Josely Vianna Baptista has written several poetry books and a children's book, which received the VI Prémio Internacional del Libro Ilustrado Infantil y Juvenil del Gobierno de México. She has translated more than fifty books, including poems by J. L. Borges (Completed Works , Globo), for which she was awarded the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti (1999). On the shining screen of the eyelids (Manifest Press), a collection of her poems selected and translated by Chris Daniels, has been published in the U.S.

John M. Bennett's books, publications, and other work can be found at his website.

Scott Bentley was born in Burbank, California, in 1964. He received a BA from UC Santa Cruz in 1986, an MA from UC San Diego in 1989, and an MFA from Mills College in 2004. He lives with his wife, Marta, a Paulista, and their two boys in Oakland, California. He teaches writing at CSU East Bay, Mills College and elsewhere.  He is the author of two chapbooks—Edge (Birdcage Chapbooks, 1987) and Out of Hand (Parenthesis Writing Series, 1989)—and two full-length books:  Ground Air (O Books, 1994) and The Occasional Tables (sub press, 2000). He has co-translated the work of Brazilian writer, Regis Bonvicino and others. Some of the latest translations appear in New American Writing and The Pip Anthology of  World Poetry of the 20th Century (Vol. 3)—Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Green Integer, 2003). Other work has appeared in The Poker, The Raddle Moon, The Styles, Syllogism, Tinfish, and elsewhere.

Gherardo Bortolotti is an editor at GAMMM and co-edits arcipelago edizioni with Michele Zaffarano. He is the author of Canopo (E-dizioni Biagio Cepollaro, 2005).

Tyler Carter has work appearing, or forthcoming, in Wherever We Put Our Hats, Nidus, horse less review, Fence, H_NGM_N, CARVE [poems], Typo, Combo, American Letters & Commentary, and Tantalum. His chapbook Egg Breakfast was published by the horse less press in 2005. He is a recent graduate of the Brown Poetry MFA program.

Clayton A. Couch (http://www.claytonacouch.com/) works as a reference librarian at two Asheville, NC-area community colleges and as a review columnist for Library Journal . His first poetry collection, Familiar Bifurcations (xPress(ed), 2004), was recently reviewed in Prague Literary Review . Artificial Lure (effing press, 2005), a chapbook, has received favorable commentary from Book/Mark, Midwest Book Review, and other publications. Poems have recently appeared in MiPO, The Alterran Poetry Assemblage, and Verse. From 2001-05, he edited and published sidereality.

Catherine Daly has worked as a technical architect, officer in a Wall Street investment bank, engineer supporting the space shuttle orbiter, software developer for motion picture studios, and teacher. Her books include DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003), Locket (Tupelo Press, 2005), Secret Kitty (Ahadada Books, 2006), and To Delite and Instruct (Blue Lion Books). She lives in Los Angeles and blogs at http://cadaly.blogspot.com/

Julie Doxsee's The Knife-Grasses is forthcoming from Octopus Books in Fall 2006. Meanwhile, she is a PhD candidate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Denver whose recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Bedazzler, Tarpaulin Sky, LIT, Aufgabe, Retort Magazine, 42opus, Spork, Action, Yes, H_NGM_N, Slope, Eratio Postmodern Poetry, La Petite Zine, can we have our ball back, Elimae, Coconut Poetry, Conduit, Typo, Fourteen Hills, Shampoo, and other journals. Find announcements and visuals at 52 Moons.

Malcolm de Chazal (1902 – 1981) was a Mauritian writer, painter, and visionary, known especially for his Sens-Plastique (1945), a work consisting of several thousand aphorisms and pensées. Chazal's other writings include La Vie Filtrée (1949), a collection of essays that elaborate upon the ideas found in Sens-Plastique, Petrusmok (1951), a spiritual history of Mauritius, Sens Magique (1957), and Poémes (1968). Sens-Plastique has been translated into English by Irving Weiss in a volume published by Green Integer (2005).

kari edwards received one of Small Press Traffic's books of the year award (2004), New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in literature (2002); and is author of obedience, Factory School (2005); iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p., subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27, Belladonna Books (2002), and post/(pink), Scarlet Press (2000). edwards' work can also be found in Scribner's The Best American Poetry (2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, Coffee House Press, (2004), Biting the Error: writers explore narrative, Coach House, Toronto, (2004), Aufgabe, Tinfish, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh's Ear , Amerikan Hotel, Boog City, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Narrativity, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Pom², Shearsman, and Submodern Fiction.

Alessia Folcio lives in Brescia (Italy) and works as a translator and English teacher. She collaborates with Gherardo Bortolotti and Marco Giovenale.

Marta Frota-Bentley grew up in São Paulo, Brasil.  She has a BA in English and Comparative literature from Berkeley. She worked for ATT for ten years as an interpreter and now does freelance translation. She lives with Scott Bentley and their two sons, Lucas and Max, in Oakland, California.

Jennifer Sarah Cooper (Frota) was born in El Centro, California (a very hot place) and currently lives in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte (another very hot place) where she is working on various projects including a photo and text experiment (poetry, translations, song) about the pilgrimages to Juazeiro do Norte. Her translations of Brazilian poetry appear in various publications including: The Magazine, Lies About the Truth, Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain, Sky-Eclipse, Potiguar Rainforests: Nature and Surrealism. Some of her original poetry and experimental fiction has appeared in the literary journal Letterbox, now in hibernation.

“When Scott [Bentley] recently asked for help on the Baptista poem ‘Saudade' I gladly dove in to collaborate with him and Marta—as I find our collaborations very gratifying experiments and a respite from working alone. The process was very different from the Pip anthology though which was mostly done separately, in that we spent much more time discussing and arguing back and forth (via email and phone, since I live in Brazil), fighting for certain choices, agreeing and disagreeing, coming to consensus on every syllable, word, punctuation mark, line break, white space, sound, silence. This effort was more deeply collaborative. The result is an English translation unlike anything any one of us would have done alone and exhilarating in its particular way. Collaboration is successful when each collaborator passionately cares about the work and the process, and is willing to fight as we do. The benefits are numerous. I also believe in the benefit of multiple translations, with the exception of Rabassa's masterly translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which everything in the original and perhaps more is brought into English. There is no need for another. Thus, on certain projects I work alone, often for practical reasons, but also if I think that the work would not benefit from the Cerberian team.”

Marco Giovenale lives in Rome, working in an antiquarian bookshop. He edits GAMMM, Absolute poetry, Italianistica OnLine, and Bina. His work has appeared in such magazines as Nuovi argomenti, Poesia, Rendiconti, Semicerchio, Private, Sud, L'immaginazione, Hebenon, Exit, and Action poétique. His books of poems include Curvature (2002), Il segno meno (2003), Altre ombre (2004), Double click (chapbook, 2005), Endoglosse (e-book, pdf, 2004), and the upcoming Criterio dei vetri (2006). His bibliography is available here, and more of his work in English can be found at his blog, Differx. His webpage is http://slowforward.wordpress.com.

"‘TLP' stands for 'three-line poem' or 'two-line poem.' I wrote down the first draft of this tiny text using a little pc-pad, which persuaded me to cage each statement in a two-or-three-line space. This gave me a rhythm, or something like a compulsive perception of a narrative narrowness."

Derek Henderson's work has appeared or will appear shortly in Diagram, Barrow Street, Fence, Action Yes, GutCult, GoodFoot, New Delta Review, and Flyway. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Brian Howe is a freelance writer and poet living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. His poems have appeared in MiPo, Octopus, Fascicle, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Eratio, Soft Targets, Cannibal, and elsewhere. His chapbook Guitar Smash is forthcoming from Atlanta's 3rdness press. Almost all the work Howe has published over the past year and a half uses a process he calls F7, which utlizes MS Word's spellcheck function in various ways to make poems. Marta E Davide is an in-progress chapbook that uses this process to transfigure an enigmatic, obsessive-scrawl-filled journal that Howe found in Sicily several years ago. The original Sicilian source text for Marta E Davide can be found here.

“Since I don't speak Sicilian (and because much of it is untranslatable at any rate), what I'm doing is simply rendering the text as precisely as possible into nonsense English, keeping spacing and font size etc. intact when possible. But the handwriting is very odd and sometimes it's just chickenscratch, so I have a lot of leeway for interpretation. My F7 process involves using MS Word's spellcheck function to make poems, working from nonsense texts of my devising or from corrupted source materials, Marta E Davide is an example of the latter. Once I have this densely sculpted nonsense language on the page (governed nevertheless by a very compelling and mysterious structure), the spellchecker is used as a sort of palette to determine what real English words those corrupted Sicilian words will become.”

Sandra Huber's poetry has appeared in the Milieu Portfolio Anthology of Canadian Women Writers and in idea&s. She is the former poetry editor for Opium Magazine (NYC) and current poetry editor for The Shore Magazine (Toronto).  She recently completed her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto and spends her days contemplating birds, cities, and the history of chemistry.

“‘As If Translating'…is one poem posing as six.  It was originally inspired by the fragmentary & textured journal of Frida Kahlo and as such tends to be fragmentary & textured itself…. My aesthetic incorporates the material, whether it be the threads, paint and canvas of a picture or the ink and pencil of a poem; I believe this is reflected in my work.”

George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. His books of poetry include Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997, American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Hambone, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, and other periodicals. He is also the author of Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence, a scholarly work on Hindu mysticism and Western rhetoric (State University of New York Press, 1994).

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen lives and writes in Espoo, Finland. His work has appeared in Poethia, Moria, Shampoo, Aught, can we have our ball back?, 5_Trope, Generator, Score, m.a.g, sleeping fish, BathHouse Magazine, Blackbox, Textbase, and elsewhere. His books include [#1-#46] (BlazeVox, 2004), [div]versions (Poetic Inhalation, 2004), and The Oracular Sonnets (with Mark Young, Meritage Press, 2004). He is the editor of xStream and xPress(ed). He has a weblog, nonlinear poetry.

Jim Leftwich co-edits xtant, and is the author of Doubt (Potes & Poets), Dirt (Luna Bisonte), Virgule (Lingua Blanca) and Staceal 1 (Avantacular). From 1994 to 2000 he published the early mail-art zine Juxta and co-edited and Juxta Electronic . An extensive selection of his work is accessible at the Muse Apprentice Guild. His long work, Doubt, is available at avant-garde bookstores.

Jon Leon is the editor of Wherever We Put Our Hats. The Italian translations of Diphasic Rumors appearing in this issue were originally published in Word For/Word #8.

Lauren Levin has work appearing in GutCult, Shampoo, and Dusie, and forthcoming in MiPOesias and the tiny. Her chapbook Adventures was published in 2004 by Your Beeswax Press.

“I've gradually come to realize that I have almost no visual memory, and, thinking about and struggling with that, I've been trying to work out a non-visual image:  not purely abstract, but on the fuzzy border between perceiving and thinking.  Each object of perception is mixed in and chopped up with the conditions of its time, place, and associations. The idea of a shifting home place preoccupies me in this group of poems.  What part of a particular place— a person's 'viewpoint'—remains in speech, gesture, characteristics, habitual responses to weather, etc., if that place is altered or even blanked out?  These poems use a shifting number pattern (seven parts per poem, but moving in different proportions between the two pages of each poem).  Looking back on the process, I think I was trying to get at that sense of transformation—certain characteristic shapes and preoccupations trying to reform themselves, even on shifting sand.  My process also involves multiple stages—writing on index cards, typewriting, and typing on the computer.  I try to refocus the sections, and to get at different lengths and shapes, which I may transfer from one stage of writing to the next or abandon along the way.”

Giuliano Mesa was born in the town of Reggio Emilia in Italy. He is a poet, critic, translator, and an editor of Akusma, a journal of contemporary poetry. His books include Schedario (Geiger, 1978), I loro scritti ( Quasar, 1992), Improvviso e dopo (Anterem, 1997), Quattro Quaderni (Zona, 2000), Chissà (Edizioni d'if, 2002), and Nuvola neve (Edizioni d'if, 2003). In 2001, he collaborated with the composer Agostino Di Scipio in creating Tiresia, a work of poetry and electronic music, which was recently performed in Berlin.

Leonardo Guevara Navarro is a a member of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC) and the performance group Zona Franca. His books of poetry include Vida en comunion (Letras Cubanas, 2001) and Piramidal (Extramuros, 2002). His work is also featured in the anthologies Escarce o (Garua Editores, 1999), Cuerpo sobre cuerpo (Letras Cubanas, 2000), and Los parques (Reina del Mar, 2001).

Jose Oquendo is from Medellin, Colombia. He is currently a doctoral student at West Virginia University and teaches Spanish and English as a Second Language at Glenville State College.

Michael Peters' poetry, fiction, and critical writing have appeared in Spinning Jenny, Rhino, Lungfull, Lost and Found Times, North of South, Sweet Portable You, World Letter, Badaboom Gramophone, Posted, Castagraf, 5’9” Assembling, Davinio Art Electronics, Generator Press, American Weddings, SleepingFish, and Xtant, among other journals. His visual poetry has appeared in numerous gallery exhibits including: The Art Academy of Cincinnati’s “02txt” exhibit (2002); the OSEAO gallery in Seattle (2002); The Ohio State University’s “American Avant-Garde, Second Wave” Exhibit (2002); “Wordseen” at the Diana Lowenstein gallery in Miami (2003); “Errata and Contradiction” and “Infinity” at Harvard (2004, 2005); the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (2004); the Durban-Segnini Gallery in Miami (2005); and the 308 Gallery in Minneapolis (2005), among others. Visual works and limited edition books can be found in The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Rulon-Miller Books in Minneapolis, Printed Matter in New York City, and both Avant-Garde/Special Collections Libraries at The Ohio State University and the University at Buffalo. Also a musician, most notably in Poem Rocket, Peters has released recordings on numerous independent labels, such as Atavistic—-the experimental, Chicago-based avant-jazz & rock label. Peters is also a member of the Be Blank Consort—with a CD available through Luna Bisonte Prods. Peters is currently teaching and working toward a doctorate in English at the University at Albany in New York. His forthcoming book—a large poem titled Vaast Bin; n Ephemerisi—is forthcoming with Calamari Press in the Fall of 2006. A new Poem Rocket release—titled Invasion—is also pending, and will be released with the Atavistic label in the Fall of 2006. In addition to these and other projects, Peters continues his on-going biographical research on the architect Fleury Colon, along with working as a contributing editor for the journal Xtant.

Marthe Reed lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, that fortunate gap threaded between Katrina and Rita. Her poetry has recently appeared or in forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, Sugar Mule, New Orleans Review, and Golden Handcuffs Review, aught and moria.

Michael Robins is the author of The Next Settlement, which was selected for the Vassar Miller Prize and will be published by University of North Texas Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Meridian, National Poetry Review, Third Coast and elsewhere.

Jared Schickling lives in upstate New York with Mollie, two cats, and a dog. He has a BA in anthropology and English and his work has appeared in Borderlands, Freefall, The Cafe Review and others. He has a finished manuscript ("arrowheads / dirt") just waiting for the press. When he's not busy he's out walking. 

Brian Seabolt lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His book Otto was a finalist in the 2004 Starcherone Fiction Prize. An excerpt from Otto is available in Word For/Word #2.

Michael Sikkema has published poems in The Tiny, Bombay Gin, Fourteen Hills, Parthenon West Review, Shampoo, mirage #4 Period(ical), Zafusy, Temenos, and Xantippe. His work is forthcoming in Blazevox. His chapbook COde Over Code was recently published by Lame HOuse PRess.

Carol Stetser is a visual artist sweltering in the high desert of Arizona.

Brian Strang, co-editor of 26 magazine, lives in Oakland and teaches English composition at San Francisco State University. He is the author Incretion (Sputyen Duyvil) and machinations (a free Duration ebook) among others. Some of his recent writing has appeared in Volt, Xantippe and One Less.

Bronwen Tate graduated from Brown's MFA program and has poems appearing in horse less review and Lungfull!.

“[These poems] are my first lineated work after a long period of working with prose poems. It comes most naturally for me to think in terms of the sentence, but I was surprised at the way the 10 line limit of these poems changed my unit of composition, formed a sort of matrix or puzzle for me to fill in, and actually provoked me to write something that worked best lineated.”

Chris Tonelli lives in Cambridge, MA. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Real Poetik, Verse, Drunken Boat, New York Quarterly, Sonora Review, GutCult, Asheville Poetry Review, LIT, and Redivider.

Gautam Verma's work has appeared in 26, Big Bridge, Diagram, Drunken Boat, Moria, and Pom², and other journals. His chapbooks include Soundings (Blaze Vox) and In Ladakh (Shearsman).

Eddie Watkins' work appears or is forthcoming in Big Bridge, Moria, canwehaveourballback?, Jack Magazine, Swirl, Aught, Paper Tiger, Conduit, Shampoo, Poethia, and Pom². He lives in Philadelphia with his wife in a house full of books and animals.

Irving Weiss' books include Infrapics: Xerolage 35 (Xexoxial Editions, 2005), Number Poems (Runaway Spoon Press, 1997), and Visual Voices: The Poem As a Print Object, (Runaway Spoon Press, 1994). He is also the author of Sens-Plastique (SUN, 1979) and Plastic Sense (Herder and Herder, 1972), both of which are translations from the French of Malcolm de Chazal’s Sens-Plastique (Gallimard, 1948).

Derek White is the editor of Sleepingfish and Calamari Press. His work has recently appeared in such journals as pindeldyboz.com, Alice Blue,Pom², 5_Trope, and others. His chapbooks include ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos (with art by Carlos M. Luis), P.S. At Least We Died Trying To Make You in the Backseat of a Taxidermist (with Wendy Collin Sorin), Bodh[i] Circu[it]s / Alg[a]e[bra] D[ra[in]], O, Vozque Pulp (with art by Carlos M. Luis), Spiritual Turkey Beggar Baste Mechanism/Trapezoidal Juggernaut (with Sandy Baldwin), 23 Text Tiles, and Mining in the Black Hills. He blogs at 5¢ense Reviews.

Randall Williams lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina and is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. His work has been featured in McSweeneys, Salon, Talisman, The Independent, Octopus Magazine and The Carolina Quarterly. In 2005, he was named one of America's 16 Hot Shot Poets by Octopus Magazine. He has a blog here. Some of his short films will soon be available here. He's the author of two chapbooks, Empire (2003) and 40 Days (2004), both published by Junk Horse Press.

Terence Winch's last book of poems is The Drift of Things (2001, The Figures). His work has appeared in three Best American Poetry collections, as well as in Verse, Paris Review, New American Writing, The New Republic, APR, and elsewhere.

Theodore Worozbyt's chapbook, A Unified Theory of Light, is currently out from Dream Horse Press, and his full-length collection, The Dauber Wings, winner of the first American Poetry Journal Book Prize, will be published in early 2007. New work appears in Crazyhorse, Image, Margie, New England Review, Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem, North American Review, Paris/Atlantic Journal, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily.

Elizabeth Marie Young is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature department at U.C. Berkeley where she focuses on ancient Greek/Roman, and 20th century American poetry. Before moving to California, she was the assistant editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and a co-coordinator of the Belladonna reading series in NYC. In San Francisco, she recently curated an inter-arts poetry festival called Cabinet of the Muses which featured over thirty poets and performers including Claudia Rankine, Jerome Rothenberg, Elizabeth Robinson and Juliana Spahr. Her poems have recently appeared in a number of journals including Aufgabe, Crowd, Jubilat, Lungfiull!!! and The Poker.