d. seth horton is editor of the recently published New Stories from the Southwest. He is currently resuming the Best of the West series with James Thomas and completing his Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland. This story is part of his collection, Dub: Stories.

chad simpson lives in Galesburg, Illinois, where he teaches fiction writing at Knox College. His stories have appeared in several magazines, including McSweeney's, Sycamore Review, Versal, elimae, Georgetown Review , juked, and Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction.

s.b. sheikh's work is forthcoming in and has appeared in The Potomac, Black Warrior Review, Prism International, The New Orphic Review and Bewildering Stories. He is staff critic for NewPages.com and Pakistan’s features haven The Friday Times, for which he has worked the last three years.

kyle schlesinger's most recent book is Hello Helicopter
(BlazeVox, 2007). He lives in Brooklyn where he edits Mimeo Mimeo by night
and prints letterpress by day.

claudia ryan is a painter and writer living in Bradenton, Fl. She was born in Washington D.C., but has moved around quite a bit since then. Claudia received her MFA in art from the University of South Florida in 2006. Some of her writing has appeared in Diagram and Right Hand Pointing. She recently participated in the Dark Poets exhibit at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

marc lowe holds a Master’s degree in Japanese Literature and spent some years living, teaching, and writing in Japan. His fictions and prose poems appear or will appear in various journals, including Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, Mad Hatters’ Review, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Retort, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Steel City Review, and others. Please visit him at his website for more information.

lauren goodwin slaughter's work has recently appeared on Verse Daily , in Crab Orchard Review , Blue Mesa Review and 42opus and is forthcoming is Salt Hill and mid)rib. She lives and works in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she also serves as prose editor for the online journal, DIAGRAM .

though born in Atlanta and schooled in Vermont and Japan, wythe marschall now lives in Brooklyn and works in SoHo at Culture Project ( cultureproject.org), an Off-Broadway theater. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Euphony , Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Locus Novus, and Silo. With Paul Vargas III, Wythe edits and occasionally writes for his own literary journal, A Lush In Rio (alushinrio.com), an online compendium of humorous shorts about unicorns, meat, mechanical contraptions, heresies, and narwhals.

aaron crippen is a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellow and winner of the PEN Texas Literary Award for Poetry. His book of translations Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng is available from George Braziller Inc. He is currently professor of world literature at Augusta State University.

justin taylor is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder's Mouth, June 2007), an anthology of new and selected short fiction about the end of the world. All his work---poetry, fiction, criticism, other---is archived at http://www.justindtaylor.net/

sean kilpatrick lives in Detroit with dogs. His work is published or forthcoming in: La Petite Zine, MiPoesias, Pindeldyboz, Exquisite Corpse, Action Yes, Snow Monkey, Stirring, elimae, alice blue, horse less press and more. The Anorexic Musuem is his interview blog. Contact: cauliflowersuitcase@hotmail.com

will gallien is the prose editor of alice blue. His work has appeared online in elimae, Juked, and dusie. New work is forthcoming in Coconut and dusie.

lily hoang is the author of Parabola: A Novel in 21 Intersections (forthcoming fall 2007, Chiasmus Press, winner of the Chiasmus Press First Book Contest)
and Chaning: 64 Versed Hexagrams (forthcoming fall 2008, Fairy Tale Review Press). Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Quarter After Eight, the Fairy Tale Review, and Mad Hatters' Review. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.

william walsh's stories and derived texts have appeared in New York Tyrant, Juked, Caketrain,LIT, Elimae, Fringe, Quarterly West, Exquisite Corpse, Rosebud, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other journals. His first novel, Without Wax, is out this spring with Casperian Books.

jamba dunn is the author of two books of experimental literature, Fossil 23 (Black Lodge Press, 2007) and American Dust (/ubu editions, 2007), and two unpublished novels Sandoval and The Bologna Generation. He teaches literary criticism in Colorado and curates the in.ti.mate lecture series.

michael loughrey has had short fiction published by 5_trope, Hobart, Word Riot, Underground Voices, Zygote In My Coffee, Dogmatika, Aesthetica, Showcase@Laura Hird, The Future Fire, Raging Face, Sein und Werden, Aphelion, Byzarium, and Half Cut Publications/Leper Colony. He also won first prize in the UK Authors Network short story competition. Michael was born in Greenwich, London, and has lived as an expatriate in New York, Los Angeles and Paris. He now lives in England and has recently completed a full-length novel as well as a novella.

leslie scalapino is the author of dozens of books of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. Her awards include: the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, Poetry Center Award from San Francisco State University, and the Lawrence Lipton Prize. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, Bard College, and elsewhere.

alice notley's collections include Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (Weslyan University Press, 2006), which was awarded the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the best book of the year; Disobedience (2001), winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Mysteries of Small Houses (1998); The Descent of Alette (1996). She currently lives in Paris.

camille martin, a poet and collage artist who recently moved to Toronto from New Orleans, is the author of codes of public sleep (BookThug, forthcoming in 2007). Recent journal publications include Walrus, The Chicago Review, and This. Her current work-in-progress is a book of sonnets. She teaches literature at Ryerson University.

margaret sullivan has studied poetry under John Rybicki and has most recently been published in Cargoes, a Hollins University publication.