Born in Newark, NJ in 1934 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) attended Rutgers University before taking his degree at Howard University in Washington, D. C. He is a central figure of the Black Arts Movement in the US and a writer and playwright of international reknown. Baraka retired in 1999 after teaching for twenty years in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook. He currently lives with his wife, the poet Amina Baraka, in Newark.

Lynne Barrett is the author of the The Secret Names of Women and The Land of Go and co-editor of Birth: A Literary Companion. Born in Newark and raised in Verona, she now lives in Miami but visits New Jersey as often as she can.

Susan Briante's poems have been published in New American Writing, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, Notre Dame Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Indiana Review among others. She is the author of the chapbooks True to Scale (Phylum Press 2001) and Neotropics: A Romance in Field Notes (Belladonna* Press 2003). Briante has received awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Monthly, the Academy of American Poets, and the US-Mexico Fund for Culture. From 1992-1997, she lived in Mexico City working as the English Editor for the magazine Artes de México. She works as the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at University of Texas at Austin. New poems are forthcoming from Mandorla and an anthology of writing about the Southwest from the University of Iowa Press.

Darin Ciccotelli is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in Borderlands, Denver Quarterly, and Poet Lore.

Stephen Dunn

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Phebus Etienne grew up in East Orange, New Jersey. She completed writing programs at Rider University and New York University. Her poems have appeared in The Butterfly's Way: Voices From The Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Poet Lore, The Best of Callaloo: Poetry, and Cave Canem Anthology VI. She received a 2001 poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from The Whiting Foundation.

Josh Goldfaden's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review and Chelsea. He lives in Brooklyn.

Kathleen Graber earned an MFA in Poetry from the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She was a 2003 recipient of fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is a faculty instructor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and also operates a seasonal music business on the Boardwalk in her hometown of Wildwood, NJ.

John Hennessy grew up in New Jersey, went to Princeton on a Cane scholarship, and did graduate work at the U. of Texas and the U. of Arkansas. Two of his stories have won the Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, and his poetry and fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Fulcrum, Washington Square, Ontario Review, New Letters, The Greensboro Review, Pleiades, The Sewanee Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals. Since September he lives been teaching creative writing and literature classes at the University of Massachusetts.

James Hoch was born in Camden, New Jersey, and has lived in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington DC, New Mexico, New York, and Seattle. Before teaching, he worked as a dishwasher, cook, dockworker, social worker, and shepherd. Currently, he is Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Gettysburg, Slate, Agni, Antioch, Post Road, Third Coast, Black Warrior, Quarterly West, Pleiades, West Branch, Sonora, Sycamore, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and others, and have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Summer Literary Seminars, and received a 2002 Individual Artists Fellowship from the PA Council on the Arts. His book, A Parade of Hands, won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in March 2003. He lives in Seattle and Lancaster, PA.

Erica Kaufman was born in Bloomington, IN. She spent most of her formative years in the New York/ New Jersey area. She currently lives and works in NYC and is the co-curator of Belladonna*. Her poems can be found in Puppy Flowers, Bombay Gin, The Mississippi Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Can We Have Our Ball Back.

Nancy Kuhl's chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, a small poetry publisher. She is the Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Paul Lisicky

Timothy Liu has two new books forthcoming: OF THEE I SING (University of Georgia, 2004) and E PLURIBUS UNUM A.K.A. KAMIKAZE PILOTS IN PARADISE (Southern Illinois University, 2005). He lives in Hoboken NJ.

Farid Matuk is a poet, essayist and translator. His essays and interviews have appeared most recently in The Texas Observer. He is currently a candidate for an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin.

Karen Miller grew up in the Philippines and spent her teenage years in Cranford, New Jersey, playing field hockey. She lives in New York City and works as senior editorial director at the American Museum of Natural History.

Paul Muldoon's most recent is the Griffin-shortlisted Moy sand and gravel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003.

We love Daniel Nester. We knew him when he was a struggling writer on The Gleaner here at Rutgers, and now look at him: God Save My Queen was reviewed by the New York Times, and his work appears in Best American Poetry 2003. (Imagine the whole editorial board all misty-eyed and clutching their pearls: that’s our boy!).

Alicia Ostriker has published 10 volumes of poems, most recently THE VOLCANO SEQUENCE (Pittsburgh 2002). Her most recent prose book DANCING AT THE DEVIL'S PARTY: ESSAYS ON POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE EROTIC.
Ostriker teaches English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and will be teaching in the low-residency MFA program of New England College starting in June 2004.

Philip Pardi Pardi has published poems, translations and essays in recent issues of Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Quarterly West, Seneca Review and Borderlands: Texas Review of Poetry. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and currently teaches at Marist College.

James Richardson's Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms will appear in Fall 2004. He teaches at Princeton University.

Carmine G. Simmons

Sandy Solomon's book, Pears, Lake, Sun, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Individual poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. She works as a freelance writer in Princeton, NJ