Jan Bottiglieri lives in Schaumburg, Illinois, with her husband and son. She is a professional editor and an associate editor for the poetry journal RHINO. She has led poetry workshops for students and adults and her work has appeared in journals including Margie, After Hours, and Bellevue Literary Review.

Nina Corwin, a Chicago social worker, is the author of one collection of poetry, Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints (Puddin'head Press, 1999) and co-editor of Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women (Moon Journal Press, 2002). Co-host of the River Oak Art reading series, she has performed her own work extensively around the country. In addition she has collaborated with a variety of musicians including the CUBE contemporary chamber ensemble, Serendipity Percussion Ensemble and dancer/choreographer Regina Lavery. Her published work appears in such publications as ACM, Atlanta, Nimrod Int'l, Poetry East, RATTLE, Spoon River and Southern Poetry Reviews, as well as the anthologies Visiting Frost (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and Poetic Voices Without Borders(Gival Press). She has received awards from the Illinois Arts Council and the Illinois State Poetry Society.

Larry O. Dean was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, during which time he won three Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing, an honor shared with fellow poets Robert Hayden, Jane Kenyon, and Frank O'Hara, among others. He is author of numerous chapbooks, including I Am Spam (2004), a series of poems "inspired" by junk email; his poetry has also been internationally anthologized. In addition to writing, he is a singer-songwriter, performing solo as well as with his current band, The Injured Parties; he has released many critically-acclaimed CDs, including Fables in Slang(2001) with Post Office, and Gentrification Is Theft (2002) with The Me Decade. Dean was a 2004 recipient of the Hands on Stanzas Gwendolyn Brooks Award, presented by the Poetry Center of Chicago. Contact him at larryodean.com.

Maureen Tolman Flannery's latest book, Ancestors in the Landscape, chronicles her upbringing in a Wyoming sheep ranch family. She and her actor husband Dan have passed their wander lust onto four back-packing children. Her other books areA Fine Line,Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico, Remembered into Life, and Knowing Stones. Her work has appeared in fifty anthologies and over a hundred literary reviews, including Atlanta Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Out of Line, Santa Fe Literary Review.

Paul Friedrich grew up and was educated in New England, has lived in Europe, Mexico, and India, has taught languages, literature, linguistics, and anthropology at eleven universities, has seven children and for long has made his home in Chicago and Virginia. He received his Ph.D from Yale University in 1957. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought, and Associate in Slavics at the University of Chicago, he has done fieldwork in southwestern Mexico, South India, and among Russians. Other research includes the Aphrodite myth in Ancient Greece, and Proto-Indo-European, and American poetry. His current work is divided between anthropology and literary studies (e.g., Homeric Greek, Tolstoy, Thoreau) and theoretical problems in ethnography, poetics, semiotics, and politics. His publications include The Language Parallax: Linguistics, Relativism, and Poetic Creativity (1986) and Music in Russian Poetry (1997). His most recent poetry collection, Harmony in Babel, was published by Virtual Artists Collective in 2007.

Christopher Gallinari is an attorney who lives and practices law in Chicago, Illinois. He was born in New York City, raised in suburban New Jersey and attended Drew University and New York University School of Law.

Larry Janowski of Chicago, Illinois, is the author of BrotherKeeper (The Puddin'head Press 2007), is the recipient of a 2008 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award. His work appears regularly in journals like After Hours: a Journal of Chicago Writing and Art and Court Green (Columbia College), and has also appeared in TriQuarterly, Rhino, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Larry, a Franciscan friar, teaches at Loyola University (Chicago).

Wayne Allen Jones reads and features at open mic venues in Chicago and elsewhere. As fractaledgepress, he independently publishes Chicago poetry and fiction (27 titles since 2002). He has a PhD in English from Harvard and has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Miami, and Roosevelt University (Chicago). He won two Jules and Avery Hopwood Awards (poetry and essays) at the University of Michigan. He put in a soul-numbing two decades in the computer industry before retiring early to earn an MA in Clinical Professional Psychology at Roosevelt University, which he currently uses to serve residents at a Chicago nursing home. He is a member of the Poets Club of Chicago. He has published three volumes of poetry, Stone Works, The A Poems, and Decades of Rehearsal, and has two more in the works.

Lauren Levato is an artist, poet and author of Marriage Bones (Fractal Edge Press 2006) and at the hotel andromeda, a collaborative text/image project with poet Kristy Bowen. More can be found at laurenlevato.com.

Huichun (Amy) Liang is a Lecturer in Chinese language and literature at the University Of Maryland. She is the co-author (with Zhanjing) of Chinese Idioms and co-translator (with Steven Schroeder) of Small (poetry by Li Nan). Her translations have appeared on the Transparent Languages multimedia web pages and dictionary, in Sichuan Literature, and Rhino; and her writing has appeared in Da Gong (Hong Kong), Sing Tao Daily (US), and a variety of media in the People's Republic of China.

Charlie Newman has had 4 books and a chapbook published and 3 CDs released. His poetry has appeared in: honeydu, After Hours, Ink & Ashes, Milk Magazine, Poetry Bay, Locuspoint, exsanguinate, and Saw, among others. He has performed at venues in NYC, London, Chicago, and others in such events as Insomniacathons, the Viking Hillbilly Apocalypse Jam, the Big Sur 40th Anniversary Read, the London International Poetry & Song Festival, the New York Underground Music & Poetry Festival, the U.N. Dialogue Through Poetry, Around The Coyote, WLUW David Amram 75th Birthday Celebration, several Chicago Poetry Fests, Poets Against The War, the 22nd Annual Chicago Blues Festival, and the 21st Annual Printers Row Book Fair. He hosts The Café Tuesday night open mic and The 1st Friday Poetry Readings and was named 1 of Top 15 in The Chicago Poetry Scene by Third Coast Press.

Deborah Nodler Rosen is an editor of RHINO, an award-winning poetry journal, and serves on the Board of United Nations of Poetry. Her anthology, WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES contains voices of forty women around the world writing about home. Her poems have appeared in: The Journal of Northwestern University; Third Coast; Out of Line; Where We Live-Illinois Poets; the anthology Wild Things and many other journals. Recent prizes include: First Prize in both an Oregon State Poetry Association Contest and a California State Poetry Society Contest. Currently she leads poetry workshops and teaches poetry in schools under a KIDS MEET ART program.

Steven Schroeder is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (a "virtual" gathering of musicians, poets, and visual artists -- vacpoetry.org) that has published five poetry collections each year since it began in 2004. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in After Hours, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Concho River Review, the Cresset, Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2005, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Macao Closer, Mid-America Poetry Review, Poetry East, Poetry Macao, Rhino, Shichao, Sichuan Literature, Texas Review, TriQuarterly, Wichita Falls Literature & Art Review, and other literary journals. He has published two chapbooks, Theory of Cats and Revolutionary Patience, and three full-length collections, Fallen Prose, The Imperfection of the Eye, and Six Stops South. He teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults and at Shenzhen University in China.