Charles Bernstein’s most recent book is a libretto Shadowtime, from Green Integer. He is the author of With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). He lives in NY and is Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. More at epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein.

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Carlos Blackburn was born in 1969. He got his BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, and an MA in Sociology from the University of Glasgow. He is currently studying Physical Therapy at Glasgow Caledonian University. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and the chapbook Portraits (Edinburgh: Artlink, 2005).

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Sean Bonney was born in Brighton, grew up in the north of England and now lives in London. He has had work published in many magazines, including Quid, The Gig and The Paper. His full length productions include Notes on Heresy (Writers Forum, 2002) and Poisons, their antidotes (West House, 2003). Currently, he is attempting to formulate a poetics of total critique, which appears to be a synthesis of social detail, historic fact, Marxist theory, pornography and random insult. This has yet to be achieved.

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Mairéad Byrne is an Irish poet who immigrated to the United States in 1994. Her collection of poetry Nelson & The Huruburu Bird was published by Wild Honey Press in 2003. Recent publications include two chapbooks, An Educated Heart and Vivas , and an ebook, China Dogs. She is the author of two plays, The Golden Hair and Safe Home; a short book on James Joyce, Joyce — A Clew; two books of interviews with Irish artists, Eithne Jordan and Michael Mulcahy; and was a journalist for eight years in Ireland and the United States. She earned a PhD in English Literature from Purdue University in 2001 and lives with her two daughters in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches poetry at Rhode Island School of Design. Her poetry blog is at maireadbyrne.blogspot.com

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cris cheek
. . . see under TNWK

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Kelvin Corcoran was born in 1956. His first book, Robin Hood in the Dark Ages, was published in 1985. His New and Selected Poems, was published in 2004 by Shearsman and has been enthusiastically received. Corcoran's work has been anthologised in the UK and America. A recent sequence, Helen Mania, was made a Poetry Book Society choice in 2005.

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Alison Croggon was born in 1962. She writes in many genres. Her poetry has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas, and volumes have been published in Australia, the U.K. and Ireland. A new and selected poems, The Common Flesh, was published by Arc in 2003, and Salt Publishing released a new collection of poems and other writing, Attempts at Being, in 2002. Two parts of an epic series of fantasy novels for young adults have been published so far by Penguin. Several of her plays and opera libretti have been successfully staged. She served as Australia Council writer in residence at Cambridge University, UK. She was poetry editor for Overland Extra, Modern Writing, and Voices, and is founding editor of the literary arts journal Masthead.

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Ian Davidson lives in Wales and teaches at the University of Wales, Bangor. Recent publications include Human Remains and Sudden Movements, Harsh and At A Stretch (Shearsman). A critical book, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, is due out in 2006. His current project, examining the impact of the internet and digital technology on the production and distirbution of poetry, is supported by a Welsh Academy/AHRB creative and research fellowship.

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Angharad Davies is a freelance musician, violinist and teacher now based in London. She studied at Sheffield University and the Royal Northern College of Music, and has played with many leading orchestras and ensembles. Before moving to London she lived and worked in Germany for six years, appearing in TV shows with Raemonn, Christian Wunderlich and 3te Generation, and recording a live concert with The Backstreet Boys and has recently appeared on The Magic Numbers' new album. She is a regular performer of improvised and experimental music, working with Broken Consort, Chris Burn, Steve Beresford, Tim Parkinson, The London Improvisers' Orchestra and others, and she is a member of the Buruk Ensemble, participating in John Cage's 'Musicircus' at the Barbican Centre in London in January 2004. She also composes works using amplified and pre-recorded sound with live performance.

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Richard Deming is a poet and critic whose poems have appeared in Field, Sulfur, Mirage Period(ical) #4, Quarter After Eight, Indiana Review, Mandorla, Kisok, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, edited by David Lehman. He is the author of Somewhere Hereabouts, published in the A.bacus series by Potes and Poets Press. Currently he is a lecturer for the English Department at Yale University. With Nancy Kuhl he edits Phylum Press.

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Allen Fisher was born in 1944, and has been involved in performance writing since 1962. A painter, publisher, editor and art historian, he has produced one hundred and twenty-eight chapbooks and books of poetry, graphics and art documentation. He currently edits Spanner, lives in Hereford and London and is Head of Art at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He has exhibited paintings in many shows including a one-man show at York in 1993 and two-man retrospective in Hereford 1994 and examples of his work are in the Tate Gallery collection, The King's College archive and the Living Museum, Iceland. He continues to perform, write and paint. Gravity as a consequence of shape, a long work published in many smaller books and booklets, started in 1982, is scheduled for completion in 2005.

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Fergal Gaynor was educated in Cork, Sheffield, Swansea and Cork (again) where he received the third degree. He has taught literature, written poetry, literary criticism, philosophy and art-criticism, performed with the art-group art / not-art, sung with a country band and operated a till for Waterstones. For the last year he has been co-curator of the Cork Caucus, an inquiry into political philosophy undertaken on the grounds of art.

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Matthew Geden was born and brought up in the English Midlands, moving to Kinsale in 1990. His publications include Autumn: Twenty Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and, most recently, catch and mist both published by hardPressed Poetry. He co-founded SoundEye in 1997, and has been a director of the Festival since then.

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Bill Griffiths was born in Middlesex in 1948. By 1972, his first poems were published in Poetry Review under the editorship of Eric Mottram. By the end of the 1970s, innovative little presses and many of the most productive poets of the period had been dislodged and cut off from patronage. Bill made a new start studying Old English at King’s College, London, obtaining a PhD in 1988. This led to a fruitful co-operation with Anglo-Saxon Books in Norfolk, and many new titles, including an edition of The Battle of Maldon and a book on the perplexities of Anglo-Saxon Magic. In 1990, he moved north and settled at Seaham on the Durham coast, where he has produced titles on local history, dialect and place-names. Throughout these years he was also writing poetry, and the four latest titles have come not from his own Amra Imprint but as paperback volumes from other little presses: A Book of Spilt Cities (Etruscan Books, 1999), Ushabtis (Talus Editions, 2001), Durham & Other Sequences (West House, 2002) and Mud Fort (Salt, 2004).

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David Grubbs is a Brooklyn-based recording artist and writer. His most recent albums are “The Harmless Dust” (a duo with Nikos Veliotis; Headz), “A Guess at the Riddle” (FatCat), and the self-titled debut album by The Wingdale Community Singers (Agenda). He has recently completed "Thiefth," a full-length recording with Susan Howe. Grubbs has played in Gastr del Sol, The Red Krayola, and Squirrel Bait; directs the Blue Chopsticks record label; and contributes music criticism to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

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Lee Harwood was born in 1939 and grew up in Chertsey, Surrey. In 1958 he moved to east London and studied English at Queen Mary College, Unversity of London. Later, in 1967, he moved to Brighton where he has lived ever since, except for a few years spent in the USA and Greece. It's always good to be by the sea. Over the years he has worked as a monumental mason, a librarian, a bookshop assistant, a Post Office counter clerk, and a railwayman. In the 1960s and '70s he edited a number of 'little magazines' and since Bob Cobbing published his first book, title illegible (writers Forum, 1965), he has published over twenty volumes of poetry and prose, as well as translations of Tristan Tzara. His Collected Poems were issued by Shearsman in 2004.

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Randolph Healy was born in Irvine, Scotland and moved to Dublin as a child. After leaving school at 14, he worked as a salesman, Hoffmann presser, telex-typist, and security man before returning to Ballymun Community School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied mathematical sciences. He is the editor of Wild Honey Press. Working as a maths and science teacher, he lives on the borders of Dublin and Wicklow with his wife Louise and their five children. A volume of selected poems, Green 532, has been published by Salt.

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Fanny Howe grew up in Boston. She attended Stanford University and lived in California, writing pulp fiction (West Coast Nurse, Vietnam Nurse) after she dropped out of college. She then lived in New York, working as a reader for Avon Books and as a hat check girl at Joe Allen's in Times Square. She wrote more pulp fiction there and then returned to Boston where she began to publish short stories and poetry. After a volume of short stories, her first collection of poems and two short novels, her work went into small press editions. She wrote five Young Adult books for and with her children. Her poetry was published by a variety of presses. She has won NEA awards, a Lenore Marshall Award in 2000 for her Selected Poems, and a San Francisco Poetry Centre Book Award for Gone in 2003. She is Professor Emerita at UCSD, but now teaches part time. She lives in New England some of the time, or elsewhere near her children and grandchildren.

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Susan Howe is a poet currently living in Guilford Connecticut even if she is also a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her most recent books are The Midnight published by New Directions, and Kidnapped and Bedhangings II from Coracle. She has recently been working on Thiefth, a recording with David Grubbs.

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International Necronautical Society INS Website

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Trevor Joyce was born in Dublin in 1947, and co-founded New Writers' Press with Michael Smith in 1967. He moved to Cork in 1984, where, under the short-lived imprint Melmoth Press he published Brian Coffey's last volume of poetry. He still lives in Cork, where for many years he worked as a systems analyst for Apple Computer. Eight earlier books of poetry, along with much new material, were collected in the 2001 volume with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (NWP/Shearsman). More recent work appeared in the 2003 chapbook set Take Over, Undone Say from The Gig, Toronto. Many later pieces involve computer-mediated composition and collaborative possibilities. He co-founded SoundEye in 1997, and has been a director of the festival since then. He is a Fulbright Scholar and a member of Aosdána.

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Nancy Kulh’s chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry, and is the Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

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Tom Leonard, poet, born Glasgow 1944. Son of a railway engine driver from Dublin, Leonard writes poetry in English and in Glasgow dialect and has done soundpoetry work with tapes and placards. His Intimate Voices (poems 1965-83) has been in print through three publishers for twenty years, its sequel access to the silence (poems 1984-2004) came out last year. He has written a deal of political satire, compiled Radical Renfrew (Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War) and written a critical biography Places of the Mind on the nineteenth century Scottish poet James Thomson. He currently teaches Creative Writing part-time at Glasgow University.

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David Lloyd was born in Dublin, and completed postgraduate studies, on the poetry of James Clarence Mangan, in Cambridge, England. His critical works include Nationalism and Minor Literature, on Mangan and the emergence of Irish cultural nationalism, and Anomalous States. He has published three volumes of poetry, Taropatch, Coupures and Change of State. The last of these was set as a song cycle for piano and counter-tenor by Hao Huang. David Lloyd is Professor of English in the University of Southern California.

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Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, grew up, from age four, in California. Author of five chapbooks of poetry, Four for Trane, Septet for the End of Time, Outlantish, Song of the Andoumboulou: 18-20 and Four for Glenn, and three books of poetry, Eroding Witness, School of Udhra, and Whatsaid Serif. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995. Author of an ongoing prose composition, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which three volumes have been published: Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run and Atet A.D. Editor of the literary magazine Hambone and coeditor (with Art Lange) of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. Author of two books of criticism, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Awards and honors include the selection of Eroding Witness for publication in the National Poetry Series, a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1993 and election to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Peter Manson was born in Glasgow in 1969. His publications include Adjunct: an Undigest, Before and After Mallarmé, Birth Windows and me generation. With Robin Purves, he co-edits the small press Object Permanence. He will be the 2005/2006 Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge from Oct 2005. For Freebase Accordion, see petermanson.com

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Hugh Maxton, was born in 1947 outside Aughrim, County Wicklow. First collection, Stones (1970); most recent, Poems 2000-2005 (Carysfort Press, 2005) Has also published a memoir, Waking (1997). Has published translations into English of several 20th-century Hungarian poets, notably Agnes Nemes Nagy. Now lives in County Monaghan. He is a member of Aosdána.

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Billy Mills was born in Dublin in 1954. His publications include Genesis and Home; On First Looking into Lorine Niedecker; A Small Love Song; Triple Helix; Letters from Barcelona; Properties Of Stone; 5 Easy Pieces; Horace: 5 Traductions; Tiny Pieces; and A Small Book of Songs. He is founder and co-editor (with Catherine Walsh) of hardPressed Poetry, and lives in County Limerick.

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Kuba Mokrosinski was born in 1980 in Lodz, Poland, and is a graduate of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. He has published short stories and poetry as well as translating extensively from English. His first book collection of poems, karate kon, was published in 2004. He is at present working on a first novel. He is interested in combining poetry with music in an endeavour to reach out to a wide audience.

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Wendy Mulford grew up in Wales before moving to Cambridge where she founded the small press Street Editions in 1972. This merged with Ken Edwards’ Reality Studios in the 1990s to become Reality Street Editions. She worked in higher education for most of her earlier life, in London and Cambridge, and combined this with working as a free-lance writer since the mid- eighties. She now lives in Benhall, Suffolk and works as a counsellor with asylum-seekers as well as having her own practice. Her Selected Poems, and suddenly supposing, were published in 2002 by Etruscan Books.

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Amir Or, poet, translator, and editor, was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1956. Or has published seven books of poetry, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. His awards include fellowships of The University of Iowa, Hawthornden, and the Jewish and Hebrew Centre at the University of Oxford. His collections of poetry include: I Look Through The Monkeys’ Eyes 1987, Faces 1991, Ransoming The Dead 1994, So! 1995, Poem (1996) and Day 1998. His last book “The Song of Tahira” 2001 is a novel written in metered prose. He has also published books in translation from several languages. Since its foundation, Or has been chief editor and of the Helicon Society for the Advancement of Poetry in Israel. He has initiated and developed Helicon projects and currently is editor of its journal and series of poetry books, and director of its Hebrew-Arabic Poetry School. He serves as art director of the “Sha’ar Festival” for Hebrew and Arabic new poetry and as the Israeli coordinator for “Poets for Peace” (the UN sponsored UPC venture).

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Maggie O'Sullivan was born in England of Irish parents. Her father was a traditional sean-nós singer from Skibbereen, County Cork. She is an artist, poet, anthologist and publisher, and has been published extensively in Britain, Europe and the U.S.A. and is notable for having a large following on both sides of the Atlantic. She edited Out of Everywhere, an anthology of linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the U.K., and her own recent volumes of poetry include In the House of the Shaman and Palace of Reptiles. The online journal How2 has an extensive feature on her work at http://tinyurl.com/9n3hx

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Michael Parsons has been a composer and performer of experimental music since the mid-1960s. With Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton he was co-founder of The Scratch Orchestra in 1969, and during the 1970s he was closely associated with visual artists of the Systems group. In 1996-97 he was composer-in-residence at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, where he helped to organise the conference 'Patterns of Connection', bringing together artists, scientists and musicians to discuss areas of common interest. His works include Expedition to the North Pole, a multi-media theatre piece devised with the sound sculptor Max Eastley, performed at the London Musicians' Collective in 1984; Tenebrio, an electronic nocturne commissioned for BBC Radio 3 in 1995; Krapp Music (1999) for piano and recordings, written for John Tilbury, based on transcriptions from Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape; and a solo harp piece, Constellations (2004), commissioned by Rhodri Davies. 

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Peter Riley was born 1940 near Manchester and now lives in Cambridge where has run a specialist book service for many years. As well as poetry he writes prose about music, travel in Eastern Europe, and things in general. His Passing Measures, a selection of poems 1966-1996, appeared from Carcanet in 2000, followed by a long poem, Alstonefield. A book of Transylvanian prose sketches was issued by Shearsman. The Gig (Toronto) issue 4/5 1999-2000, was devoted to discussion of his poetry, with a detailed bibliography.

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Fiona Sampson is a poet and editor. Her most recent books are: The Distance Between Us, a verse-novel; Travel Diary; Evening Brings Everything Back (translations of Jaan Kaplinski); A Fine Line: New Poetry from East and Central Europe; Folding the Real and a chapbook, Hotel Casino. Her pioneering residencies in health care – a field in which she still consults internationally – led to her doctorate on the social roles of poetry and to The Healing Word; The Self on the Page (with Celia Hunt); Creative Writing in Health and Social Care and Creative Writing and the Writer (with Celia Hunt). She has also written for radio and public art commission. She has been published and broadcast in fifteen languages. Awards include the 2003 Zlaten Prsten for international writing, a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Newdigate Prize; and awards from the Arts Councils of England and Wales and the Society of Authors. She is the Editor of Poetry Review; and of Orient Express, a journal of contemporary writing from Enlargement Europe.

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Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952. He was co-editor and a contributor to The Beau magazine Issue 3 (1983-84), and edited The Beans (The Bean Press 1981-83) and Coelacanth, 1985-87. He has also co-edited a special issue of the London magazine Angel Exhaust on Irish experimental poetry. His books include Zulu Dynamite, Steps, The Basic Colours, Over and Through and Prelude / Interlude / Postlude. The long poetic project which occupied him for many years was finally issued as Livelihood by Wild Honey Press in 2004. He lives in Dublin.

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Michael Smith was born in the heart of Dublin in 1942, and he has lived within the canals ever since, apart from numerous sojourns in Spain. He co-founded New Writers' Press in 1967 with Trevor Joyce, and continued it single-handed from the mid-70s. With Seán Ó Mórdha, he made a 30 minute television programme for RTE on the life and poetry of Brian Coffey with whom he had a deep friendship for more than thirty years. In 2001 the European Academy of Poetry awarded him their Medal for Translation. He edited three recent issues of Poetry Ireland Review. His Maldon and Other Translations appeared from Shearsman in 2004, along with a volume of selected poems, The Purpose of the Gift. Several books translated from Spanish, including two volumes of Vallejo, are due out this year from Shearsman. He is a member of Aosdána.

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Geoffrey Squires (b. 1942) grew up in Co. Donegal. After reading English at Cambridge he lived and worked in various countries and is now retired and living in Hull. His selected Untitled and Other Poems 1975-2002 was published in 2004, and his previous publications include Drowned Stones, Figures, XXI Poems and Landscapes and Silences. Some of his Persian translations appeared in K. Washburn and J. Major (eds) World Poetry (Norton, New York, 1998).

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Edel Sullivan, a native of Cork, began her musical training at the age of six. Consolidating her classical style at the Cork School of Music and Trinity College Dublin, she began to explore the use of the violin in other contexts. She is now in demand as a session fiddler with traditional Irish bands, singer-songwriters, rock and folk bands and more. She has toured throughout North America, Canada and Europe with a variety of artists. Edel has studied Orchestration/Arrangement and Ethnomusicology in Cambridge, England. This was followed by the study of Music Therapy and Community Music.

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TNWK* is a collaborative authorship of interdisciplinary poetic textual and visual practices. Their work is about issues raised by co-authorship, site-responsiveness, conversation and par-ticipation, using a diversity rather than a singularity of modes and medias to explore questions of value. TNWK stands for THINGS NOT WORTH KEEPING – a phrase that is central to their work ranging across a variety of media and approaches, including; mixed-media installations, works in video, digital photography, sound works, procedural performances, bookart and hypertext.

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Keith Tuma is the author of Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Northwestern, 1998). He is the editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and several other books. His chapbook of poetic squibs and epigrams Topical Ointment appeared from Slack Buddha Press in 2004. Critical Path: Into the Bush , the first volume of a collaboration with cris cheek and Wiiliam R. Howe, appeared in 2003. He has appeared in previous years at the Soundeye Festival wearing his critic, editor, poet, and collaborator hats, and is currently working on poems, film and poetry productions in collaboration with jUStin katKO, and a book of (and on) anecdotes. He is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

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Catherine Wagner was born in Burma and raised in Baltimore. She is the author of Macular Hole (Fence 2004), Miss America (Fence 2001) and many chapbooks, including Hotel Faust (West House Books, 2001) and Exercises (811 Books, 2004). Her poems, reviews and essays appear regularly in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; recent publications include poems in Shearsman, American Letters and Commentary, Black Clock, and The Hat. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Utah and an MFA from the University of Iowa, and teaches at Boise State University in Idaho.

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Catherine Walsh was born in Dublin in 1964. Her poetry includes Macula; The Ca Pater Pillar Thing and More Besides; Making Tents; Short Stories; Pitch; Idir Eatortha; Etruscan Books Reader No 1. She is noted for her long poems in experimental forms, and City West, completed in 2000, her most recent such work, will be issued by Shearsman in 2005, with a subsequent text, Optic Verve, in 2006. She has co-edited hardPressed Poetry with Billy Mills.

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Mark Weiss – art dealer, quondam filmmaker, psychotherapist and social worker, occasional teacher of writing, literature, history and psychology – has published five books of poetry, most recently Fieldnotes, from his own imprint, Junction Press, and Figures: 32 Poems. Different Birds appeared as an ebook in 2004. He edited, with Harry Polkinhorn, the bilingual anthology Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California. Forthcoming are Stories as Equipment for Living: Late Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff, edited with Marc Kaminsky; Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer, translated and edited; and The Whole Island / La isla en peso: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, editor.

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John Wilkinson was born in London in 1953 and grew up in Cornwall and Devon. He has spent his working life in mental health, latterly as a strategic planner in the east end of London. His recent books of poetry include Contrivances and Effigies Against the Light, both from Salt. He is married to the literary critic Maud Ellmann and lives in Cambridge.

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Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He was one of the first group of young ‘underground’ poets, who published the literary magazine Jintian. He was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tian’anmen massacre. He has published seven selections of poems, two selections of prose and many essays in Chinese. His work has been widely translated. His three volumes of collected works, Yang Lian Zuo Pin 1982-1997 (2 vols) and Yang Lian Xin Zuo 1998-2002 have eventually been published in China. His most recent translations into English have been Yi, a book-length poem, and Notes of a Blissful Ghost, a selection of poems. His new book Concentric Circles has just been published by Bloodaxe.