Perihelion

Quan Barry, this issue's featured poet, was born in Saigon and rasied on Boston's north shore. she received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University as well as the Diane Middlebrook poetry fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing. Quan Barry's work has appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and The New Yorker. Currently she is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book, Asylum, was the winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Cal Bedient

Cal Bedient is the author of several books, including a previous collection of poems, Candy Necklace, and works of criticism such as He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist and In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry. His second collection of poems, The Violence of the Morning, has just been published by the Uniiversity of Georgia Press. Mr. Bedient is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Josh Bell

Josh Bell is an instructor at the University of Alabama. He has recently published in Verse, Sycamore Review, and Jubilat, along with some other number of poems to be found online at Boston Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, and (upcoming) Nerve.

Nadia Herman Colburn

Nadia Colburn is finishing her PhD. from Columbia University. She runs the Jubilat reading series at the Harvard Advocate and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and son.

Carolina Ebeid

Carolina Ebeid grew up in New Jersey and Western Massachusetts. She currently lives in Columbia, Missouri.

Odysseas Elytis

Odysseus Elytis, recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born to a wealthy family in Iraklion, Crete. His original name was Odysseus Alepoudhelis. He used the pseudonym to distinguish his writing from the family soap manufaturing business. He attended the University of Athens School of Law, but he dropped out to pursue his literary career. Nicknamed "the sun-drinking poet," Elytis' work reflects the influence of the French Surrealism movement. His first volume of poetry, PROSANATOLISMOI (ORIENTATIONS), was published when he was 29. He gained an international reputation with ASTHMA IROIKA KE PENTHIMO GHIA TON HAMENO ANTHIPOLOCHAGO TIS ALVANIS (HEROIC AND ELEGIAC SONG FOR THE LOST SECOND LIEUTENANT OF THE ALBANIAN CAMPAIGN). He was the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Athens, Greece in 1996.

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal received an MFA from Bennington College, Vermont. She has lived in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines/literary journals and anthologies worldwide. She is the author of the poetry book, The NeverField and Traveling Rooms, a poetry CD. She is editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets bestseller.

Connie Hershey

Connie Hershey is the founder of Artifact Press, Ltd., in Concord, Massachusetts, which has published Truth And Lies That Press For Life: 60 Los Angeles Poets, and an art postcard book. Her own poems have been published in journals including Atlanta Review, Worcester Review, American Voice, Onthebus, and in five anthologies.

The following note from the author describes her poems:

"The first poem, 'Ecstatic Permutations,' is a cento. According to John Drury's The Poetry Dictionary, a cento is 'A poem made up of passages from poems by one or more authors...a literary collage...'. 'Ecstatic Permutations' is made up of one line from each poem in the anthology Ecstatic Occasions, Expecdient Forms, edited by David Lehman.

The other poems are a version of found poetry or bricolage. Rather than framing a found non-poem text with the poet's eye (as in found poetry) or using truly 'whatever is available for immediate use' as defined by bricolage, my system is to extract phrases and lines from existing texts and to use these as my raw material. In these poems, I have drawn upon a physics text from the 1800's and from art reviews."

Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu's books of poems are Vox Angelica (Alice James, 1992), Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon, 1995), Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon, 1998) and Hard Evidence (Talisman, 2001). He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman, 2000). New work is forthcoming in Boston Review, Boulevard, Field, Iowa Review, Paris Review and Volt. He teaches at William Paterson University and lives in Hoboken, NJ.

Drago Stambuk

Drago Stambuk is the former Croation ambassador to Great Britain, India, Egypt and six other Arab countries; he is a medical doctor and researcher; and one of Croatia's best loved poets.

Franz Wright

Franz Wright's most recent collection of poetry, The Beforelife, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), was nominated for this year's Pulitzer Prize. His previous collections include Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). He has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Wright has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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