David Braden
lives in Oakland, California. His written work has appeared in various small press journals, print and on-line. Most recently these include: Moria, Poethia, Vert, Shampoo, Sidereality, Aught, and Word for Word. His wordsound compositions have been featured in Muse Apprentice Guild, where he has been named as a "writer in residence." "Warwords," a wordsound composition, will be included in the first issue of Sprechen, a CD magazine of sound poetry. Samples of his sound and text work can be found at: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~barleydog/poems.html

Sarah Messer
Sarah Messer has been a Burger King employee, a 4-H horse judge, a platform diver, and a ballerina. Currently she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina -Wilmington. She has received writing fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute from Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Bandit Letters (poetry), was published by New Issues in 2001. A memoir of place, Red House, is forthcoming from Viking in Spring of 2004.

Paul Murphy
was b orn 1965 in Belfast. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany.

His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published a pamphlet and one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing an oral history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.

Kari Edwards
is a poet, artist and gender activist, winner of New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in literature(2002), author of a day in the life of p. to be released by subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), Electric Spandex: anthology of writing the queer text, Pyriform Press (2002), and post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2001). edwards' work can also be found in Blood and Tears: an anthology on Matthew Shepard, Painted leaf Press (2000), Aufgabe, Fracture, Bombay Gin, Belight Fiction, In Posse, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh's Ear, PuppyFlower, Vert, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Shampoo, xStream, Big Bridge, Nerve Lantern, Magazine Cypress, AUGHT, Word/For Word, Atomicpetals, FIR at potz.com, muse-apprentice-guild, Panic, Avoid Strange Men, and The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies.

Katie Bush
is a Canadian chicklette living in San Francisco who lloves making internet things happen. She has a master's degree in new genres from the San Francisco Art Institute (2000) and doesn't appreciate it when people wear ugly sandals. destroyevil.com! (lovekatie.com)

Eric Elshtain
is a Ph.D. student in the University of Chicago'sCommittee on the History of Culture. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, New American Writing, McSweeney's, Interim and other journals. An essay, " 'As If': Some Poetics," appears in the book Vectors: New Poetics, published by Samizdat Press. A chapbook, Seventy-two Malignant Spirits, is available through www.beardofbees.com; another chapbook, The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter, will appear through Transparent Tiger Press: both presses are in Chicago. He is currently the poetry editor of the Chicago Review.

Erminia Passannanti
Born and brought up in Salerno, Erminia Passannanti read Modern Languages at Salerno University. In 1991, she was winners ex-equo of the first Italian National Poetry Competition, "Laura Nobile." A selection of 30 poems from her collection Noi Altri was published in 1993 in the anthology I Cinque Poeti del Premio Laura Nobile, with an introduction by Franco Fortini. In 1995, she won the First Prize in the same peotry competition with her collection Macchina, published by Manni Editore in 2000. English translations of her poems have been published in UK literary magazines such as Agenda, Poetry Durham, Between the Lines and in several on-line American magazines. The English transaltion of Macchina has been published in the UK by Brindin Press: Virtual Book http://www.brindin.com/vb9cover.htm. Her last collection of poems Extasis (2003) is published with Lieto Colle. In 2003, Rispostes will publish Mystics.

David Ray Vance
is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Sniper Logic, and Timothy Mc Sweeney's, amongst others, and will be included in two anthologies--Of Tangible Knowledge: Poetry and Science (Samizdat Press) and Is This Forever or What: Poems and Painting from Texas (Greenwillow/HarperCollins)--both slated for publication spring 2003. His chapbook, Radium Jaw is available from Transparent Tiger Press.

Lewis LaCook
is a poet, musician and net artist with a gnawing obsession: the intersection of randomness, interactivity and post-post-modern poetics. His work, both text and hypermedia, has appeared in Cauldron and Net, Shampoo, _sidereality, 5_trope, furtherfield.org, Aught, Lost and Found Times, the muse apprentice guild, CTheory Multimedia, hyperrhiz, and Slope, among others. Some of his hypermedia pieces are archived in the Rhizome artBase(New York); some of his texts have been archived in the Avant Writing Collection, curated by John M. Bennett(Ohio State University) and the rare books archive at SUNY Buffalo, curated by Michael Basinski. Published books and chapbooks include: Cling(anabasis, Washington, 2000); The Odious Art of Lewis LaCook (BeeHive Microtitle, e-book, San Francisco, 2001)

Aaron McCullough

Steven Seidenberg

John Bradley
is the editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader. His collection of parables, Add Musk Here, was recently published by Pavement Saw Press. He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

Louis Armand
is an artist and writer who has lived in Prague since 1994, where he currently lectures on cultural theory and art history at Charles University and works as a freelance art consultant. His poetry, fiction, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in various publications, including Poetry Review, Meanjin, Southerly, TriQuarterly, Culture Machine, Frank and Salt. His work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets.

Mikhail Zoschenko (1894 - 1958)
is one of Russia's greatest writers and deserves wider recognition abroad. He is the master of short, ironical stories and novels describing Soviet Russia of the 1920s-1940s. He was highly regarded by Akhmatova , Olesha and Esenin and often compared with Chekhov and Gogol.

He suffered a great deal in his lifetime and was cruelly persecuted by Stalin for being opposed to the ideals of "true Soviet Literature." At the same time poet Osip Mandelstam considered Zoschenko to be the only writer in Russia who portrayed "the working man" and insisted that every town in Russia should bear a monument to him.

Zoschenko's books still enjoy great popularity in Russia today as witnessed by their large print runs. He is also popular as a children's writer and his books are still essential reading for a younger generation fifty years on.
(bio from Limbus Press)

cover page music by Anna Homler