David Barringer has written stories for Epoch, Nerve, Wisconsin Review, In Posse Review, Cross Connect, Carve Magazine, Cenotaph, 3AM Magazine, Tatlin's Tower, Taint Magazine, Pindeldyboz, and others. His first story collection is The Leap & Other Mistakes: 35 Stories. He has written a novel, Johnny Red, a chunk of which appears in this summer's Epoch. He lives in Michigan with his wife and two kids. His website is www.davidbarringer.com. curious@davidbarringer.com

Thomas Bates is an independent researcher and writer residing in Northern Colorado. His interests include nontraditional approaches to education, common sense as a depletable natural resource, and cooking. bates_moss@yahoo.com

Joop Bersee was born in 1958 in The Netherlands. In 1982 Joop started writing poetry in Dutch and had his work (including his first poem ever written) published in Holland. In 1989 he moved to South Africa and settled in Cape Town where he studied theology and bookkeeping. In 1991 he started writing in English only and has had work published in South Africa, England and Canada. Joop is married to Sandy and has a daughter, Jessica-Anne. All Joop's work can be seen at his website.

Ryan Costello is quite the bohemian, with a penchant for roaming the globe and a consuming love of people - their thoughts, tears, loves, deaths-as well as a need to documenting his observations through writing and black and white photography. 23, he graduates this year from the University of South Florida. An obsessive musician, he plays any instrument he can get his hands on, from piano and keyboards to guitar, mandolin, recorder, and harmonica. He plays in a post-jazz ambient, experimental free form trio called "figure versus ground" around the central Florida area, their ultimate goal being to dredge up the far corners of their psyche and spontaneously paint musical collages from an unrestricted palette. Within the next year Ryan is looking to join, long-term, a humanitarian organization providing resources to refugees and documenting their struggles and situations. rchristopc@hotmail.com

Michael Catherwood holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and a BFA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published in various magazines, including Black Warrior Review, Georgetown Review, Kansas Quarterly, Kimera, Morpo, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Red River Review, and others. He writes essays for Plainsongs. He's worked as a truck driver, weed whacker, garbage man, teacher, tutor, substitute teacher, and administrator, and currently teaches at Creighton University. His awards include an Intro Award for Poetry from AWP, a Lily Peter Fellowship, the Holt Prize for Poetry, National Finalist for the Ruth Lily Prize from Poetry Magazine, finalist for the Paris Review Prize, and finalist for Pig Iron Press Poetry Book Award.

Gabriel Dean resides in Atlanta, where he attends university, acts, and freelances. He grew up in Chatsworth, Georgia, a small town in the Appalachians. He lived in Manhattan briefly, studying theatre. His first play, "Saltwater in the Eye," (copyright 1997) was produced in 1998. He has self-published two literary collections entitled "Titans in the Shadows" (copyright 2000) and "Emergence" (copyright 2001). In his poetry he attempts to write what Rilke deemed "the unsayable;" to create a lingual transport for those unutterable sensations created by day-to-day living. Recently, for the second year in a row, he received Oglethorpe University's Sidney Lanier Prize in Writing. He is 22 years old.

Roy Doughty is a poet, kriya meditator and ethics seminar leader. For the past decade, he has led a seminar entitled "Uncommon Solutions," which uses brief plays and stories by such authors as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and James Baldwin to help legal, medical and business professionals deepen their understanding of ethical issues. He lives in Oakland, California. global@lmi.net

Richard Freed is a professor in the English Department at Iowa State University; an international consultant on proposal writing; the author of a scholarly book The Variables of Composition, which won NCTE's best book award for research in scientific and technical communication; the author of the trade book Writing Winning Business Proposals (McGraw-Hill), and the creator of The Grants Workbench, the first web-based application that structures a writer's thinking and produces the first draft of a grant proposal, soon to be up at the site WinningProposal.com.

Joel Fry is a 23-year-old Junior at Athens State University where he majors in Behavioral Science. He plans to specialize in the psychology of language someday. He has been published in Melic Review and Stirring.

Tony Grist was born in London in 1951 and began writing seriously in 1986. His work has appeared widely in British newspapers and magazines and on the Net. He is co-author of An Illustrated Guide to Wicca (Godsfield Press) and assistant editor of the Carriage House Review. He can be contacted at Lostcow95@aol.com

Nigel Holt: I'm male, expatriate and British, solemnly approaching thirty-eight, and back writing poetry after nearly twenty years away. When not writing, I eke out an existence as an English teacher on a tax-free salary in the United Arab Emirates, most of which is spent on air-conditioning, poetry books and three dysfunctional cats. I write mainly metered verse - usually in the garden if the electricity man is about. nigel_holt@yahoo.com

Allen Itz: I began writing poetry in the late 1960's and had a couple of poems published. When the demands of family and career began to monopolize most of my creative energies in the early 1970's I quit writing and didn't start again until a couple of years ago when I retired. Since then my poems have appeared in The Melic Review and a number of other on-line and print journals, including Maelstrom, Eclectica, The Poet's Canvas, The Horsethief's Journal, Niederngasse, The Shallow End and others. The greatest pleasure of writing is the reaction of readers so I always enjoy reader response and would welcome comments at this e-mail address: allenitz@aol.com

Richard Jordan is a Ph.D. Mathematician and a poet who lives and works in the Washington, DC area. His poems have appeared in over 40 print and on-line magazines, including most recently, Stirring, The Pedestal, Poems Niederngasse, Net Author E2K, Adirondack Review, Prose Ax, Red River Review, Kimera, Dakota House Journal, Steel Point Quarterly, Virginia Adversaria, Maelstrom, Purr Magazine, Concrete Wolf, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, and Facets. The editor of Branches has chosen lines from one of his poems to include as an example in the 2003 Poet's Market. He is also a judge/editor for the Beginnings Magazine quarterly poetry contest, and has been a Guest Editor for Facets Magazine and Stirring. He has published flash fiction in Insolent Rudder, Story Bytes, and American Feed Magazine, as well. sdjordan1@juno.com

kris t kahn's poetry and prose has appeared in The Cortland Review, Naked Poetry, Stirring, Mentress Moon, Scarlet Letters, and various other journals. His chapbook, the Gospel according to Thomas, was published by 2River View and is also available online. kris is co-founder/co-editor of the online poetry journal Sometimes City. He lives in New Jersey where he is currently trying his hand at novel writing. blackswan2@aol.com

Harold Larrimore, a student, abides near Califia.

David Linebarger, a native of California, is currently Assistant Professor of Humanities at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. After a hand injury forced him to abandon a career in music, he turned to the study of literature and, more recently, to the writing of poetry. His publications include numerous essays on Wallace Stevens and recent or forthcoming poetry from The Mid-America Poetry Review and Potpourri. He currently resides in Tahlequah with his wife and two young children. linebarg@ipa.net

Pug Marr is just some guy, one that ascribes to the tenets of a strict and closely guarded privacy, and is grateful to those that harbor the tact and sound grace to forgive him this peculiar minauderie.

RJ McCaffery holds a M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His first book, Chaos Theory and the Knuckleballer, was published in the Spring of 2000. His poetry and essays have appeared in such publications as The Norton Anthology of Literature's web site, New Books, Ploughshares, The Cortland Review, Crania, The Alsop Review, The Free Cuisenart, Terrain, Conspire, Masthead, Moondance, Octavo, and The Alembic. While not restoring vintage 3-speed bicycles, he putters with several web-related poetry projects; many under the aegis of Eye Dialect. Anyone who wishes to discuss the Red Sox, poetry, or the fine line between them, is welcome to mail him at rj@contemporarypoetry.com

Andy Nicholson is currently living in Bowling Green, Ohio, where he is a student at Bowling Green State University. He has found inspiration in the paintings of Klee, the writings of Mac Low and the noise of the Boredoms. Recently he has been published in such magazines as Devil's Advocate and The Obsidian.

Stephen Oliver b. 1950, Wellington, New Zealand. One year diploma course in Magazine Journalism, Wellington Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, ‘The Voice of Peace’ broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice, newsreader, announcer, journalist, copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Books published: Henwise (1975), & Interviews (1978), Autumn Songs (1978), Letter To James. K. Baxter (1980), Earthbound Mirrors (1984), Guardians, Not Angels (1993), Islands of Wilderness - A Romance (1996), Election Year Blues (1999), Unmanned (1999), Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000. HeadworX (2001), covers five collections of poetry and spans two decades. In addition, Stephen Oliver's work can be found in a number of online literary magazines including, Comrades, Drought: A Literary Review, 42Opus, Gangway, Melic Review, Southern Ocean Review, Southern Cross Review, Trout, Turbine, The Poetry Warehouse, Stride, Blackmail Press, Zuzu's Petals. Recent prose work in: Deep South [Contempt: A Survey], Thylazine [One Day In The Life of Vicki Viidikas]. Stephen Oliver is a transtasman poet based in Sydney, Australia. Address: PO Box 1661, Strawberry Hills, Sydney, NSW, 2012, Australia. Email: sao@smartchat.net.au

Timothy Patton is a painter (of houses) whose poems have appeared in his jacket pocket, on his bedroom floor and (for a brief time) on an end table at his mother's house. He has lived for most of his life in various suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He knows he is bound for something, somewhere. He is taller than you think he is.

Sambarta Rakshit grew up in Calcutta and majored in Electrical Engineering. Later, came to the US for graduate study and currently lives in the Boston area with his wife, Mayurika.

A.P. Taylor lives in Southwestern Missouri where he studies German Literature, English, and Philosophy. He hopes to live a life of academic leisure, writing speculative philosophy, and poetry, and avoiding strenuous activity.

Jon Teets lives in Scottsdale, AZ with his wife Lori and two Old English Sheepdogs, Marlowe and Sidney. He's been published in The New Formalist, Verse & Vice, Optic Magazine, Laughing Lions, and Jocundity. He is publisher of The Avatar Review. jteets@avatarreview.com

Bob Thurber grew up in Rhode Island and now lives in Southeastern Massachusetts where he works full time at writing and part-time at not much else. His work has appeared in a variety of publications and won numerous awards. He was recently a finalist for Glimmer Train's 2002 Very Short Fiction Award. Selections of published work and contact information can be found at his website.

—COVER ART: Embrace (Lovers II); Egon Schiele, 1917.—