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Jeffery Beam ("Anthologies for Dinner" & "Editor's Note" & "Read & Recommended") is OBR Poetry Editor.

Kevin Bezner's ("A Location Constantly Occurring" & "Listening to Music, Watching Gray Sky") collection of poetry The Tools of Ignorance was published in 1997 by Cincinnati Writers' Project. CWP will also publish Wherever in 1999 and Particularities in 2000. Bezner is also coeditor of The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines, published by Story Line Press.

Jay Bonner ("Half Life") teaches at The Asheville School. His fiction, poetry, and criticism have been published in several magazines, including The Quarterly, Art Papers, Artforum, Tyuonyi, Asheville Poetry Review, and The Greensboro Review.

Poet and filmmaker James Broughton ("Advice to Poets" & "Wheelchair in the Far West") authored more than 20 books of poetry and made 23 films. He died May 17, 1999, in Port Townsend, Washington.

E. Barnsley Brown ("Twenty-Four Top Places to Fuck, By Dr. Seuss") is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University where she teaches African American and American literature and Women's Studies. She recently received two grants for a writer's residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and is currently completing her first book of poetry. Poems of hers have appeared in Chiron Review, Puerto del Sol, and Kansas Quarterly.

Steve Campbell ("Freshfields") is a graduate of a prestigious Montana Junior High school. He has held positions in several lucrative fields such as dishwasher, gas station attendant, and laborer. Currently he works for a Public Defender doing his part to defend the masses from the wrath of the MAN.

Thomas A. Clark ("Grey Over Green") lives with his wife, Laurie, in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, England, where they run Moschatel Press and Cairn Gallery. His books include A Still Life and Ways Through Bracken (both from North Carolina's The Jargon Society), Madder Lake, and Tormentil and Bleached Bones. The Clarks hand print limited editions of poetry.

George Elliot Clarke's ("Bio: Black Baptist/Bastard") books include Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues and Lush Dreams and Whylah Falls (Polestar Books). Originally from Nova Scotia, Clarke teaches at the University of Toronto.

Charles Fort ("What They had Learned of the World") speaks truthfully when he says, I attempt to write in the mother tongue tampering with the mother tongue and the nuances of the spiritual and the collective unconscious, a surreal and haunting rendering of what we call human. Much of my work also derives form working class poetics: my father, hometown, the brownfields of the burnt out factories he used to toil. Fort holds the Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His books include Darvil, The Town Clock Burning, and the recent We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems.

Kenny Fries ("Autumn Cadenza" & "Perspective") is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and Anesthesia: Poems (The Avocado Press, 1996), as well as the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (Plume, 1997). He received the Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS Writing for The Healing Notebooks (Open Books, 1990). He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Ricky Garni ("Love Poems to Amy") is a wine importer distributor living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is in the final stages of completing the art and writing of his new manuscript Wardrobe.

Harry Gilonis ("An Egg for E." & "Remembering Scott Lafaro") lives in London and is the publisher of Form Books. His books include Reliefs, Pibroch, Forty Fungi, and From Far Away.

After two dead-end years as adjunct faculty at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Damion Higbie ("When Lizzie Drowned") has recently taken a position as a technical writer for an IT consulting firm in Herndon, Virginia. He was a winner of the 1997-1998 AWP Intro Journals Project for poetry, and his work has appeared in Willow Springs, Black Bear Review, and OBR 8.

Will Inman ("What's So") was born 4 May 1923 in Wilmington, North Carolina. Now retired, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. Latest chapbooks: Surfing the Dark Sound and You Whose Eyes Open Naked Into Me (Mille Grazie Press).

Debra Kaufman ("Cages") is a poet and playwright. She grew up in the Midwest and now lives in Mebane, North Carolina. Her first chapbook, Family of Strangers, was published by Nightshade Press in 1990. Her second chapbook, Still Life Burning, won the 1996 Kinloch Rivers Memorial Chapbook Competition sponsored by the Poetry Society of South Carolina. She has recently compiled a new poetry manuscript, What Light Breaks.

Jamal Lally's ("The Seal") work is influenced by, the global consciousness of his Baha'I faith, Hip Hop music, and a pragmatic sense of Oneness which asserts the commonality of human identity in a manner parallel to the Law of Gravity, i.e. we all knowingly, or not, submit to it. He lives with his wife, Amoke Ocean, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while pursuing a degree in Psychology and Religious Studies at UNC.

Billy Little ("Sonnet/Ghasp Valentine (For U, Ugly As U Iz)") is the millionaire's poet, the baka roshi of the forbidden plateau fallen body dojo, and the author of The Cantos of Ezra Pound.

T. Marcellus ("Nobody") is a 28 year-old graduate of Lamar University with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He resides in Houston, Texas where he is currently working on his second screen play.

Aaron McCollough ("The Costume Wedding") is a Tennessee expatriate, rock and roll geek, looking down the barrel of a career teaching English composition. I used to copy edit and do features at everybody's mother's magazine Southern Living—an emotionally disastrous affair, which helped me cultivate a healthy disdain for gossipy, southern book club fiction. Credits: Sheila Na Gig, Ascent, Slipstream, and Lullwater Review.

Gary McCullough ("Taipei Quartours") is a systems administrator at Indiana University and webmaster of buddhadharma.org.

Ann McGarrell ("Mediterraneo") is a poet and translator who lives in Vermont. She has recently translated a collection of Oyster Boy's Poetry Editor Jeffery Beam's poems into Italian.

Kevin McGowin ("Tom Waits's Mule Variations") Kevin McGowin holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Florida and teaches Humanities at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.  His next book of poems, Millennium Torch Songs, is out March 1st from Funky Dog, and his book on the decaying Montgomery antebellum mansion Winter Place is forthcoming.

Thomas Meyer ("Regatta" & "Voiles") lives in the mountains of western North Carolina and the Yorkshire Dales. A gathering of his old and new poems, At Dusk Iridescent, will be published this year.

Florence Nash's ("Damascus" & "Margaret Rabb's Figments of the Firmament" & "Lisa Williams's The Hammered Dulcimer") poems have appeared in publications here and there and in her book Crossing Water (Gravity Press, 1997). She received a Blumenthal/ NC Writers Network Readers and Writers Award in 1998. She is Managing Editor of the NC Medical Journal and sings as much as she can.

David Preece ("Jonquil Airs") lives in Northampton, England, where he publishes Egg Press.

Mark Roberts ("Michael McNeilley's Punch Lines & Virgil Hervey's David Called Today") directs the Writing Center at Virginia Intermont College. Recently, his poem Letter from the Foothills received an Honorable Mention in the Now and Then Poetry Contest, judged by poet Fred Chappell. Whenever possible, he likes to dig for Truth in his wife's garden and in the words of Jesus.

Andrea Selch ("The Ballad of the Bee, or Queen Bee's Lament") defended her dissertation in April and graduated with a PhD in English from Duke in May. She has been chosen as a Bluementhal Series reader by the North Carolina Writers' Network. Fall 1999, she will teach the undergraduate poetry workshop at Duke while looking for a permanent teaching position. Her poems have appeared previously in OBR 9.

Tony Tost ("Stopping for Directions") is a 1998 graduate magna cum laude of College of the Ozarks in Pt. Lookout, Missouri, and a contributing editor of Smokestack Lightning, a web and print journal. He has recently been published in Black Bear Review and Cymbals, and was nominated by College of the Ozarks' English faculty for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship sponsored by Poetry. He is currently employed as a candlestick maker in Kimberling City, Missouri.

The Italian modernist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti ("Three Poems from "Il Dore" ("Sorrow")") was born in Alexandria in 1888 and died in Milano in 1970. His medium is the fierce and heightened intensity of private discourse. Tra un fiore colto e l'altro donato / l'inesprimibile nulla [Between a plucked flower and another one given / inexpressible nothingness]

Robert West ("Gnatsong" & "Starlight" & "Richard Tayson's The Apprentice of Fever & Paul Dilsaver's Medi-Phoria") is a doctoral student in English at UNC-Chapel Hill. His poems have appeared in Pembroke Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, and other magazines. He served for two years as poetry editor and one year as editor of The Carolina Quarterly.

Jonathan Williams ("15 Metafours")—poet, publisher of The Jargon Society, essayist, photographer—has been sitting in front of typewriters for over 50 years. He plans to continue until either his back or his libido gives out. He hopes to publish volume one of his quote book in 1999. It is titled If You Can Kill A Snake With It, It Ain't Art.