Shane Allison
Shane Allison is a black, gay, southern boy from Florida who wishes he was from any place but the Sunshine State. He has managed to cross the great bible belt into the great Northeast where he attended New School University, recieving an MFA for his troubles and studied with the poet, David Lehman in the process. His poems have graced the pages of Mississippi Review, New Delta Review, Oyster Boy Review, Chiron Review, Coal City Review and online journals such as Suspect Thoughts, Velvet Mafia, Babel, Mississippi Review.com and Unlikely Stories. He has work forthcoming in The Glut, Frigg Magazine, Gargoyle, Open Wide and others.

Daniel Brenner
Daniel Brenner grew up near Harrisburg, PA, graduated from Bard College in 1998, and currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he has worked as an English teacher, an accountant, and a researcher. His poetry has appeared in several print and online journals, and he was a finalist for the 2002 Penumbra Poetry Prize.

John Bryan
John Bryan has been published in various journals such as: Unlikely Stories, Taint Magazine, The Quill & Ink, Retort Magazine, 3AM Magazine, River King Poetry Supplement, Locust Magazine, GetUnderground and Ink Magazine to name a few.

Janet Buck
Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in Octavo, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, CrossConnect, Poetry Magazine.com, The Montserrat Review, Offcourse, The Pedestal Magazine, MiPo, PoetryBay, Facets Magazine, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Tickets to a Closing Play, her second print collection of poetry, won the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award and is now available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.booksurge.com, and www.givalpress.com. Janet can be reached at her website, www.janetbuck.com.

James Buchanan
James Buchanan is a freelance writer living in Newmarket, New Hampshire. His nonfiction work has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and he is currently working on a book on the politics of the Internet to be published by The MIT Press. His fiction has been published online at The Square Table and Another Sun. He can be reached at orchard-65@comcast.net.

Frank Carvino
Frank M. Carvino lives near Boston, Massachusetts and is currently a Masters candidate in Critical And Creative Thinking and Historical Archaeology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. First published as a journalist in his high school paper, The Red & White, he has also had both artwork and poetry published in Prometheus, his high school's literary journal, and was the creator of the comic strip 'Political Anarchy' which appeared in Bloomsburg University's The Voice. Plum Ruby Review is his first short story publication.

Mikey Cofer
Mikey Cofer spent most of her formative years in Dallas, Texas and now lives in Seattle, WA. She attended the University of North Texas where she studied Biology and Environmental Science. Cofer moved to Seattle two years ago, where she began pursuing photography. Her love for photography naturally led her to painting. She is intrigued by the movement of light and how it is perceived by each individual. Cofer strives to illustrate the simplicity of life in an all too complicated world by finding beauty in everyday items. Cofer can be reached through her Web site, Then You Discover.
To purchase prints of Cofer's images, please visit her Gallery.


Christopher Daniels
Christopher Daniels lives with his wife in the north hills of Kyoto, Japan, where he teaches English and generally putters around. He has been previously published on the web in Carvezine and Hackwriters, and tries to keep his blog updated (http://blogs.salon.com/0002393/).

Mike Estabrook
Mike Estabrook is "a Marketing Communications Manager for a tiny division of a gigantic billions-of-dollars company, and man, going into an office every day can be excruciating. The stuffy air, the florescent lights are killing me. Thankfully I can retire in 10 or 15 years. But I still think that somehow I've got to get myself on some boat collecting phytoplankton, or into the rich brown hills of Montana searching for TRex bones. Then again maybe I simply should've stayed on Northfield Avenue where I belong and learned to fix cars like my Daddy did." Some of his publications include: The Devil's Millhopper, Dog River Review, Elements, Embers, Envoi, Experiment in Words, Hampden-Sydney Review, Hummingbird, Hodge Podge Poetry, Hung Ruse, The Iconoclast, Illya's Honey, Impetus, Quickenings, Radio Void, Rant, Reflect, Renegade, Renovated Lighthouse, Riverrun, River Styx, Roanoke Review, Ship of Fools, Sisyphus, Slipstream, Small Pond, The Space Between, Stovepipe, Suffusion, Sulphur and Sawdust, Sulphur River, The Sun, Synaesthetic, Taggerzine, Talus and Scree, TAPJoE, Thirteen, Thistle, Thorny Locust, Tucumcari Literary Review, 24-7 Quarterly, Veins, Verve, Voices, Vox, Wail!, Whisper and many more. Estabrook can be reached at mestabrook AT comcast.net.

Melanie Faith
Melanie Faith lives in Pennsylvania, where she works as an English, American History, and French tutor at the Mercersburg Academy. She has also taught American History courses for international students. She graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1999 from Wilson College, where she majored in English, with a concentration in professional writing. Her writing has appeared in print and online in more than twenty literary journals, including The Pedestal Magazine, 3rd Muse, Promise, Thought Magazine, Verse Libre, Coelacanth Magazine, Flashquake, Adagio Verse Quarterly, Blue Fifth Review,Whalelane and forthcoming from Carillon, Lit Pot (online)and Ink Pot (print). Her first poetry chapbook, Restless: Relative Poems, is available from Foothills Publishing. She may be contacted at writer@pa.net.

Howard Good
Howard Good is a professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz and the author of nine books, the latest being Educated Guess (ScarecrowEducation, 2003). Good's poetry has appeared in numerous journals and e-zines, including Stirring, Rose &Thorn, Conspire, Wilmington Blues, Midstream, and 2River View.

Rob Hardy
Rob Hardy has been a college professor, stay-at-home Dad, secondary school Latin teacher, middle school poet-in-residence, and writer for Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac." Hardy's writing has appeared recently in River City, English Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Lion and the Unicorn. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.

Lori Hahnel
Lori Hahnel's short fiction, nominated for the Journey Prize in 2002, has appeared in The Amethyst Review, lichen literary journal, Forum, C/Oasis and Tickled by Thunder’s 2002 Best Fiction Anthology. She is currently marketing her first novel. Hahnel's reviews and essays have appeared in numerous journals including Books in Canada, Canadian Author and West Word.

AnnLouise Jones
AnnLouise Jones is an artist, amateur photographer, and life-long Massachusetts resident. Her particular photographic interest is in capturing the natural beauty and diversity of New England.

Orval Lund
Orval Lund is a retired English professor who lives in Winona, Minnesota. He has read his poems widely--from Japan to Alaska to Vermont--but mostly in his native Minnesota. He has also published widely--including two chapbooks from Dacotah Territory Press; the Minnesota Voices Competition winner, Casting Lines (New Rivers Press, 1999); and just recently (summer 2003) in From Blue Herons to White Cranes, a Japanese-English bilingual chapbook. The poems in this issue are from his current project, a manuscript of Swede poems featuring an alter-ego based on Lund's small town and Swedish heritage.

David Menzies
David Menzies has poetry published in Spire Press, Astropoetica, Subjective Substance, and poems in Listening To The Birth Of Crystals, a U.K. poetry anthology which can be purchased at Amazon UK or at this link.

Erin Noteboom
Erin Noteboom has appeared in many of Canada's literary magazines, including Malahat, Grain, Event, Fiddlehead, PRISM, and The New Quarterly. She reads in schools, give workshops, edit, and scrounge for grants. It's not a living, so she also does clerical work at a psychiatric hospital. Her first book, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska, was published in 2003 by Wolsak and Wynn. The manuscript won the CBC Literary Award, and was featured on the CBC Program Between the Covers. She's Catholic by birth and by choice, a feminist by upbringing, particle physicist by training, secretary by day, New Quarterly editor by night, and writer by religious vocation. Noteboom lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, with her husband, fellow geek, fellow writer, and great love of her life, James Bow. Together they have one cat, two woks, three domain names, four full filing cabinets, five seasons of Buffy DVDs, and thousands of books. Noteboom can be reached via her Web site, Vivid.

Claudio Parentela
Claudio Parentela is a painter, illustrator, mail artist, and cartoonist who resides in Italy and is very active in the international underground scene. He collaborates with many zines, magazines and with publishers in Italy and around the world, such as: Stripburger, Lavirint, Sunburn, The Cherotic Revolutionary, Chance, Lucid Moon, Pitchfork, Mani Art, Unwound, Moon Magazine, Staplegun, The Lummox Journal, Bathtub Gin, Experimental Forest ,Stardust Memories, and The White Buffalo Gazzette among dozens more. In 1999 he was guest at the Break 21 Festival in Ljubljana (Slovenja). His strange artworks are in many art galleries across the World Wide Web. Most recently, he has exhibited art at the Association Microcosmo (Torino ); at the Girasole(Villa Basilica-Italy); at the Tabula Rasa (Barcellona-Espain); at the Galerie Slaphanger(Amsterdam- ), and has future exhibitions planned at the Gallery Soqquadro(Rome) and at ''La Cueva''(Milan). In addition, Parentela ollaborates with various musicians and record labels in the areas of industrial, noise, metal, and punk music. He has illustrated stories and poems of: Vittorio Baccelli, Lisa Massei, Alberto Rizzi, Cristiano Quadalti, Shannon Colebank, Gavin Burrows, Gary Sneyd, Robert Smith, Michael Kriesel and Mark Sonnenfeld. He has published several books of comics and illustrations including: The Slavering Rat and The Halved Nightmare (Innovation Studio-BGA Comix-Italy); Fashion Robot (David Lasky-Seattle/USA). Stories and Il Bombarolo (Progetto Siderurgiko-Italy); The Sacrificial Lamb and the hanged Salamander at the Patè 666' (Medicina Nucleare-Italy); Claudio Parentela '(Romantika Productions-Italy); Eudemoni and Small Black Trilogy (Poems of Alberto Rizzi and of Cristiano Quadalti, illustrations of Claudio Parentela-Criatu Productions-Italy); Jeanne Dark you got Balls and The Frogs' Ballet (Self-produced); Black Kisses and Other Stories and The Book of Secrets (La Cafetiere Editions-Belgium). Cladio Parentela may be reached at c_parentela@libero.it.
To purchase prints or merchandise with Parentela's images, please visit his Gallery (Italian) or his Cafe Shop.

Ben Passikoff
Ben Passikoff is a retired engineer. His poems have appeared in The Quarterly Review of Literature, the Atlanta, Harvard, Sarah Lawrence and Texas Reviews, Literal Latte, Orbis, Pedestal Magazine and a truckload of other journals. His pursuits are poetry and survival.

J. Rubino
J.Rubino has been published in Apollo’s Lyre, The Travel Rag, Spillway Review, Buffalo Spree Magazine and Vegetarian Times magazine. He's a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) and have lived and worked overseas for the last 7 years. Currently, he is working on a novel and teaching English at Arab-American University in the West Bank. Rubino can be reached at john_rubino@yahoo.com.

Ben Stivers
Ben Stivers is a poet and novelist, living in Louisville, KY, USA with his wife and two of his four children. In 1997, Stivers published his first book of poetry, A Thousand Lifetimes Wide. He has published 500 or so poems in various poetry magazines in the U.S. and Canada, including: Poet's Edge, Portals, Emotions Literary Journal, Maelstrom, Parnassus Literary Journal, The Burning Cloud Review, and Beauty for Ashes Poetry Review.

Doug Tanoury
Doug Tanoury is primarily a poet of the Internet with the majority of his work never leaving electronic form. His verse can be read at electronic magazines and journals across the world. Collections of poetry by Doug Tanoury can be found at Funky Dog Publishing and Athens Avenue. A number of Tanoury's ebook collections can be read and downloaded at this link. Tanoury grew up in Detroit, Michigan and still lives in the area. He credits his 7th grade poetry anthology from Sister Debra's English class, Reflections On A Gift Of Watermelon Pickle And Other Modern Verse, (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders and Hugh Smith, (c) 1966 by Scott Foresman & Company) as exerting the greatest influence on his work. He still keeps a copy of it at his writing desk.

Paul A. Toth
Paul A. Toth lives in the United States. His novel Fizz is now available from Bleak House Books. Toth's short fiction has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Iowa Review Web, Mississippi Review Online and many others, with nominations for the Pushcart prize and Best American Mystery Stories. Please see www.netpt.tv for further details.

Chris Vaillancourt
Chris Vaillancourt is a Canadian poet who has enjoyed publication in numerous small poetry magazines and newsletters. He is married, and has been for 12 years, with two young children, ages 11 and 8. He has been writing since as long as he can remember. In younger years, he enjoyed publication of a few chapbooks of his work. Vaillancourt is currently working on a new poetry chapbook to be hopefully published sometime in 2004.