Benjamin Balthaser's poetry and critical work have appeared or will be forthcoming in journals such as Minnesota Review, American Quarterly, Left Curve, Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry International, and elsewhere. The poems appearing here are from a manuscript titled "Dedication," detailing the lives of Jewish, former Communist Party members during the Cold War. He is a former labor organizer for UAW 2322, and is currently a doctoral candidate at UC San Diego, in literature and cultural studies. He can be reached via email at bbalthaser1@yahoo.com

Jim Benz lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two cats. His poems
have appeared in various print and online publications, including Haggard and Halloo, Unlikely Stories, Pralaton, Letter X, unarmed, Sein und Werden, and DISPATCH.

Gary Bloom is a published writer with credits in American Visions, The Educated Traveler, Milwaukee Magazine,The Buffalo News, The Grand Rapids Press, Grit, Cappers, Oasis, Players, Clockwatch Review, Black Diaspora, Mankato Poetry Review, and other magazines and newspapers.

Christopher Butters is the author of two books, The Propaganda of a Seed (Cardinal Press, 1990) and Americas (Vietnam Generation, 1998).   His work has most recently appeared in Blue Collar Review, Pemmican and Cedar Hill Review.   A court reporter in New York City, his recent campaign for president of his AFSCME local won 32% of the vote.   He has also been the poetry editor of Political Affairs: A Journal of Marxist Thought. His most recent publication is The Algebra of Doing It, published by Partisan Press.

Jared Carter is a Midwesterner from Indiana. He has published three books of poems. A fourth, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, was recently issued by Wind Publications in Kentucky. The book consists of a series of narrative poems dealing with incidents in American history from the Revolution to the present. For more information please visit Jared Carter's web site at http://www.jaredcarter.com.

Leonard J. Cirino is the author of 16 chapbooks and 13 full-length collections of poems from numerous presses since 1987. He lives in Springfield, Oregon, where he does home care for his 94-year-old mother. His collection, Ululations: Poems 2006, was published in 2008. His 104 page collection, Omphalos: Poems 2007 has been selected by Cervena Barva Press for 2009. Recent publications and acceptances include America (NYC), Osiris, Blue Collar Review, Pemmican, thepedestalmagazine.com, The Iconoclast, Barnwood, Grasslimb, Poesia, and others.

Corey Cook's poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in Children, Churches and Daddies, Entelechy International, Lilliput Review, Nerve Cowboy, The November 3rd Club, "remark.", The Shit Creek Review, The Wilderness House Literary Review. He lives and works in New Hampshire. Corey edits The Orange Room Review with his wife, Rachael.

Tony Christini is the author of Political Fiction: Ganoga, Homefront, YouthTopia and Other Works. He is the creator of the websites Political Novel and Imaginative Literature and Social Change. With Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek, he is the cofounder of Mainstay Press.

Chris Crittenden is a hermit in the wilds of Maine and the internet is his podium to launch poetic jeremiads.

Philip Dacey's most recent full-length book, his eighth, is THE MYSTERY OF MAX SCHMITT: POEMS ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF THOMAS EAKINS (Turning Point, 2004). Two recent chapbooks are THE ADVENTURES OF ALIXA DOOM AND OTHER LOVE POEMS (Snark, 2003) and MR. FIVE-BY-FIVE (Pudding House, 2005). He recently moved from Minnesota, his base for 35 years, to Manhattan's Upper West Side. His website is: www.philipdacey.com.

Lyle Daggett's books of poems include If There Is A Song and What Is Buried Here, both published Red Dragonfly Press, and The Idea of Legacy, published by Musical Comedy Editions. A new collection, The First Light Touches Me, is forthcoming from Red Dragonfly Press, tentatively due out in fall 2008. His poems, translations, essays and book reviews have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Main Street Rag, Free Verse, previously in Pemmican, and in other publications. His blog is A Burning Patience, http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com. He lives in Minneapolis.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently pursuing a master's degree. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and nonfiction. Her criticism has appeared or will appear in New Letters, The Mid-American Review, CutBank, The Warwick Review, Redactions, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

Eric Evans is a writer and musician from Buffalo, New York with stops in Portland, Oregon and Rochester, New York where he currently resides with his wife, Diane, and son, Henry. His work has appeared in Artvoice, Blind Man's Rainbow, Posey, Lucid Moon, Poetry Motel, Hazmat, Remark and many other publications as well as a few anthologies. He has published six collections. He has also published a broadside through Lucid Moon Press.

Clint Frakes currently lives in Sedona, AZ. He has recently received the James Vaughan Award for Poetry and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Award for Poetry. He is a graduate of the Naropa and Northern Arizona University writing programs and received his doctorate with emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Hawaii in 2006. He is currently working on his second full book of poetry, entitled Citizen Poems. His recent work can be found in Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Pacific Review and Tinfish. He is the former Chief Editor of Hawaii Review and Big Rain.

John Grey's latest book is "What Else Is There" from Main Street Rag. He has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal.

Lisa Hickey is an author, poet and entrepreneur. She owns an advertising agency, where she has written countless ads, commercials, radio spots and brochures. She is also the author of two non-fiction books on advertising's creative process. Her poems have been published in Slipstream, Prose/Axe, Nerve Cowboy, Pemmican, Curbside Review and Branches Quarterly. The walls of her house are wallpapered with her favorite poems.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson has appeared in The Barefoot Muse, The Raintown Review, Contemporary Rhyme, The Quarterly Journal of Food and Car Poems, Shit Creek Review, Mezzo Cammin, The Hypertexts, Odin's Gift, Idunna, Shatter Colors Literary Review, Appalling Limericks, Arabesques Print Review, Workers Write, Flipside and HipMama Magazine.

Maggie Jaffe, when she's not obsessing about the striking similarities between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler's foreign policies, tries her best to adapt to the 21st century. She is currently working on Flic(k)s: Poetic Interrogations of American Cinema. Her two most recent books, 7th Circle and The Prisons, both won the San Diego Book Award for Poetry. She will never apologize for the 60's.

Persis M. Karim is a poet and teacher living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has been published in a number of online and print journals. She teaches literature and creative writing at San Jose State University. She finds solace (from a lot of the ugliness in the world) by gardening and playing with her son, Niko. She can be reached at http://www.persiskarim.com.

Hilton Mashonga lives in Cape Town with his wife and adopted dog, Lacey. He is an advertising copywriter, poet and novelist. Five of his poems were published in the Buchu Books Anthology in 1993. He has performed his works in Cape Town, Johannesburg and at Open Mic Night at American Book Center Treehouse in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Hossein Mostafavi Kashani is an Iranian poet and novelist. His sister is the poet and painter, Soufi Mostafavi Kashani.

Lissa Kiernan is Associate Editor of the poetry journal Arsenic
Lobster. She received her MA from the New School for Social Research and her BA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her poetry credits include The Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine and MIPOesias Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Robert S. King (Tallahassee, FL) has published in hundreds of journals over the years. Despite loving poetry more than paychecks, he makes his main living as a Software Engineer. He has learned that technology and literature, in the right hands, can enhance one another. Currently he is the Director of FutureCycle Press, http://www.futurecycle.org.

Cleo Fellers Kocol has been writing and publishing prose for years. Although she didn't start writing poetry until the age of 74, six years later she is proud to be among those keeping the writing soup stirred. She has been published in a variety of journals, including Mobius, Querqus Review, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Song of the San Joaquin, Blue Collar Review and California Quarterly. She was Grand Prize Winner of the Artists' Embassy International Contest in 2003 and first place winner in 2006. Her poetry was choreographed to music and danced at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2003.

Frank Krasnowsky was editor of the quarterly "Revolutionary Age" and a political commentator, producer and performer on KRAB-FM in Seattle for 20 years. He is active in the movement for the revival and maintenance of the Yiddish language and culture, and has supported the demand for Palestinian justice for over thirty years. As vocalist with the duo "Chutzpah", Krasnowsky has sung, translated and recorded over l50 Yiddish and Ladino songs. He is in the process of printing his translations which have been used by Yiddish choruses and formed the basis for two Jewish theatrical productions in the Seattle area. His essay "The Drafting of Karl Helper" was an award winner for the west coast literary journal, "The Peralta Press."

David LaBounty has had work appear in Pemmican as well as Word Riot, Unlikely 2.0, Thieves Jargon, Cause and Effect and others. He has two published novels under his belt and a third, Affluenza, is under consideration.

Martin Marriott is a singer, songwriter and poet living in Seattle.

Hilton Mashonga lives in Cape Town with his wife, Shelley and adopted dog, Lacey. He is an advertising copywriter, poet and novelist. Five of his poems were published in the Buchu Books Anthology in 1993. He has performed his works in Cape Town, Johannesburg and at Open Mic Night at American Book Center Treehouse in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Chris Middleman has been writing since his high school days in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Having recently relocated to Seattle from Boston, his work has appeared in issues of Perigee, Eclectica, The Orange Room Review, and The Commonline Project.

Shayla Mollohan's poetry has been published in numerous publications—on-line at Amaze: A Cinquain Journal, ken*again, and The Rose & Thorn; in print in Poem, Slipstream, Whiskey Island, and Sun Dog. Her work is included in a new international women's anthology, Letters to the World (Red Hen Press) and Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poetry (Negative Capability Press).

Shea Donovan Mullaney is currently living in Boston while pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His first full-length collection of poems, Follow the Wolf Moon, appeared in January 2005. His poems have appeared and/or will appear in The New York Review, Soundings East, and Hoi Polloi. He is a regular contributor to Pemmican. His poetry has been featured several times as part of the Unitarian Universalist Association's celebration of marriage equality in Massachusetts. Other work has been featured on WOMR 92.1 FM, Radio Provincetown and WERS 88.9 FM, Boston. His first spoken word album, Silent Trumpeter, is available from Brave Records at www.Braverecords.com. Mullaney lives on his family's horse farm near Cape Cod.

Kristine Ong Muslim has more than three hundred stories and poems published/forthcoming in mostly genre professional and small press magazines and anthologies. Her mainstream poems have been published or will appear in Adbusters, Bleeding Quill, FireWeed,
Free Verse, Jones Av, Megaera, The Pedestal Magazine, T-Zero: The Writer's Ezine, and elsewhere.

Mark Pawlak grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has lived in the Boston area for almost forty years. He has taught writing, science and mathematics at various levels and is presently Director of Academic Support Programs at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he teaches mathematics. Pawlak's original poems, and his translations from the German of Bertolt Brecht and others, have appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies. SPECIAL HANDLING: Newspaper Poems New and Selected is the latest of his four poetry collections. He has received awards from the Massachusetts Artist Fellowship Program and from the Fund for Poetry. He is co-editor of Hanging Loose Press based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 1966, Hanging Loose is arguably the oldest, continuously running, independent, literary magazine and press in the country. Hanging Loose counts among its stable of notable poets Sherman Alexie, Ha Jin, Jayne Cortez, and Hettie Jones. Last year Pawlak edited Shooting the Rat: Outstanding Poems and Stories by High School Writers, the third in a series of his anthologies drawn from the celebrated high school section of Hanging Loose magazine. Shooting the Rat is a collection of extraordinary poems and stories by 93 of the nation's most outstanding high school writers and it was recently name a 2003 top young adult non-fiction title by both VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates) and by the Association of Pennsylvania School Librarians. All the work first appeared in the special high school section of Hanging Loose magazine, the standard for cutting-edge work by teenage writers since 1968. Pawlak has given hundreds of readings and performances of his work locally, across the nation, and overseas.

Verandah Porche works as a poet in residence and writing partner in a variety of settings, schools, hospitals, nursing homes,factories, literacy and art centers around New England. Her two published books are The Body’s Symmetry (Harper and Row) and Glancing Off (See Through Books). Feminist Studies published “On N-V”. Two of her poems were included in Contemporary Poetry of New England, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. She worked for a year in a rural industrial town for Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium. The Vermont Arts Council has given her a grant and an award honoring her contribution to the state’s cultural life.

F. Daniel Rzicznek's first book of poems is Neck of the World, winner the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award, published by Utah State University Press. He is also the author of the chapbook Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, AGNI, and Mississippi Review, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He currently teaches English composition at Bowling Green State University.

Doren Robbins has published poetry in over seventy literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, International Poetry, Hawaii Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sulfur, New Letters, 5 AM, Exquisite Corpse, Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and Hayden's Ferry Review. Essays and book reviews have appeared in Sagetreib, Contact II, Onthebus, and The Daily Iowan. From 1975-82, he was co-editor for the Los Angeles-based journal Third Rail. In 1994 he served as a contributing editor to the Japanese-based literary journal Electric Rexroth. Robbins has received a state fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, as well as prizes, grants, and awards from The Indiana Review, River Styx, Literal Latte, Passaic Poetry Center, the Loft Foundation, The Centrum Residency Program, The Judah Magnes Museum (first prize for the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Jewish Poetry Award), The Chester H. Jones Foundation (commendation prizes in '93, '96 and '97), The Lane Literary Guild (first prize), The Seattle Arts Commission and, as an editor, from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and The California Arts Council. His four previous collections are Driving Face Down, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House Press, 2001; The Donkey's Tale (Red Wind Press, 1998); Sympathetic Manifesto (Perivale Press, 1987); and The Roots and the Towers (Third Rail Press, 1980). His chapbooks are Dignity in Naples and North Hollywood, introduction by Philip Levine (Pennywhistle Press, 1996), Under the Black Moth's Wings (Ameroot, 1987); Seduction of the Groom (Loom press, 1982). In 2006, Eastern Washington University Press will publish a new book of poems, My Piece of the Puzzle. A mixed media artist as well as a writer, two of his works are currently on exhibit at the Crossing Boundaries: Visual Art by Writers exhibit, held at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. Currently, he teaches creative writing and literature at Foothill College where he is director of the Foothill Writers' Conference.Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing/Literature at Foothill College, where he is coordinator for The Foothill Writers' Conference.

Edward Schelb's Dogbelly poems explore the psyche of a rhythm guitarist for a Texas swing band. He grew up in a working class family in Oklahoma, and his poems explore the sensibility and the language of Tulsa and the surrounding areas. He has published a number of critical essays on contemporary poetry, including recent essays on Robert Kelly and John Yau, as well as many poems. Currently he lives and works in Rochester, New York.

Anthony Seidman has published short fiction and poetry in The Bitter Oleander, Hunger, Pearl, Borderlands, and The Wandering Hermit Review. He translated and edited a volume of Miguel Angel Zapata's poetry entitled A Sparrow In The House of Seven Patios, published by The Latino Press, and a suite of his poems were published in the anthology Corresponding Voices, published by Point of Contact and Syracuse University Press. He has recently invested a lot of energy in translating contemporary American poets into Spanish, and has published versions of such diverse poets as Paul B Roth and John Olson in Mexican journals such as Solar.

Tom Sheehan's Epic Cures, (short stories), 2005 from Press 53 won an IPPY Award from Independent Publishers. A Collection of Friends, (memoirs), 2004 from Pocol Press, was nominated for PEN America Albrend Memoir Award). His fourth poetry book, This Rare Earth & Other Flights, issued by Lit Pot Press, 2003. Print mysteries are Vigilantes East and Death for the Phantom Receiver. An Accountable Death is serialized on 3amMagazine.com. Five novels seek publication. His short story collection, Brief Cases, Short Spans, is under consideration. He has eight Pushcart nominations.

Theresa Swanson works as a legal secretary in Omaha, Nebraska. Having raised her three children, she is pursuing a master's degree in writing and English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She lives, proudly, in the same working class neighborhood in South Omaha where she grew up.

Tobin F. Terry, 25, grew up around smokestacks and farmland near Warren, OH. He currently resides in Akron, OH, where he is in his final year of the NEOMFA program.

CarrieAnn (CAT) Thunell has been published in over 70 print magazines (in 7 countries) and in over 8 magazines online. She is editor of the print magazine Nisqually Delta Review, http://NisquallyDeltaReview.bravehost.com , has served as a guest editor for the Santa Fe Broadsides, and is a peace and ecology activist, backpacker, nature photographer, artist, and poet. CAT also volunteers for the Olympic Forest Coalition, whose mission of the Olympic Forest Coalition is to protect and restore forest and aquatic ecosystems on the public lands of the Olympic Peninsula.

Rob Whitbeck is a farmer and timber thinner living in eastern Oregon. A full-length collection, Oregon Sojourn, is available from Pygmy Forest Press. A second collection, The Taproot Confessions, also from Pygmy Forest Press, was released in the summer of 2003.

Marilyn Zuckerman has published four books of poetry: Personal Effects (Alice James Books, Cambridge, 1976), Monday Morning Movie (Street Editions, N.Y, 1981), Poems of the Sixth Decade (Garden Street Press, 1993), and from Cedar Hill Publications,
Amerika/America, 2002, as well as a chapbook from The Greatest Hits series, Pudding House Publications, 2001. Her many poem publications include magazines such as New York Quarterly, The Little Magazine, Nimrod, Pig Iron, Mystic River Review and Pemmican (last two online) She has also received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.

Fredrick Zydeck is the author of eight collections of poetry. T'Kopechuck: the Buckley Poems is forthcoming from Winthrop Press later this year. Formerly a professor of creative writing and theology at the University of Nebraska and later at the College of Saint Mary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isn't writing. He is the editor for Lone Willow Press.