Jenny Factor was born in 1969 in New Haven, Connecticut, and is the author of Unraveling at the Name (2002), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award. She graduated from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and received an MFA from Bennington College in 2000. She formerly worked as an editor at EarthLink and currently serves as Core Faculty in poetry for the Antioch College MFA program and lives in San Marino, California, with her son, Lev, and her partner, Marilyn Hoyt.

Beth Ann Fennelly was born in 1971 in Rahway, New Jersey. She is the author of Open House (2002), winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize for a First Book and the GLCA New Writers Award; Tender Hooks (2004); and the nonfiction book Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (2006). She is the recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and has been included in The Best American Poetry series three times. She received an MFA from the University of Arkansas and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Miranda Field was born in 1962 in London, England, and received an MFA from Vermont College. Her first collection of poems, Swallow, won a 2002 Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize. She has also received a Discovery/The Nation Award and a Pushcart Prize. She currently teaches at the New School in New York City, where she lives with the poet Tom Thompson and their two sons.

Katie Ford was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1975 and holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Deposition (2002) and Colosseum (2008). She has received an Academy of American Poets prize and is a contributor to the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006). She is poetry editor of the New Orleans Review and has taught at Loyola University, Reed College, and Franklin and Marshall College. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons.

Daphne Gottlieb was born in Philadelphia in 1968. She is the author of Pelt (1999); Why Things Burn (2001), which won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Spoken Word; Final Girl (2003); and the forthcoming Kissing Dead Girls (2007). She is also the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (2005) and author, with illustrator Diane DiMassa, of the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious (2006). She received an MFA from Mills College and is currently on faculty at the New College of California. She lives in San Francisco.

Matthea Harvey was born in Bad Homburg, Germany, in 1973. She is the author of Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, winner of the New York/New England Prize from Alice James Books in 2000; Sad Little Breathing Machine (2004); and Modern Life (2007). She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998. She is a contributing editor for jubilat and BOMB magazines and is an assistant professor at Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kirsten Kaschock was born in 1972 in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of Unfathoms (2004), a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. She received an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from the University of Georgia; she also holds an MFA in choreography from the University of Iowa and has received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council in the Arts for dance. She lives in Philadelphia.

Joy Katz was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1963. She is the author of Fabulae (2002) and The Garden Room (2006). She also is coeditor of the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (2007). She held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and serves as a senior editor at Pleiades magazine. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and works as a book designer and as a creative writing instructor at The New School. She served as writer-in-residence at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 2007. She lives in Brooklyn.

Katy Lederer was born in 1972 in Concord, New Hampshire. She is the author of Winter Sex (2002) and three chapbooks and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. She currently serves as a poetry editor of Fence magazine. From 1996 until 2005, she edited Explosive Magazine and continues to edit the chapbook imprint Spectacular Books. Lederer is also the author of Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers, an Esquire choice for best books of 2003, a Publishers Weekly choice for best nonfiction books of 2003, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Lederer holds a BA from the University of  California– Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She lives in Manhattan, where she works for a quantitative hedge fund.

Valerie Martínez was born in 1961 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of Absence, Luminescent (1998), winner of the Larry Levis Prize and a Greenwall Fund grant from the Academy of American Poets; World to World (2004); and A Flock of Scarlet Doves: Selected Translations of Delmira Agustini (2005). She also served as assistant editor of Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Writing by Native Women of North America (with Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird) (1997). She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently assistant professor of English and creative writing and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Santa Fe.

Erika Meitner was born in 1975 in Queens, New York. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She received a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is pursuing a PhD in religious studies at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (2003), won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In addition to teaching creative writing at the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of California–Santa Cruz, Meitner has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, and a middle-school teacher in the New York City public school system, where she is the Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech and lives in Virginia with her husband and son.

Jennifer Moxley was born in 1964 in San Diego, California. She is the author of The Line (2007), Often Capital (2005), The Sense Record (2002), and Imagination Verses (1996). She is poetry editor of The Baffler and contributing editor of The Poker. She received her MFA from Brown in 1994. She is an assistant professor at the University of Maine and lives in Orono.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in 1974 in Chicago to an Indian father and Filipina mother. She received her MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Ohio State University and was the Diane Middle-brook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is the author of Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize and the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for poetry, and At the Drive-In Volcano (2007). She lives in western New York with her husband, son, and their geriatric dachshund, Villanelle. She is an associate professor of English at SUNY Fredonia.

Mendi Lewis Obadike was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1973 and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Her works include Armor and Flesh, which won the 2004 Naomi Long Madgett poetry prize from Lotus Press, and The Sour Thunder (2004), an Internet opera composed with her husband and collaborator, Keith Obadike. They recently developed Four Electric Ghosts (songs and stories based on Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the video game Pac Man) and received the Rockefeller Media Arts fellowship; they have also received commissions from the Whitney Museum, Yale University, the New York African Film Festival, and Electronic Arts Intermix. She earned a BA in English from Spelman College (1995) and a PhD in literature from Duke University (2005). She lives in the New York area and from 2006–2009 she will be a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, where she is working on a book on sound and stereotype.

Danielle Pafunda was born in 1977 in Albany, New York. She is author of Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005) and coeditor of the online literary journal La Petite Zine. She studied creative writing and Russian literature at Bard College and then received her MFA in poetry from New School University, during which time she was publicist for the KGB Bar poetry reading series. She is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia, where she teaches creative writing and composition and curates the Vox Reading Series. She is spending 2007 in Valdivia, Chile, with her partner Adam and daughter Hazel.

Kristin Prevallet was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1966. She is the author of Shadow Evidence Intelligence (2006) and Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-text Projects (2003). She won a PEN translation fund grant in 2004 for her translations of the Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi. She is the editor of materialword.com (a journal of word/image studies) and coeditor of DoubleChange.com (a journal of French/English poetic exchange). She received a MA in poetics and media studies from the University of Buffalo. She is currently on the writing faculty of Naropa University’s online MFA program and a professor at St. John’s College. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, Sophie.

Cin Salach was born in 1962 in Chicago and is the author of Looking for a Soft Place to Land (1996). She performs and records with her band Ten Tongues and is the founder and ongoing director of words@play, an after-school poetry program in collaboration with the Chicago Park District and the Children’s Humanities Festival. She also works as a copywriter and teacher of performance poetry workshops and has studied glassblowing and seido karate. She is about to adopt her first child with her partner, Chris. They live in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago.

Robyn Schiff was born in New Jersey in 1973. She is the author of Worth (2002), which received the Academy of American Poet’s Green-wall Fund award; her second book, titled 51, is forthcoming in 2008. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in medieval studies from the University of Bristol. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and is editor at large for The Canary. She is married to the poet Nick Twemlow. They live in Chicago.

Kathy Lou Schultz was born in Burke, South Dakota, in 1966. Her most recent book of poetry and experimental fiction is Some Vague Wife (2002). She is also he author of two chapbooks: Genealogy (1999) and Re Dress (1994), winner of the Michael Rubin Award. In addition, she is coeditor of the journal Lipstick Eleven. Among her scholarly articles are essays in the collections Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry (2005) and Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004). Schultz received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She then went on to complete a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focused on Afro-Modernist poetry and she was a dissertation fellow at the Center for Africana Studies. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis.

Eleni Sikelianos was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1965 and spent much of her youth hitchhiking across other continents. Her books include The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (2003), winner of the National Poetry Series; Earliest Worlds (2001); The California Poem (2004); and the nonfiction book The Book of Jon (2004). Her awards include a Fulbright Senior Scholar writer’s fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and both a New York Foundation and New York Council for the Arts Award. She received her MFA from Naropa. She has lived in San Francisco, Paris, New York, and Greece. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Denver and lives in Boulder with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter, Eva Grace.

Tracy K. Smith was born in 1972 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and is the author of The Body’s Question (2003), winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Duende (2007), winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2004 and a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2005. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Elizabeth Treadwell is the author of seven books and seven chapbooks and her work appears in a number of anthologies including 100 Days (Barque Press, 2001), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), War & Peace 3: The Future (O Books, 2007), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008) and Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Drafts from her current projects sometimes appear at her semiretired blog, Secret Mint. From 1997-2002 she edited and published Outlet magazine and Double Lucy Books and from 2000-2007 she served as director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she was founding editor of the journal Traffic. She is currently a contributing editor at Delirious Hem and the editor/publisher of Thimble (both online). She lives with her husband and their two young daughters in Oakland, California, where she was born in 1967.

Crystal Williams was born in 1970 in Detroit. She is the author of Kin (2000) and Lunatic (2002). She holds an undergraduate degree from New York University and an MFA from Cornell University. She is currently on faculty at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and lives in Portland and Chicago.

Rebecca Wolff was born in New York City in 1967. Her two books of poems are Manderley, winner of the National Poetry Series (2001), and Figment, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize (2004). She is the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence as well as the press Fence Books and the online poetry review journal The Constant Critic. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Wolff is being paid to edit her press by the University of Albany, in a happy partnership with the New York State Writers Institute. She lives in Athens, New York, with her husband, novelist Ira Sher, and their children Asher Wolff and Margot Sher.