Rae Armantrout is a native Californian whose poems are masterful contradictions; according to Robert Creeley, her poems have “a quiet and enabling signature.” He adds, “I don’t think there’s another poet writing who is so consummate in authority and yet so generous to her readers and company alike.” She has taught writing at UCSD for almost two decades. Her poems are telegenically “regional,” filled with bungalows, newscasters and swimming pools yet they ring with an immaterial clarity that quietly subsumes her readers and listeners in a radical and eerily funny vision. Rae Armantrout came up as a poet in the Bay Area, educated at UC Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov, and San Francisco State. Subsequently, she was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the US most often credited with introducing poetry to postmodernity. Since then Rae has forged a growing international reputation, publishing eight remarkable books of poems, most recently Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004) and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2001), as well as countless poems anthologized (Best American Poetry 2002, and Postmodern American Poetry, a Norton Anthology, 1994) and gathered in diverse journals such as Conjunctions, Partisan Review, and the LA Times. In 2000, A Wild Salience, a collection of critical writings on her work, was published (Burning Deck). She has directed the New Writing Series at UCSD since 1989, and co-organized the Page Mother’s Conference in 1999. She recently published the poem "The Ether," in The New Yorker issue of May 22nd and had two poems - "Traveling Through the Dark," and "Articulation" in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2006). • David Berridge lives in London. Poems and sequences can be found in Shearsman, Liminal Pleasures, Poetry Salzburg Review and online in Fascicle, Great Works and Shadow Train. A chapbook Nationality Test, published as part of the 2007 dusi/e-chap kollectiv, can be downloaded at dusie.org. He has written three stage plays – Chime Child, Scrawl and After Blue - and is currently developing poems, essays and talks as part of a research project on the art and pedagogy of Josef Albers. • Mairead 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, two ebooks, China Dogs and SOS Poetry and her latest volume of poetry, Talk Poetry from Ubu Editions. 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 • Cai Tianxin was born in Huangyan, in the South East of the People's Republic of China, in 1963. He studied mathematics and received a doctorate with a dissertation on number theory from Shandong University in 1987. For several years Cai was a visiting lecturer and professor in France and North and South America. His publications include many research papers on mathematics in prestigious journals. Tianxin Cai is also considered to be among the most active young Chinese avant-garde authors. He has participated in international poetry festivals in Medellín, Colombia, and Rosario, Argentina, as well as in Zurich, Genoa, Vilenica, Slovenia, and Durban, South Africa. Since the publication of his first volume of poetry 'Bi An'(t: Shore), in 1992, another three volumes have appeared in China. A Spanish collection of his lyrical work, 'La desnudez antigua' was published in Colombia in 2002. • James Cummins was born in the middle-east but because of his pale colouring could never be mistaken for anything but Irish. After school he went to Dartington College of art in Devon and got a Degree in Performance writing for his trouble. Since then he has been around the world and back again. In 2005 he set up DEFAULT publishing in order to promote new and exciting poetry. And despite all his best efforts it has gone from strength to strength. His own poetry has been published in a number of magazines both in Ireland and the UK. His latest project DEFAULT productions is on a quest to explore all things generic and will be appearing in the Dublin fringe festival this September. • Kate Fagan is a Sydney writer and musician whose poems have appeared in various journals including Salt, Meanjin and The Prague Revue. A pamphlet entitled return to a new physics was published by Vagabond Press earlier this year. Kate is currently completing a PhD thesis on Lyn Hejinian's writings. She is well known in Australian folk-country circles as a member of the group The Fagans, and has also released an acclaimed solo LP. • 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. In 2005 he co-curated the Cork Caucus, an inquiry into political philosophy undertaken on the grounds of art. • Anna Glazova left Russia in 1994 and has been leaving in Germany and USA since then. She is a researcher in the field of Comparative Literature and works mainly on Russian and German poetry. She is due to defend her doctoral thesis on Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam in the Fall of 2007 at Northwestern University (Evanston). She writes her poetry in Russian and translates from German and English. Her works as translator include Robert Walser's novel, "The Robber," Unica Zürn's biographic prose and a contribution to an anthology of modernist poetry of New Zealand. She has published a book of poetry, "Pust' i voda" (2003), in Moscow and is currently preparing a new book for publication. Selections of her poetry have been translated into English and Chinese. • Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at the universities of Wales and California and took a D. Phil at Oxford. He has published a handful of books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) and Capital (Salt, 2007). He now lives in London and works as a lexicographer. • Robert Heffernan lives in Cork with his wife Marie and is currently studying toward a PhD in mathematics. He has a keen interest in poetry -- especially those poetries that attempt to venture into the unfamiliar. • 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. • Trevor Joyce co-founded New Writers' Press with Michael Smith in Dublin. 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). Many later pieces involve computer-mediated composition and collaborative possibilities. Two books are shortly due out: Courts of Air and Earth (Shearsman), and What's in Store: Collected Poems 2001-2007 (The Gig). He text edited the volume Art, Possibility and Democracy (Revolver, Frankfurt, 2006), an outcome of the 2005 Cork Caucus. 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. • Jow Lindsay grew up in South Africa and now lives in London. He is one of the editors of Bad Press. He also writes as Francis Crot and Helen Bridwell and a dozen other pseudonymns, though one hears his real name pronounced as Joe. Neither he nor his avatars have a glue-for-binding book in the world yet, though the one called Crot has published forty-four pages of a cut-up novel-with-verse that, if it's ever finished, might be titled The Tragedy of Beyoncé Knowles. • Gerry Loose lives
in Glasgow and is a poet, editor and land-artist. His background is
in horticulture and agriculture, and has farmed in Kerry and market-gardened
both in Ireland and in Scotland, where he trained in conservation and
ecology. His writing began to coincide with his other interests in the
1990s, when he was made Poet-in-Residence at Glasgow's Botanic Gardens,
and created a Poetry Garden. In 2004, as part of Entente Cordiale 100,
he was sent to Montpellier, France, to fulfill a similar role in France's
oldest botanic garden. In 2006 he was Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow,
living at Stevenson's old house, where he will complete a manusctript
dealing with his travels in "nuclear" landscapes: the New
Mexican deserts, the Mojave, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Faslane in Scotland,
although entry into the latter landscape is impossible. This particular
project led from a project, and the poet's own inclinations, where he
brought a persimmon tree from japan to Glasgow Botanics. The tree was
grown from the seed of persimmon tree that survived the Nagasaki A-bomb. • Peter Manson was born in 1969 in Glasgow, where he works for the Land Register. His publications include iter atur e (computer visuals, Writers Forum, London 1995), me generation (unclassified verbal and visual work, Writers Forum 1997), and Birth Windows (poems, Barque press, Cambridge 1999). Two Renga, written collaboratively with Elizabeth James, appeared in the Reality Street Editions 4-pack Renga + in 2002, and a prose work, Adjunct: an Undigest is forthcoming (2004) from Edinburgh Review. Between 1994 and 1997, he co-edited (with Robin Purves) eight issues of the experimental/modernist poetry journal Object Permanence. In 2001, the imprint was revived as an occasional publisher of pamphlets of innovative poetry, and has so far published work by the poets J. H. Prynne and Keston Sutherland. His own website, Freebase Accordion, is at http://www.petermanson.com • 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. • Peter Minter is a poet, editor and writer living in Sydney, Australia, where he teaches Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. His first book Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin was shortlisted for the 1996 New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, he received the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry in 1999, and in 2000 he was awarded The Age Poetry Book of the Year for Empty Texas. He was founding editor of the Varuna New Poetry broadsheet, a founding editor of Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, co-editor of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, and poetry editor of Meanjin from 2000 to 2005. His work appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and a wide range of other Australian and international electronic and print publications. • Philip Nikolayev was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1966 and grew up fully bilingual in Russian and English thanks to his father, a linguist. He started out as a Russian poet, but came to the United States in 1990 to attend Harvard University, and has since been writing primarily in English. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Grand Street, Verse, Stand, Jacket, Salt, overland and many others across the English-speaking world. Nikolayev lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his poet wife Katia Kapovich and their four year old daughter Sophia Margarita. He is the author of three collections of poems, Artery Lumen (Barbara Matteau Editions: Cambridge, MA, 1996), Dusk Raga (The Writers' Workshop, Calcutta, 1998), and Monkey Time, winner of the 2001 Verse Prize (judge Lyn Hejinian) issued by Verse Press this fall. He is also the editor and publisher of Fuclrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. • Maggie O'Sullivan was born Lincolnshire, 20th July, 1951 to southern Irish parents. Her mother was from Clara, County Offaly and 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. BODY OF WORK, the most comprehensive selection yet of Maggie O'Sullivan's work, comprising the full text of many books now out of print, from Concerning Spheres (1982) to Unofficial Word (1988) - plus previously unpublished works, is out now from Reality Street • Nicole Panizza • Maurice Scully was born in Dublin in 1952. His books include Love Poems & Others (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1981); 5 Freedoms of Movement (Swansea, Galloping Dog Press,1987 [2nd edition, South Devonshire, Etruscan Books, 2001]); The Basic Colours (Durham, Pig Press, 1994); Priority (London, Writers’ Forum, 1995); Steps (London, Reality Street Editions, 1998); Livelihood (Bray, Wild Honey Press, 2004), Tig (Exeter, Shearsman Books, 2006); and Sonata (Reality Street Editions, 2006). He is also the author of a bilingual childrens’ book in collaboration with the German artist Bianca Grunwald-Game, What Is The Cat Looking At? (London, Faber & Faber, 1995). Mouthpuller, a CD, which includes a selection from Livelihood, is read by the author. Scully edited The Beau magazine and Beau Press from 1981 to 1984, and managed a series of readings, talks and shows by poets, painters, architects, composers etc, the Beau Events, through the early 1980s. He was the recipient of the Macaulay Fellowship in 1981, Bursaries in Literature (1986, 1998), and the Catherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2003. He lives in Dublin. • Anamaría Crowe Serrano is Irish and lives in Dublin with her family. She has published poetry (Shearsman, Masthead, Red Pagoda Press, Jacket) a collection of short stories (Dall'altra parte, Leconte) and a one-act play (The Interpreter, Delta3 Edizioni), as well as translations from Spanish, Italian and English of poems by Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Annamaria Ferramosca, Gerardo Beltrán, Eugenio Montale, among others. She has received two awards from the Arts Council of Ireland for her work, as well as third prize from the BCLA/BCLT Competition 2002 (University of East Anglia) for her translation of Valerio Magrelli's collection, Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper. With Riccardo Duranti she has written Behind the Tapestry, a historical novel on the life of Thomas Shelton, the first translator of Don Quijote. Her second novel, The Big E, is pending publication. • 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, 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 four volumes of Vallejo, have recently been issued from Shearsman. He is a member of Aosdána. • 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). • Jon Thomson teaches twentieth-century English and American literature, pre-twentieth-century American literature, cultural theory and poetry. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of the Floating World (2004), a collection of poems based on photographs of Japan during the American Occupation. His poetry has been published in The Iowa Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Hotel Amerika, Shearsman, Stride, CrossConnect, Faultline, Typo and elsewhere. His first critical book was Fiction, Crime and Empire (University of Illinois Press, 1993) and has other essays in Genre, Literature and History, The Massachusetts Review , Fascicle, Kiosk and Works and Days. His next critical book - on William Bradford, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Michael Her - is currently under review at a university press; it is entitled After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing. Thompson is the founding editor of the international journal, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, and is the editor of Parlor Press's new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. • 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 co-editor of Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (NPF, 1998) and Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site-Specifity (The Cherry-on-Top Press, 2002). His essays on British, Irish, American, and Anglophone poetry have appeared in journals including Chicago Review, Contemporary Literature, ELH, Sagetrieb, Criticism, Modernism/Modernity, The Journal, Quid, Jacket, The Gig, American Book Review, Paideuma, Sulfur, River City, Bullan, and in a number of books edited by others, including Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. His poems and performance texts have appeared in journals including Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, Open Letter, Poetry Salzburg, The Gig, nth position, Flights, Famous Reporter, and in the anthologies 100 Days and Onsets. 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 an ongoing multi-media project in collaboration with cris cheek and Wiiliam R. Howe, appeared in 2003. • 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 was issued by Shearsman in 2005, with a subsequent text, Optic Verve, in 2006. She has co-edited hardPressed Poetry with Billy Mills. |