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Shane Allison ("Give Me a Counselor" & "My Fuckbuddy is Getting Married" & "Breaking the Skin") is a graduate student at New School University in New York. He has had poems published in Chiron Review, Redneck Review, and Coal City Review. He is one of the editors of the online literary magazine Narcolepsy Arms at www.narcolepsyarms.com.

Antler's ("What Would Christ Say?" & "Napkin Folding Art vs. Ejaculation Folding Art") most recent work, Antler: The Selected Poems was published in December 2000 and reviewed in the last issue of OBR. He is most famous for his long poem "Factory" which appeared as a City Lights Pocket Poet book in 1980. This is first, but we hope not his last, appearance in OBR.

Steven Barza ("The Coronation" & "Jaded") received his MFA and PhD from the University of Iowa. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Richmond. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Black Warrior Review, New Letters, Utne Reader, Wisconsin Review, Passages North, and Yemassee.

Jeffery Beam ("New & Collected Poems, by George Oppen" & "The Book of Mystical Chapters, translated by John Anthony McGuckin" & "The Shrubberies, by Ronald Johnson" & "Desire for a Beginning, Dread of One Single End, by Edmond Jabès" & "Eyes to See Otherwise, by Homero Aridjis" & "Ideograms of China, by Henri Michaux" & "Surrealist Love Poems, by Mary Ann Caws" & "Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You, by Juliana Spahr" & "The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams" & "Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, by Jonathan Ned Katz" & "Old Sunflower, You Bowed to No One") is OBR's poetry editor.

Kevin Bezner's ("Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Helen of Troy" & "Mr. A. Fuente") collection of poetry The Tools of Ignorance was published in 1997 by Cincinnati Writers' Project. CWP also published Wherever in 1999 (reviewed in OBR 13) and Particularities in 2000 (reviewed in OBR 14). Bezner is also co-editor of The Wilderness of Vision: On The Poetry of John Haines, published by Story Line Press.

J. W. Bonner ("Animate Objects") reviews books regularly for Asheville Poetry Review and OBR. His fiction and poetry have appeared in the journals mentioned above as well as The Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Tyuonyi, and other literary magazines.

Ricks Carson ("In the City of God") teaches high school and coaches soccer at Pace Academy in Atlanta. His poems have appeared in about 20 different publications, and a number of essays in The Explicator.

Douglas Chambers ("Hadrian" & ""He wanted to be the man"") is a retired professor of English who gardens and writes on garden history on his farm "Stonyground" in Ontario, Canada.

C. A. Conrad's ("Poet's Last Word Review") work has appeared in American Writing, Exquisite Corpse, Chiron Review, and other magazines. A book, Frank, is forthcoming from the Jargon Society, and advancedELVIScourse is forthcoming from Buck Downs Books.

Cid Corman ("The Timing"), one of America's great modernist poets, continues to add to his massive quantity of small, quiet, but vast poems in Kyoto, Japan.

Jim Cory ("Remembering Joe Brainard") has three times seen otters in the wild and would've included that if he'd had the prescience to write I Remember.

Carlomar Arcangel Daoana ("fragment from a poem unwritten" & "Sagada") is a 23-year-old poet from Manila, Philippines. The University of the Philippines Press published his first collection of poems, Marginal Bliss, last year. This is his first U.S. publication.

Cy Dillon ("'Some of these tunes hold up remarkably well.' The Seventies as We Lived Them." & "Throwing Fire at the World" & "Not Far From Music") is a college librarian, living on a small farm at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. A former editor of Virginia Libraries and currently associate editor of Nantahala Review, he is fascinated by Web publishing. Active in library issues concerning literacy and freedom of information, he serves as a board member of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and is past president of the Virginia Library Association. Dillon's poems can be seen in the e-zines Maverick Magazine and Savoy.

Harry Gilonis ("i.m. Robert Lax") is a poet, editor, publisher, and intermittent art critic. His works have been translated into Catalan, (Scots) Gaelic, German, Polish, and Spanish. His books include Reliefs (hardPressed Poetry/Pig Press); Pibroch (Morning Star); Reading Hoelderlin on Orkney (Grille/Simple Vice); walk the line (Last Adana); and a collaborative renga, from far away (Oasis Books), co-written with Tony Baker; as well as collaborations with visual artists: Axioms (Ankle Press) with David Connearn and An Envelope Interior History of Art and Forty Fungi, both with Erica van Horn (both Coracle). He was recently published on the lawn of London's Serpentine Gallery. Harry lives in London.

Reginald Harris ("Poet in a Landscape" & "Harryette Mullen's Abecedarian Dreams") is the author of Ten Tongues: Poems (Three Conditions Press, 2002) and head of the Information Technology Support Department of the Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland.

Josh Hockensmith ("Recipes from Oblivia") is a writer, translator, and book artist who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has translated Noticias de Burgundia by Bolivian author Emilio Martinez Navarro (Editorial Nuevo Milenio, 1999).

Steve Lapinsky ("Mouse Lungs") earned his BA in English at Michigan State University. His work has appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, Red Cedar Review, The New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Ellipsis, and Riverrun. His two collections of poetry, Treeless Pears and The Iron Bed are currently available to an interested publisher. He resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he earns his living as a sushi chef.

Geoff Manaugh ("Tiempo Espiral") currently lives in the United States, where he works as a DJ and writes full-time. His work has appeared in a number of chapbooks and small magazines. In 1996, Manaugh traveled to Europe with poet Allen Ginsberg, performing his own work beside Ginsberg and meeting the president of France. He has lived in Europe on several occasions, most notably in London and Berlin.

Although not a native, Thomas Meyer ("From "Coromandel"") has lived his entire adult life on a hillside in the mountains of western North Carolina where he has written poems and assisted Jonathan Williams with the publications of the Jargon Society. His most recent book is At Dusk Iridescent (A Gathering of Poems 1972-1997).

Florence Nash's ("More Than I Really Wanted to Know") poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, The Palo Alto Quarterly, Potato Eyes, and other publications, and in her book Crossing Water (Gravity Press 1997). She received a Blumenthal/NC Writers Network Readers and Writers Award. She leads a poetry workshop for the Duke University Institute for Learning in Retirement.

David Preece ("Rucksack Poems" & "The Order of Things" & "Dear Lorine") lives in Northamptonshire, England, where he works with autistic children and writes poetry. He is researching for his PhD at the University of Birmingham. Preece is contributing poetry editor (Europe) for Oyster Boy Review.

Reginald Shepherd's ("Becoming Marianne Moore") fourth book of poems, Otherhood, was published in spring 2003 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. He lives and writes in Pensacola, Florida, where the live oaks and magnolias are evergreens.

Delacey Skinner ("Political Personal") is a writer and President of the Southern Literature Council of Charleston. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her poetry has appeared in Hummingbird Review, and her first work for the stage, Standard Deviations, was recently performed at the Horse Trade Theater Company's Red Room in New York City.

Mark Spitzer ("Introduction") is Professor of English in Creative Writing at Truman State University. He is a former editor of Exquisite Corpse. Read more about Mark at his Web site: www.spitzr.net.