Jennifer Ashton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She just completed a critical book, From Modernism to Postmodernism:  American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century, which is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in January 2006.  Her poetry has appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Chicago Review (among others) and new work is forthcoming in The Journal.  

Karin Wraley Barbee writes poetry, accumulates great junk, wishes Freddie Mercury was still with us, and sings the praises of small town festivals (such as the Delta Chicken Festival). She is a full-time English composition Instructor at Bowling Green State University. [email]

Kathryn T. S. Bass's poetry has appeared in dozens of journals, including American Tanka, The Amherst Review, The Formalist, The Prose Poem, and Quarter After Eight. A State of Colorado Artists' Fellow, Kathryn serves as a poet with the Online Poetry Project, teaches with Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and visits schools as a Young Audiences residency artist. Kathryn's second book, Bright Seeds, has been selected for the Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices series and is scheduled for publication this fall.

George Belden (1885-1952), architect, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Explorers' Club, in 1913, to erect a memorial on Antarctica's Barrier Ice, commemorating the death of Captain Robert Scott and two of his colleagues the previous year. Belden went mad without ever fulfilling his commission.

Gunnar Benediktsson's work has appeared in Grain, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review, along with numerous other print and online venues. He is currently the managing editor of 5_trope, and lives in Coralville, Iowa.

Jason Bredle is the author of A Twelve Step Guide, winner of the 2004 NMP/DIAGRAM Chapbook Contest. If you've ever loved him, you know what it's like to be hurt by him. He lives in Chicago. [website]

Pack Bringley will attend the City College of New York's graduate program in creative writing in the Fall. Originally from Homewood, Illinois, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He's very grateful to DIAGRAM and its readers. [email]

Marcel Brouwers is currently finishing up a PhD in English (Creative Writing) at Western Michigan University. The second half of 2005 will find him studying in Prague, CZ and in Cassis, France until the new year. [email]

Lauren Caldwell is an undergraduate at Stanford University. She is currently working on a sequence obsessed with Christopher Smart, William Blake, and eighteenth/nineteenth century life science. She misses the vital fluid of those days.

Traci Oberg Connor's most recent work includes hammering, tiling, painting, yelling, and spilling things on her old new house in Athens, OH. Her writing—which she has forsaken, lately, for the remodeling (all those before and after shows on TV duped her into thinking it'd be so quick and easy)—appears or is forthcoming in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review, The Red Rock Review, Spork Magazine, Poet Lore, Barrowstreet, Limestone, and The Madison Review. [email]

N M Courtright, an Ohio native, currently resides in Austin, Texas. His poetry can be seen in The Pebble Lake Review, Astropoetica, Ghoti, Dirt, and others. He offers his sincere condolences for not having a more humorous and/or exciting biography.

Jeffrey Encke has recently published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (Last Tangos), a deck of playing cards featuring excerpts of love letters written to Saddam Hussein and other war criminals. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Octopus Magazine, Salt Hill, 3rd Bed, and Quarterly West.

Sarah Elisabeth Freeman's poems and prose poems have appeared in various journals, including The Iowa Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Seattle Review, and Double Room. A recipient of a grant from the Iowa Arts Council, she teaches in Portland, Oregon.

Anne Germanacos' stories and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming at Agni online, Black Warrior Review, Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, Chattahoochee Review, Salamander, and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. [email]

Painter Kimberly MacArthur Graham was born in Texas, and grew up in cities around the U.S., eventually settling in Denver, Colorado, as an adult. Her work, which seeks to present a balance between formal beauty and thoughtful content, is shown regularly at regional galleries and art centers, and figures in private and corporate collections nationwide. She has received several awards and grants. In addition, she is a published freelance writer on art, design, and architecture.

Stacy Kidd hails from Oklahoma and has published in 42Opus, StorySouth, Memorious, Aestetica, and Verse Daily.

Sora Kim-Russell works as a freelance editor in Seoul, South Korea. Her hobbies include angering cab drivers and daydreaming about American junk food. Her writing has appeared in Onthebus, Lodestar Quarterly, Meridians, and other publications. [email]

Norman Lock has written plays for the stage and for German radio. He is the author of five prose collections: Grim Tales, Émigrés and Joseph Cornell's Operas (published by Triple Press as Trio), A History of the Imagination (Fiction Collective Two) and Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams for Marco Knauff's Universe (Ravenna Press). He is also the editor of George Belden's recently discovered The Land of the Snow Men (forthcoming from Calamari Press).

Barbara Maloutas won the New Issues first book in poetry competition for In a Combination of Practices, published in 2004. She was also the winner of the 2003 New Michigan Press/Diagram Chapbook Contest for Practices. Her work has appeared in Aufgabe, FreeVerse, Segue, Tarpaulin Sky, New Review of Literature, American Tanka, and Good Foot. A selection of her work is anthologized in Intersections: Innovative Poetry in Southern California, Green Integer, 2005.

For now, Marc McKee lives in Tucson, Arizona with his bride-to-be. Mark his lettuce deployment scenarios: one day everyone will be deploying lettuce that way. Documentation points to a semi-advanced degree from the swamplands of Houston, Texas and various poem appearances. Soon or already, sketchy proof of his continued existence will modestly erupt from Bat City Review, Crazyhorse, and Pleiades. When the strange man in the threadbare vest and billowy print pants fails to believe that the Lord has not blessed him with 75 extra cents with which to alchemize bus fare, Marc McKee feels shame and sadness. But only for a little while. You should be listening to the Books' "Motherless Bastard" right this second. It would be nice if you were as fond of writing letters as he is of receiving them. [email]

Carol Novack is a lapsed criminal defense and constitutional lawyer with a languishing degree in social work, the author of a chapbook of poems and the former recipient of a writers' grant from the Australian government. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Wild Strawberries, Pindeldyboz,Word Riot, Opium, and Newtopia. Carol edits Mad Hatters' Review, an ezine featuring "edgy and enlightened literature, art and music in the age of dementia." [website] [email]

Michael Robins' poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Spinning Jenny, Black Warrior Review, Redactions, Shampoo, Backwards City Review, and Verse. He is a contributing editor at Born Magazine and lives in Chicago. [email]

Mike Smith lives in Spartanburg, S.C. You can see more of the Anagrams of America on the web at Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics.

Robert Strong lives north of the Adirondacks in New York State. He is currently editing an anthology of American spiritual poetry forthcoming from Autumn House Press. The poems appearing here are taken from a manuscript called Puritan Spectacle. [email]

Derek White is an aspiring taxonomist, meme coveter, and sometimes restorer of the lost and found.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of two book-length poems: Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005) and the forthcoming Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk—which won the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize—and will be published in early Spring 2006. His chapbook, A Ghost As King of the Rabbits, will be published by New Michigan Press this Fall.