Featured in Writing Los Angeles (Library of America, 2002), in Poet’s Market (2003), and Quercus Review VI (2006), self-styled word-warrior Coleman has been a Guggenheim fellow, Emmy-winning scriptwriter, former columnist for Los Angeles Times magazine; a nominee for poet laureate, California 2005, and for the USA artists fellowship 2007. Her books from Black Sparrow are Bathwater Wine, winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize—the first African-American woman to receive the award, and Mercurochrome (poems), bronze-medal finalist, National Book Awards 2001. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent books include Ostinato Vamps (Pitt Poetry Series) and from Godine/Black Sparrow Books: The Riot Inside Me: Trials & Tremors and Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales. Photo by Rod Bradley.

Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of two collections of poetry, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunites (Tin House/Bloomsbury Press, 2003), a Spring 2004 Book Sense Poetry Top Ten Pick, and And Her Soul Out Of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), which was selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including four Best American Poetry volumes, and have won a Pushcart Prize. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rasumon Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation writers grant and several grants from the Alaska and Juneau Arts Councils, she lives, practices law, and raises her two children in Anchorage, Alaska. She has basically done nothing, poetically speaking, since February 2006.

Forrest Gander is the author of books of poems, translations, and prose, most recently Eye Against Eye (poems) and the novel As a Friend, both from New Directions. He has edited anthologies of poems in translation and individual books by Mexican and Latin American writers, most recently Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho. His website can be found at www.brown.edu/Departments/Literary_Arts/people/Forrest/.

Lavinia Greenlaw has published three books of poems, most recently Minsk. Her two novels are Mary George of Allnorthover and An Irresponsible Age and she has also published a memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls. Her work for BBC radio includes programs about the Arctic, the Baltic, the solstices and equinoxes, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Dutch landscape painting. She has also written opera libretti and song texts. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and lives in London.

Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, and Salon. She lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Javier O. Huerta's debut collection Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico 2007) received the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine. A graduate of the Bilingual MFA Program at UT El Paso, Huerta is currently a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley, where he studies Bad Poetry of the 19th Century. He maintains a blog on immigrant rights and undocumented poetics at unitedstatesean.blogspot.com.

Travis Nichols lives in Seattle where he works as a freelance writer and edits the online magazine Weird Deer. His first book of poems, Iowa, is forthcoming from Letter Machine Editions in 2009, and Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder, his first novel, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2010.