Michele Battiste, a New York native living on the left coast, is on the verge of a life-altering relocation to begin her MFA at Wichita State University. Michele tells lies to strangers and touches things that don't belong to her. So do her poems. [email]

T.J. Beitelman:

Green-blue and haunted
By a lack of light and limes

There is the Strudel Man—
Lover of icing-licking,

Chewer of flaky crusts, hater of climes
muggy, and vaunted

for these and other tricks—
who is T. J. Beitelman.

Geoffrey Detrani is an artist and writer. His poetry and prose have been published in Crowd, Crossconnect, NYArts Magazine, Chronogram, Words, and other publication. He has exhibited his artwork at the Bronx Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, among other venues; and on the 91st floor of tower one of the former twin towers of the World Trade Center, where he was artist in residence. [email]

Daniel Paul Eness is a writer and monomedia artist (baroque figure drawings in invisible ink) who resides. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming. You do the relativistic physics) in knotgrass, Sketch, ideomancer, and the Black Warrior Review, which is to say, no place where a respectable person might go. Place: Minneapolis. Faith: Jesus Christ, Son of God. Family: Huge. Privacy: Respected.

Benjamin Gantcher lives in New York City. His poems have appeared in Archipelago and Tin House and are forthcoming in Grand Street, Hopscotch, Many Mountains Moving, and Terra Incognita. An essay, "Resurrecting the Essential: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz," appears in The Hyde Park Review of Books, Fall 2002.

Paul Hardacre is the Managing Editor of papertiger media, specialist publishers of poetry on CDROM, and contributing editor to the South Australian poetry journal, Sidewalk. His first collection of poetry, The Year Nothing, will be published by HeadworX (New Zealand).

Brandon Hobson is 32 and has an MA in English from the University of Central Oklahoma. His work has appeared in The Southern Anthology 1996, New Plains Review, Words of Wisdom, and in the online journals Word Riot, 3am Magazine, and Stirring. He has recently finished a novel; he lives in Oklahoma with his dog.

Christine Boyka Kluge has received six Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first book is forthcoming from Bitter Oleander Press. A selection of her prose poetry will appear in an anthology to be published by Tupelo Press. She has writing in Arts & Letters, Quarterly West, Quarter After Eight, LUNA, Rattapallax, Tar River Poetry, Fine Madness, and others. She's also an artist, wife, and mother of two daughters. Theodore Roethke provided her a measure of serenity / an excuse with these lines from "In a Dark Time": "What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?"

Ronald Mohring's chapbook, The David Museum, won the NMP/DIAGRAM 2002 chapbook competition and is available from New Michigan Press. His Ärst chapbook, Amateur Grief, was selected by Maureen Seaton for the 1998 Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award. A third collection, Beneficence, will appear in Fall 2002 from Pecan Grove Press. He moderates two online poetry groups—one for Bucknell's June Seminar Poets and the other for G/L/B/T writers, serves as Poetry Editor for RFD, a quarterly queer journal, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bucknell University, where he is Associate Editor of West Branch.

Ryan Mullen lives in a basement in Wausau, WI, where he is pretty much content to read
books and eat mangoes all day. He writes fiction and some poetry. He is currently working on his second novel, Human Insides.

Brandon Shimoda was born in California and came of age in, respectively, Connecticut, Costa Rica, and Oregon. His thoughts on these and other places can be found in recent and/or upcoming installments of Hayden's Ferry Review, Barrow Street, Snow Monkey, The Styles, La Petite Zine, Baconfinger, the late Pixelboogie.com, and elsewhere. [email]

Ognjen Smiljanic was born and raised in Croatia. He came to America in 1992. Currently he lives in Monterey, CA where he teaches at the Defense Language Institute and he edits tooth.

Jake Adam York is a contributing editor for Shenandoah and the poetry editor of storySouth. His poems have appeared or will appear in The Greensboro Review, Brilliant Corners, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, Shampoo, and The Southern Review. He is a 2002 Poetry Fellow of the Colorado Council on the Arts and is now completing his first book of poems.