Karen Alkalay-Gut was born in London at the end of the Blitz, grew up in upstate New York, and moved to Israel in 1972, where she teaches poetry at Tel Aviv University. Her most recent book is a collection of poems, So Far, So Good (Sivan, Boulevard, 2004).

Diana Anhalt's poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Into the Teeth, HazMat, Poetica, The Scholar Feminist, Daybreak, and California Quarterly, among others. She is the author of A Gathering of Fugitives: Voices of American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965 (Archer Books, 2001). Her articles have been published by magazines and anthologies in both Mexico and the United States, and she has reviewed books for the Texas Observer.

Gloria Attoun is primarily a songwriter but also expresses herself through art and poetry. She belongs to a musical ensemble called "Augusta Bottoms Consort," which has recorded three cds. She has recently released a solo cd entitled Seeds. She graduated from University City High School's "High School of the Arts" program and from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and spent five years working for the National Public Radio affiliate in Kansas City.

John Azrak has been the Chair of a high school English Department for twenty years. His stories and poems have been published in numerous literary journals, including Poetry East, The Santa Clara Review, Artful Dodge, Another Chicago Magazine, Coe Review and West Branch. Work has also been anthologized in Bless Me, Father (Penguin) and XY Files (Sherman Asher).

Yakov Azriel was born in New York in 1950, and came to live in Israel in 1971. His first full-length book of poetry, Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors (Time Being Books, 2005) is currently a candidate for the National Jewish Book Award, as well as one of Israel's most important literary awards, the President's Prize. Nine of his poems have won prizes in international poetry contests over the last few years, including First Place for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg Poetry for Peace Prize and Semi-finalist for the 2005 Pablo Neruda Prize. He was also awarded a fellowship for his poetry in 2004-2005 by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Stan Badgett and his wife live in the mountains of western Colorado, where they raised four children. In earlier years he worked in the coal mines and taught wilderness survival skills; more recently he has made his living as an artist and English teacher.

Attila Balogh is a poet and editor. His Collected Poems in English (translated by Gabor G. Gyukics and Michael Castro) is forthcoming. Balogh is also the founder and managing director of the “From the Danube to the Ganges” Foundation in Hungary. The purpose of the foundation is to study the special literature written on the origin of the Gypsies and to process the material and reconstruct the emigration route of the Gypsies.

Jackie Bartley’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Image, Permafrost, West Wind, and elsewhere. Her second full-length collection, Ordinary Time, won the 2005 Spire Poetry Contest and is due out in 2006. She lives in Holland, Michigan with her husband John and their amiable Dalmatian and neurotic cat.

Lois Bar-yaacov is a retired lecturer in English and American Poetry from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is at present devoting herself to writing poetry and translating.

Edward Beatty is retired and lives in rural northern Illinois. This year his poems have appeared in Permafrost, Poetry East, Willow Review, Cider Press Review, Bayou, and Karamu and poems are forthcoming in Rhino, Out of Line, Sunstone, and Northeast.

Marvin Bell's current books are Rampant and Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000. Recently retired from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he leads an annual Urban Teachers Workshop for "America SCORES," and teaches for the low-residency MFA program at Pacific College. Mr. Bell lives in Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

Carol Bergé, of the famous Four Young Lady Poets, is 78 and specializes in fiction. She has earned an NEA and has taught by invitation in English departments and Honors Centers. She is presently completing two books, Antics: Passionate Stories about Folks in the Antiques Trade (fiction) and Light Years, an anthology of memoirs by writers and allies who were among the progenitors of multimedia in New York's 1960s East Village.

Barbara Black Koltuv, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author of The Book of Lilith, Weaving Woman, Solomon and Sheba: Individuation and Inner Marriage, Amulets, Talismans and Magical Jewelry all published by Nicolas-Hays a Division of Samuel Weiser. Her piece in this issue is excerpted from The Song of Songs as Dreams of Love which will be published by Nicolas-Hays in 2006. Dr. Koltuv is currently writing Nights By The Wall: Torah, Dreams and Meditation.

James Bogan is a professor of art history, a poet, and a filmmaker, who has taught at the University of Missouri-Rolla since 1969. His scholarly publications include Sparks of Fire (1982), an experimental anthology on William Blake, and Burden of Dreams (1984), a casebook on Les Blank's film. In 1986 he lectured at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil as a Fulbright Fellow, where he also began his career as a documentary filmmaker with T-Shirt Cantata followed by the Hammock Variations (1996) and The Adventures of the Amazon Queen, which is currently in production.

Alice Bolstridge has publications of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies: Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Slant, Passager (1995 Passager Poet award), Kalliope, An Intricate Weave (Iris Editions), and elsewhere. She teaches English at The Maine School of Science and Mathematics.

John Brandi has been faithful to the craft of poetry, painting, journaling, and digging in the garden for the majority of his life. A recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA Poetry Fellowship, he is an ardent traveler, with over 30 books published in the U.S. and abroad.

Hari ‘Sky’ Campbell received his M.F.A. from the University of Missouri—St. Louis in 2001. He sits on the Citizen Advisory Panel of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and received Warrior Poet recognition from the SLAM/Word in Motion literary group of St. Louis at the 2004 Annual National Poetry SLAM series held in St. Louis. A collection of his work, Shawmaul’s House, is on sale at Left Bank Bookstore and the Subterranean Bookstore in St. Louis, Missouri.

Stephen Campiglio’s poems and prose poems have appeared in Anthology of New England Writers, Calapooya, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Italian Americana, Osiris, Paragraph, Sahara, and Switched-on Gutenberg, among others. He works in continuing education at Manchester Community College in Connecticut.

Peter Carlos is a producer, director, writer, and Emmy-award winner who has worked in the film and television industry for over twenty years. His poems have appeared in River Styx, Image, and The Oakland Review. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Communications and Director of Programming for LU-TV26 at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri.

Michael Castro is a native of New York City who has lived in St. Louis for most of his adult life. He is a poet and translator, and he has published six books of his own poetry, most recently Human Rites and The Man Who Looked into Coltrane’s Horn and the literary history, Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth Century Poets and the Native American. Castro is the co-founder of River Styx, a community based literary organization that has produced River Styx Magazine and readings in St. Louis since 1975, as well as his long running radio program, Poetry Beat. He has performed his work, often in collaboration with musicians all over the United States, in Great Britain, Hungary, Scotland, and India. He is the recipient of the Guardian Angel of St. Louis Poetry Award from River Styx (2000) and the Warrior Poet Award from Word in Motion (2005). He currently teaches at Lindenwood University.

Martha Christina lives in Bristol, RI, where for many years she taught at Roger Williams University. Her work has also appeared in Tar River Poetry, The Louisville Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and elsewhere.

David Clewell has published six collections of poems (most recently, The Low End of Higher Things) and two book-length poems (Jack Ruby’s America and The Conspiracy Quartet). He was a winner in the National Poetry Series for Blessings in Disguise and a recipient of the Pollak Poetry Prize for Now We’re Getting Somewhere. He teaches at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Ira Cohen (b. 1935) is a poet, photographer, filmmaker, editor, electronic multimedia shaman, living legend. His books include: On Feet of Gold, Poems From the Akashic Record, and Chaos and Glory. His films include: Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Paradise Now, and Kings with Straw Mats.

Allison Creighton graduated from the MFA program at the University of Missouri—St. Louis where she received The Graduate Prize in Poetry for 2002. She has worked as a music therapist, a high school English teacher, and as an editor, and currently teaches at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park. Her work has been published in New Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, 1998-2005.

Christopher Crew teaches Reading, Writing, Social Studies, Math, and Science to 6th graders at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies in Brooklyn, NY. He hosts brunch every Sunday, does everything his father says, and will compete in his 5th annual Iron Chef Seattle competition this winter.

Moira Crone is the author of four books of fiction. Forthcoming is What Gets Into Us, which will include “It.” Her stories have been included in many anthologies, and in 2004 she was awarded the William Faulkner/William Wisdom Prize for the novella. She is from New Orleans.

Amanda Crowell Stiebel has been a dishwasher, janitor, model, substitute teacher, caving instructor, high school teacher, telemarketer, steelworker, and perpetual student. She is now an adjunct instructor living in St. Louis. Previous publication credits include Blueline, The Georgetown Review, Poetry Motel, Bellerive, East Central Literary Review, Firebox, Windfall, and The Rockhurst Review.

Darcy Cummings’ poems have appeared in journals in the United States and England. Cummings recently received fellowships from the New Jersey Arts Council and the Dodge Foundation. She teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, the New Jersey Writers Project, and the Visual Poetry Project, Rutgers University. Her book, The Artist as Alice: From a Photographer’s Life won the Bright Hill Press competition and will be published in 2006. Cummings’ poetry also appeared in Natural Bridge #13.

Barbara Daniels’ chapbook, The Woman Who Tries to Believe, won the Quentin R. Howard Prize. She has received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (the most recent in 2005), completed an MFA in poetry at Vermont College, and teaches writing and literature at Camden County College.

Chard deNiord is the author of three books of poetry, Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Night Mowing (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared recently in The American Scholar, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Green Mountains Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. He is an associate professor of English at Providence College and directs the low residency MFA program in poetry at New England College.

Liz Dolan has published poems, memoirs, and short stories in New Delta Review, The Pedestal, Mudlark, Bardsong, The Delaware Anthology, and numerous other journals. She has received a fellowship and grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts and recently completed a traveling exhibit of her fellow poets’ poetry throughout southern Delaware. She is one of eight DE poets recently chosen for the master’s level retreat with Fleda Brown, DE Poet Laureate.

William Doreski’s poems have recently appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, and Pebble Lake. His most recent collection is Sacra Via. He teaches writing at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Gene Doty teaches writing and literature at the University of Missouri—Rolla. Last summer, he attended the Rustbelt Roethke Professional Writers Workshop. As “Gino Peregrini,” he publishes and edits The Ghazal Page online and is moderator of the ghazal forum at AHA Poetry Forums.

Bob Dyer is a poet, writer, and musician living in Boonville, Missouri. He is the author of a book of poems, Oracle of the Turtle, several cds of original songs, and a history of his hometown. He also co-authored a book about Duke Paul’s journeys in the early 1820s up the Missouri River.

Janet Eigner is a poet, dance writer, psychologist, gardener, wife, mother, and grandmother. Selected publications include: Blue Mesa, Hawaii Review, Manzanita, Mudfish, Sagarin Anthology, Reconstructionist, Visions International, Dance Magazine, and Dance Critics of America.

Eva Eliav grew up in Toronto, Canada, and received a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. Poems from her collection, Eve, were published in the summer 2004 issue of the Canadian literary journal, Room of One’s Own, and more of her poetry is due to appear in Room in the coming year. Her work has been published in Voices, an Israeli anthology of poetry in English, and in ARC, the Israeli Journal of Writers in English. She is presently working on new collections of poetry and very short fiction. She has been living in Israel since 1970, is married, and has a daughter.

Margarita Engle is a botanist and the author of several books, most recently The Poet Slave of Cuba (Henry Holt & Co. 2006). Short works appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Bilingual Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, Hawaii Pacific Review, and the Genesis issue of Natural Bridge. Awards include a Cintas Fellowship, a San Diego Book Award, and a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiking and helping her husband with his volunteer work for a wilderness search-and-rescue dog training program.

Allen C. Fischer brings to poetry a background in business where he was director of marketing. His poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Rattapallax.

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two books of poems: Blue Window and Five Terraces. She has also published two chapbooks: The Trinket Poems and Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, online, and in anthologies. She teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Mardelle Fortier has won many poetry awards, especially through Poets and Patrons of Chicago, and has about 70 poems in literary journals such as Bibliophilos. Dr. Fortier has taught in several colleges in the Chicago area, and currently teaches at College of DuPage and Benedictine University.

Jeff Friedman is a frequent contributor to Natural Bridge. His latest collection is Black Threads (forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2006). He is a core faculty member in the M.F.A. program in Poetry Writing at New England College.

Daniel Garrett is a new Foreign Service Officer with the State Department. He is currently studying Tibetan for his first assignment in Kathmandu working with Tibetan refugees. He attributes his good fortune to having been a pacifist Yeti in a previous life, though in fact he may simply have been a particularly well-behaved Yak.

Gloria Garfunkel grew up in New Jersey and attended Barnard College, majoring in Art History. She then earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard and has lived in the Cambridge area ever since. She has a private practice in Lexington where she helps children, adolescents, and parents better understand each other, being the kind of therapist she wishes she'd had as a child. She lives with her husband, two sons, and three cats.

Carmen Germain lives in Washington’s Elwha river valley, looking south to Mt. Olympus; in the summer, she lives in the Kispiox valley, British Columbia. Pathwise Press published her poetry collection, Living Room, Earth, in 2002.

Gail Giewont is an eighth grade English teacher. She received the Edwin O. Ochester Graduate Poetry Prize while an MFA student at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Café Review and Indiana Review.

Isaac Goldemberg’s novel, The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner, now in its 6th English edition, was described in the New York Times Book Review as "a moving exploration of the human condition” and was selected by a panel of international scholars as one of the 100 greatest Jewish books of the last 150 years. His most recent publications are La vida son los ríos (selected writings, Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2005), Memoria (poems, Editorial de la Universidad de Puebla, 2005), Los Cementerios Reales (poems, Editorial Umbra, Venezuela, 2004), Golpe de gracia (2003, a play, recipient of Venezuela’s Estival Theater Award), Self-Portraits and Masks (poems, New York: Cross Cultural Communications, 2002), and El nombre del padre (a novel published in 2001 by Alfaguara, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the Spanish-speaking world). Presently, he is Chairman of the Advisory Board of the New York Peruvian Cultural Institute and Director of the Committee of Peruvian Writers in Exile of the P.E.N. Club International.

Reuven Goldfarb’s column, “An Inside View,” appears regularly in The Jewish Star (Long Island) and The National Jewish Post and Opinion (Indianapolis). He co-founded and edited Agada, the illustrated Jewish literary magazine, which brought out eleven issues between 1981 and 1988.

Melissa Gurley Bancks is co-director of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars at Washington University. Most recent works are published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boulevard, A Teacher’s Voice, Sou’wester, The Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi, The U. S. Latino Review, The Cape Rock, and in the anthologies Key West: A Collection, Microfiction 2: Fictions of the New Millennium, and Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. Her chapbook, On the Shoulders of Sparrows, was awarded second place by the National Society of Arts and Letters St. Louis Chapter Contest.

Renée Gregorio’s latest book is Water Shed. Other poetry collections include The Storm That Tames Us (La Alameda Press, 1999) and The Skins of Possible Lives (Blinking Yellow Books, 1996).

Charles Guenther is the author or translator of fourteen books of poems, essays, and translations, the latest of which are The Complete Love Sonnets of Garsilaso De La Vega (Cornerstone Press) and Three Faces of Autumn (Mid-America Press), the latter a retrospective of poetry, prose, and translations. He has also taught English and French at various colleges, and for fifty years reviewed poetry and belles-lettres for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Gábor G. Gyukics is a Hungarian-American poet and literary translator born in Budapest. He has three books of poetry published including Last Smile and two books of translations: Half-Naked Muse: Contemporary American Poetry (in Hungarian) and Swimming in the Ground: Contemporary Hungarian Poetry and A Transparent Lion: Selected Poems of Attila Jozsef (in English, with co-translator Michael Castro). He received the Fust Milan translator’s prize from the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1999, and an ArtsLink grant in 2000. He divides his time between Hungary and the United States.

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University and the author of over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently Laws (poems, 2004). Forthcoming are a volume of poems, The River of Forgetfulness, and a collection of essays, Classics.

Joy Harjo’s most recent book of poetry is How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 2002, and a new cd of music, Native Joy for Real, has won critical acclaim. Harjo also co-wrote A Thousand Roads, the signature film for the National Museum of the American Indian. She holds the Joseph M. Russo Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches every fall. When she’s not traveling and performing she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Laura A. Hazan resides in Kirkwood, Missouri. She is a feature writer for Sauce Magazine, a St. Louis food monthly, and Byline Magazine recently awarded her short story "Chalk It Up" an honorable mention in a new talent short story contest.

Jana Heffernan dedicated 8 years to writing the story of a woman’s inner journey, compiled from about 500 dreams. The book, entitled The Story of the Journey to the North (Príbeh cesty na Sever, in three volumes) and from which “The Fish Girl” is excerpted, is just being published in the Czech Republic by Argo publishers.

Margaret Hill is originally from St. Louis, Missouri. She went to graduate school for International Affairs at Washington University and has an undergraduate background in International Human Rights. While living in St. Louis, she worked as a community activist and a high school Spanish teacher. She has worked and traveled all over the world. This past summer, she worked with the National Book Foundation at their summer writing workshop in Bennington, Vermont. For the past two years, Margaret has won the poetry award for her political poems, “America Found in a Dark Place” and “Abandoned Garden,” at the Jobs with Justice Bread and Roses Arts Contest. She is currently working on a volume of poetry about salsa dancing and lives in New York City.

Andrea Hollander Budy’s books include The Other Life and House Without a Dreamer, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. She is also winner of a Pushcart Prize for memoir and fellowships from the NEA and Arkansas Arts Council. Her third poetry collection, Woman in the Painting, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press. She is the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College.

Spencer E. Hurst earned a B.A. in economics from Westminster College and an M.B.A. from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville while pursuing a 15 year career in global logistics. In his current incarnation, he earned an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He lives in St. Louis, MO with his wife and two children and teaches English at Lindenwood University.

Yair Hurvitz was born in Tel Aviv in 1941 and part of a group known as “the Tel Aviv poets,” the generation that succeeded Yehuda Amichai. Hurvitz died at the age of forty-seven, at the height of his powers, of the heart disease that had plagued him from childhood.

Jane Ellen Ibur’s most recent work appears in Lilith, New Harvest, Runes, Natural Bridge #9, Teaching the Arts Behind Bars, with forthcoming poems in Boulevard. Jane is among the Lead Faculty for the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute, co-director of The Gifted Writers Project for middle and high schoolers, co-host of “Literature for the Halibut” on KDHX radio, and teaches creative writing with at-risk communities, such as prisons and homeless shelters.

Eve Jones's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Nimrod, and Poet Lore. She is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Lindenwood University and lives in St. Louis.

Rodger Kamenetz is completing a book on the history of dreams as revelation, A Brief History of Dreams, of which his essay here is an excerpt. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Jew in the Lotus and The Lowercase Jew. You can find more about his dream work at www.talkingdream.com.

Jim Kates is a poet and prolific translator whose literary work has appeared in over one hundred magazines. He is the co-editor of de Zephyr Press, which specializes in publishing literature in translation, particularly from the Slavic languages and the Chinese.

Jascha Kessler has published 7 books of his poetry and fiction as well as 6 volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from the Hungarian, Persian, and Bulgarian. In 1989, his translation of Sándor Rákos' Cattullan Games won the Translation Award from the National Translation Center (Marlboro Press, Marlboro, VT). A volume of fiction, Siren Songs & Classical Illusions: 50 Stories appeared in December of 1992. His recent works include a translation of King Oedipus in Sophocles, 2 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and a number of works, including the novel Rapid Transit: 1948 and his Collected Poems, are available from Xlibris at www.xlibris.com.

Janet R. Kirchheimer's poems have appeared in publications such as Potomac Review, Lilith, PoetryNZ, Kerem, CrossCurrents, the Aurorean, and MSN Religion Forum. Work is forthcoming in Confrontation, Main Street Rag, Nashim, and Jewish Women's Literary Annual. She is also a regular contributor to Beliefnet.com.

Lynne Knight’s first collection, Dissolving Borders, won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996; her second, The Book of Common Betrayals, won the Bear Star Press award in 2002. Her third collection, Night in the Shape of a Mirror, is forthcoming from David Robert Books in 2006. She lives in Berkeley.

Joan Larkin’s four poetry collections include A Long Sound and Cold River, the latter of which received a Lambda Award for poetry. My Body: New and Selected Poems will be published by Hanging Loose Press in 2007. Her most recent play is a hip-hop version of Sophocles’ Antigone.

Tim Leach is a retired public relations writer and journalist and was a 2003 finalist in three poetry competitions—River Styx, New Letters, and the Winning Writers War Poetry Competition. He lives in University City, Missouri and is a Vietnam vet.

Caren Loebel–Fried is an author and second-generation block print artist. She is the author and illustrator of Hawaiian Legends of Dreams (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), Hawaiian Legends of the Guardian Spirits (University of Hawaii Press, 2002), and of the forthcoming Lono and the Magical Land Beneath the Sea (Bishop Museum Press, 2006). Her art appears in numerous books and magazines including Howard Schwartz’s Tree of Souls and Nona Beamer’s Pua Polu, the Pretty Blue Hawaiian Flower. Her awards for art and writing include the Hawaii Book Publishers Association’s Excellence in Illustration and Hawaiian Culture, and the Bookbuilders West Design Competition.

Iven Lourie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Hanging Loose, Midstream, and other journals.

K. Curtis Lyle’s books include Drunk on God and Fifteen Predestination Weather Reports.

Kelly Madigan Erlandson’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, The Florida Review, CALYX, and Puerto del Sol. She has been a writer-in-residence at Jentel Artist Residency Program and the KHN Center for the Arts.

Marjorie Manwaring is a freelance writer and editor living in Seattle, where she also co-edits the online poetry journal Switched-on Gutenberg. Her poems have appeared in the Seattle Review, 5 AM, the DMQ Review, Sentence, and other journals, and she was a semifinalist in the 2005 "Discovery"/The Nation poetry contest.

Morton Marcus has published nine volumes of poetry and one novel. His poems have appeared in over eighty anthologies, and he has read his work and taught creative writing at universities throughout the nation. In 2006, his memoir, Striking Through the Masks, as well as a new book of prose poems, The Courage of Rain, will be published.

Sandra Marshburn has published poems in various journals including Tar River Poetry, Now & Then, and Antietam Review. Her most recent chapbook, Winter Beach, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2003. She teaches writing courses at West Virginia State University.

Galen Martini has won a Bush Foundation Artist fellowship and a Loft Mentor Award for poetry. She has published poems, essays, multi-media scripts, and a book of poems and photographs, The Heart's Slow Race. She is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

Max Martins was born in the Amazonian city of Belém, in the state of Pará, Brazil, in 1926, and has lived there his entire life so far. Sometimes a journalist and always a poet, he continues to write poetry and to illustrate his journal in a barbarous fashion. He visited the United States once, in 1988, and gave a famous reading at Duff's Poetry Series in St. Louis. His Poemas Reunidos—1952-2001 was published in 2001 by the Editora Universitaria-UFPa.

Seymour Mayne is the author, editor, or translator of more than fifty books and monographs. His writings have been translated into many languages, including French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. His latest collections include Light Industry (Mosaic Press), a selection of humorous and satirical poems; Ricochet (Mosaic Press), a volume of selected word sonnets; and The Old Blue Couch: Canadian Stories (Anábasis), a selection of his short fiction in Spanish translation, published in Argentina. As a fervent innovator of the word sonnet, he has given readings and lectured widely in Canada and abroad on this unique new "miniature" form. He serves as Professor of Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

David Meltzer’s David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer was brought out by Penguin in September 2005.

Jerred Metz is the author of five books of poetry and three of non-fiction prose. He teaches writing and literature at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina and at Webster University and Strayer University in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mark J. Mirsky is the editor of Fiction.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

Greg Nicholl is a freelance proofreader and designer living in southeastern Idaho. His poetry has recently been published in Feminist Studies, Rattapallax, Fugue, and Lumina.

Carol Niederlander, a former Professor of English at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, is Board VP for River Styx and co-author of Practical Writing, a textbook. She also served as Art Department Chair at Forest Park and is especially interested in connections between literature and art. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at UM—St Louis.

Jean Nordhaus’ fifth books of poems, The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn, was published by Milkweed Editions in November, 2002. She lives in Washington, D.C.

K. D. Norwood is a corporate lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia, and his J.D. from the College of William and Mary. This is his first publication not related to the practice of law.

Paulo Nunes is a native of Belém do Pará. He has a doctoral degree in Brazilian Literature from the Federal University of Pará and he teaches literature at the Unama University of the Amazon. He was an organizer for the celebrations of Portuguese discoveries in the New World.

Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of eleven volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven (2005). As a critic Ostriker is the author of two volumes on women's poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. She lives in Princeton, NJ where she is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University. She is also a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program.

Kendra Paredes Hayden has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Missouri—St. Louis and a B.S. in journalism from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She has published in The Louisville Review, ESC! Magazine, Buffalo Carp, and the Belleville News Democrat. Currently, she writes for Lipstik, a women's magazine published by the Democrat, and she teaches Latin American studies at Lindenwood University.

Linda Pastan's 12th book, Queen of a Rainy Country, will be published by Norton in the fall of 2006.

Marvyn Petrucci’s poetry, stories, and essays have appeared in Spinning Jenny, Black Warrior Review, The Connecticut Review, Zone 3, The Boston Globe, Santa Clara Review, Louisiana Literature, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals.

Barbara Platek is a Jungian psychotherapist in Ithaca, New York.

John Pleimann is a professor of English at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, Missouri. A former advertising copywriter, he still appreciates a good jingle. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Evansville Review, The Connecticut Review, Margie, and The Atlanta Review.

Doug Ramspeck directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing and composition at The Ohio State University at Lima. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals, including Connecticut Review, Rosebud, Lake Effect, Louisiana Literature, Harpur Palate, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Permafrost, Confrontation, and Rhino. He lives in Lima with his wife, Beth, and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Lee.

Natalie Reid is a linguist, writer, editor, and mystic. She has published four books in Japan about English language and culture. Her shorter works have appeared in Knock, Sistersong, 13th Moon, Venture Inward, and Women's Words, among others. She conducts technical, academic, and transformational writing workshops in the U.S., Europe, and the Pacific.

Bettina Rotenberg received a B.A. from Harvard University and completed an Ed.M. in Expressive Therapies and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been the founding Director of Visual Arts/Language Arts since 1995, and a book of poems is forthcoming from Listening Chamber Press.

Stephen A. Sadow (Ph.D., Harvard) is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Northeastern University. He is the author, editor, or translator of sixteen books and numerous other published chapters, articles, and translations.

Steve Sanfield is a storyteller, folklorist, and children's author as well as a poet. He has published more than two dozen books of tales, folklore, & poetry. His most recent is The Rain Begins Below: Selected Slightly Longer Poems 1961-2005 from Larkspur Press. He lives in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevadas, where he continues with his lifelong study of clouds.

Matthew W. Schmeer edits Poetry Midwest and is an Assistant Professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Online, Sentence, Talking River, River Walk Journal, and The Lawrence Journal-World.

Henry I. Schvey is Chair of the Performing Arts Department and Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. A director, playwright and scholar, he writes fiction and poetry as well. He has published extensively on American and British drama, and on the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, including a book-length study, Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright. Among his recent works is an original stage adaptation of Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening (2004).

Anne Shaw’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including New American Writing, Phoebe, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, and 26. She lives in Milwaukee and teaches creative writing at Carthage College.

Moisy Shopper, Ph.D. was born and educated in New York City and moved to St. Louis, Missouri to help in the creation of the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, where he now teaches and supervises. He has attempted to utilize analytic thinking in diverse fields: film, education for the deaf, folk tales, and family and criminal law.

Maxine Silverman's poems have been published in journals and anthologies—among them Pushcart Prize III, Voices from the Ark, Isotope, Nimrod, Heliotrope—and as chapbooks (Survival Song from Sunbury Press and Red Delicious in Desire Path, a collection of chapbooks from toadlily press). A native of Sedalia, Missouri, she now lives in the Hudson River Valley with her family.

Christine Simokatis received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and her work has appeared in Apocalypse and Alligator Juniper. She teaches writing at Columbia College in Chicago and has maintained a private practice in massage therapy for the past fifteen years. She lives with her husband and eighteen-month old son and is currently working on a collection of essays about motherhood. “Catalog of Dreams” is excerpted from Bodywork: A Collection of Dreams.

Askold Skalsky teaches at Hagerstown Community College in western Maryland and has had poems published in numerous small press magazines, most recently in The Notre Dame Review and Bryant Literary Review. Last year he won an award from the Maryland State Arts Council for his poetry.

Myra Sklarew, professor of literature at American University, is the author of three chapbooks and six collections of poetry, most recently Lithuania: New & Selected Poems and The Witness Trees. Other work includes Over the Rooftops of Time (essays), Like a Field Riddled by Ants (prose), Eating the White Earth (poetry translated into Hebrew by Moshe Dor and published in Israel), and a forthcoming nonfiction work, Holocaust and the Construction of Memory.

David R. Slavitt’s latest collection, Change of Address: Poems, New and Selected, was published in 2005 by LSU and Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets appeared from Northwestern U. Press. Blue State Blues, an account of his political campaign for State Rep. in Cambridge, will be published in the spring of 2006 by Wesleyan U. Press, and William Henry Harrison and Other Poems will appear in that same season from LSU.

Thomas R. Smith lives in River Falls, Wisconsin, and often writes from dreams. He has published three full-length poetry collections: Keeping the Star (1988), Horse of the Earth (1994), and The Dark Indigo Current (2000). His new collection of brief seasonal poems, Winter Hours, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press.

Rebecca Spears is a writer and educator, with an M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her poetry has appeared in Dos Passos Review, Calyx, minnesota review, Texas Review, Borderlands, Concho River Review, di-verse-city, and other journals as well as in the anthology, Texas in Poetry 2 (TCU Press, 2003). Other publications include book reviews and historical essays.

Lianne Spidel’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, Nimrod, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Southern Poetry Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her non-fiction has appeared in Michigan History Magazine and Whiskey Island Review. She lives in Greenville, Ohio.

Marjorie Stelmach’s second volume of poems, A History of Disappearance, will be published this winter by University of Tampa Press. She directs the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gerald Stern’s most recent poetry collections include Everything is Burning (2005), American Sonnets (2003), Last Blue (2000), and This Time: New and Selected Poems (1999), all published by W.W. Norton. Norton also brought out a memoir, What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life, in 2003. Mr. Stern recently received the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Steve Stern is the author of several novels and short story collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and The Wedding Jester, which won the National Jewish Book Award. His latest book is The Angel of Forgetfulness.

Kristin Stoner is an instructor of English at a community college in Iowa. She studied literature and creative writing at Iowa State University and has been writing poetry for over ten years. Recent work has appeared in The Briar Cliff Review.

Michael E. Stone was educated at the University of Melbourne and holds the degrees of PhD from Harvard University and D:Litt from the University of Melbourne. He is the author of over 40 books and 250 articles in the fields of Ancient Judaism and Armenian Studies. His work has encompassed Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, and many aspects of Armenian Studies, with special emphasis on the Bible and biblical traditions in Armenian, the Armenians in the Holy Land, and the history of Armenian writing. His translation of the Armenian Adam Epic by Arak'el of Siwnik' will be published next year by Oxford.

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) received the Prix des Critiques for his last major collection of verse, Forgetful Memory.

Arthur Sze’s eighth book of poetry, Quipu, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2005. He is also the author of The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 and The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. The three poems published here first appeared in Manoa.

Brian Taylor, a British citizen, lives in St Louis. Widely published, he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poets by the British Society of Authors in 1985, the year London Magazine Editions published his collection Transit. Currently, while teaching poetry writing at Washington University, St. Louis, he is polishing two more collections.

Colette Tennant is an English Professor at Corban College in Salem, OR where she leads a group of poets called Stinky Bagels. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Rosebud, Pudding, Christianity and Literature, Manzanita Quarterly, Phoebe, The Chaffin Journal, Riven, and T? T?pos. Most recently her poems have appeared in The Dos Passos Review and Oregon Coast: Visions and Perspectives. Her book, Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Novels, was published in December, 2003.

Maureen Tolman Flannery’s most recent books are Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher’s Daughter, nominated for 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and A Fine Line, which was also produced as musical theatre. Although she grew up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband, Dan, have raised their four children in Chicago. Her other books are Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico and the anthology Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places.

Diane Wakoski is the author of more than 20 collections of poetry, the most recent being The Butcher’s Apron published by Black Sparrow Press. In 2005, Godine Press put out a new edition of her selected poems, Emerald Ice. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University.

Carol Was is the Poetry Editor for The MacGuffin at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in such journals as The Connecticut Review, Ellipsis, The Fiddlehead, Heartlands, Isotope, Nimrod, Passages North, and others. She edited The MacGuffin’s special issue, Speaking of Freedom.

Michael Waters’ recent books include Darling Vulgarity (2006) and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001), both from BOA Editions, and also the new edition of Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Waters teaches at Salisbury University in Maryland and in the New England College MFA Program, and will be Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Wichita State University in spring 2006.

Jane O. Wayne's poetry collections are A Strange Heart (Helicon, 1996) and Looking Both Ways (University of Missouri Press, 1984). She recently provided the foreword to Poetry to Make You Smile (Portable Poetry) (M.Q. Publications, 2005).

Marianne White was lucky enough to take a poetry workshop as an elective while getting her Master’s degree in English literature. Since then she has been acquiring experiences that will “inform” her future poetry. These include mothering, teaching high school English, weightlifting, cooking, dancing, and bird watching.

Kevin Wilson has published fiction in Ploughshares, One Story, Greensboro Review, New Stories from the South 2005, and elsewhere. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Reed Wilson directs the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at UCLA, teaches poetry writing in the UCLA English Department, and advises Westwind, UCLA's literary magazine. He reviews poetry for Poetry International, and his poems have appeared in Rive Gauche, Kinglog, and The Antioch Review.

S.L. Wisenberg is the author of a short-story collection, The Sweetheart Is In, and an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions. She has work forthcoming in Rules of Thumb, a book of advice for writers, and teaches at Northwestern and Roosevelt Universities. Her essay collection-in-progress is The Wandering Womb.

Wendy Wisner’s first book of poems, Epicenter, was released by CustomWords in 2004. Recent poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, The Comstock Review, Flint Hills Review, and online at Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2003 Amy Award. She teaches writing at Hunter College.

Linda Zisquit has published three full-length collections of poetry: Ritual Bath (Broken Moon Press, Seattle, WA, 1993), Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 1996), and The Face in the Window (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, 2004), and as well as a number of translations from Hebrew including Desert Poems of Yehuda Amichai (Schocken Press, Tel Aviv, 1991), The Book of Ruth (with woodcuts by Maty Grunberg, Osband Press, London, 1997) and Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 1997) for which she won an NEA Translation Grant and was short-listed for a PEN Translation Award. Forthcoming are an expanded collection of translations from the work of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press) and a collection of translations from the work of Israeli poet Rivka Miriam.