Tony Hoagland is the author of Donkey Gospel, from Graywolf Press, and a forthcoming book of prose about poetry, called Reel Sofistikashun.

Cynthia Hogue has published three collections of poetry, most recently The Never Wife (Mammoth P, 1999) and Flux (New Issues P, 2002), and has co-edited an anthology of essays on women's avant-garde writing, We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics (U of AL P, 2001). She has lived and taught in Iceland, Denmark, Arizona, New Orleans, and New York. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches English at Bucknell University.

Matthew Jewell is a member of the Chicago text-based performance/exhibition group Telophase.  He is from east of the Mississippi.

Cheri Johnson grew up in Lake of the Woods County in northern MN. She has an MA from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA where she won the Gertrude Claytor Prize in poetry and the James Andrew Purdy Fiction Prize. She has had fiction and poetry included in journals such as Gypsy Cab, The Blue Skunk Review, Pif, and Clare, as well as nonfiction in The Minnesota Women's Press, and an anthology by Breakaway Books. She lives in Minneapolis.

Jill Khoury lived and worked in Pittsburgh for nine years. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State University.

Robert Krut's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, Many Mountains Moving, and The American Literary Review, among others.

John Rybicki's poems and stories have appeared in North American Review, Field, Bomb, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. He currently teaches creative writing to inner-city children in Detroit, and serves as a guest lecturer at schools throughout the country. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry Press) appeared in 1996, and his latest collection, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider (March Street Press), was published in 2002.  

Arthur Saltzman is a professor of English at Missouri Southern and the author of seven books, including Object and Empathy, a collection of essays that won the First Series Creative Nonfiction Award from Mid-List Press. His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Cream City Review, Ohio Review, Black Warrior Review, and Nebraska Review. He is also the most recent winner of the Nebraska Review Essay Award.

Neil Shigley, whose art appears in this issue, works on canvas using various mixed media combined with acrylic paint. "I'm drawn to larger works, with a focus on the intensity of surface texture and application of paint along with intensity of color." He shows his paintings in galleries in San Diego and Santa Barbara. A collection of woodblock and plexiglassblock prints was exhibited in several cities in Germany in 1994. More work can be seen at www.portfolios.com/neilshigley. Shigley teaches drawing and illustration at San Diego State University.

Mathias Svalina teaches in Richmond, Virginia. He has previous or forthcoming work in In Posse Review, River City Review and Willow Springs.