Ali Riley is the author of two collections of poetry: her first, Wayward, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and her second, Tear Down, was published in 2006. She was born in Calgary, and was the singer/songwriter of the seminal psycho-country band Sacred Heart of Elvis. Her produced plays include dog dream, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Hole in my Heart the Size of My Heart. Her poetry has appeared in Geist, The nth Position Anthology, Matrix, This Magazine, Event and the Moosehead Review, and she has performed at festivals, schools, and hootennannies across the country. She appeared in BookTelevision's reality show "3 Day Novel Contest: the Series", finishing
in the top three. She recently moved to Edmonton, Alberta and is working on her next collection of poetry, TWAIN.

"Je Vous Attends" by Lynn Xu

Lynn Xu received her MFA from Brown University in 2006, the 2006 Greg Grummer Prize, judged by Anne Carson, and the 2004 Eisner Prize, judged by Lyn Hejinian. Her poems have appeared in The Canary, Phoebe, and UDP's 6x6, are forthcoming in Fence, Swerve, and Eaogh. Her chapbook JUNE is out on Corollary Press. LYNN XU likes water. Likes gold. These are not competing species so she is very happy.

"The Nothing Room" by Elizabeth Lucy Conway

Elizabeth Lucy Conway is the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, DC. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a BA in English and Spanish from the University of Rochester. She has taught creative writing at St. Albans, UMD, and Writers & Books in Rochester, NY, and she has worked as a publicist for the environmental publishing house Island Press in DC. She is currently working on a novel.

"The Reunion" by Moez Surani

Moez Surani's poetry and short fiction have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Europe and North America, including PRISM International, Carousel, and Todd Swift's, 100 Poets Against the War. He has won the The Dublin Quarterly's Poem of the Year, the Kingston Literary Award, the James H. Stitt Poetry Prize, and was twice shortlisted for THIS Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt. He holds a BA Honours degree in English & Biology and an MA in English. He lives in Toronto.

"A Man of Uncommon Means" by Jan Piotr Dutkiewicz

Jan Dutkiewicz was born in Warsaw, Poland, raised in Ottawa, Canada, and educated in various parts of the world. His first novel, "A repentant freethinker: Memoirs of a man rediscovered" has just been published by a publishing house in Poland. He enjoys vegetarian cuisine, surfing, rock climbing, Modest Mouse songs, and sleeping in. He has also recently acquired an an MBA from Carleton University.

"before that tho[ugh], if lucky" by Alyson Sinclair

Alyson Price Sinclair was born and raised in Lancaster, Fort Mill, and Charleston, South Carolina. Currently, she is in her last year of the MFA program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She misses the ocean and will move to Brooklyn in the very near future.

Nadia Kalman emigrated from the former Soviet Union as a child. She is a recent first-place winner of the 2007 Chris O'Malley Prize in Fiction from the Madison Review, and has published short stories in the Gettysburg Review, the Antigonish Review, and the Crab Creek Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

Katie Peterson was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and Harvard University and is currently Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College in the desert of California. Her first book, This One Tree, was selected by William Olsen for the New Issues Poetry Prize and came out in March. Her poems and criticism appear in various journals, including the Boston Review, the Chicago Tribune, and, most recently, Hunger Mountain.

"The Heart of Calcutta" by Margaret Sweatman

Margaret Sweatman lives in Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada.?Her most recent novel, When Alice Lay Down with Peter, won several awards including the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.?She is a playwright and poet, and performs with jazz and new music ensembles.?Most recently she won a Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film, with composer Glenn Buhr.

"Another Failed Version of Yourself " by Vicki Suchanek

Vicki Suchanek holds a BA in English from Rice University and was an MFA candidate in the poetry program at the University of Houston until 2002. Having finally managed to to find her way out of Texas, she now finds herself employed at a mortgage company, where her job has absolutely nothing to do with creative writing. Her work has appeared, most recently, in various Excel spreadsheets published to regional sales managers and vice presidents. She currently lives in Phoenix, AZ, where she continues to have issues writing about herself in the third person.

"Hideous Thing " by Scott Winokur

Scott Winokur was a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper-man for 29 years. He left the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 to devote himself to fiction writing. He has published journalism widely, and won something like 40 national, state and regional journalism awards, including the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel and the National Headliners Club award. For nearly seven years, he was a columnist for the (Hearst-owned) San Francisco Examiner and, for 11 years, an investigative and enterprise reporter for the Examiner and, later, the Chronicle. His freelance work also has appeared in Cosmo-politan, Redbook, and other national publications. His 1991 profile of V.S. Naipaul, based on three days of interviews with him, was published by the Examiner & Chronicle's Sunday magazine and subsequently anthologized in "Conversations with V.S. Naipaul" (ed. Feroza Jussawalla, University Press of Mississippi, 1997). He holds a B.A. in English from SUNY Binghamton and an M.A. in English from SUNY Buffalo, where he was a Teaching Fellow for three years.

"The Music Inside" by Christina Hutchins

Christina Hutchins is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, using A. N. Whitehead and Judith Butler to develop a theory of reading. A recipient of the Villa Montalvo Poetry Prize and a Barbara Deming Award, she has recent poems in The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.

Diane Greco's fiction and essays have appeared in the Saint Ann's Review, the Laurel Review, Art New England, and Poets & Writers. After earning a Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT in 1999, she served for several years as acquisitions editor at Eastgate Systems, the premier US publisher of literary hypertext. She is currently completing an MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she is supported by a fellowship from the University Writing Program.

Deborah Bernhardt received her MFA from The University of Arizona. She has been a Penn State Altoona Writer-in-Residence, a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Wisconsin Arts Board fellowship recipient and a Writers@Work Poetry Fellow. Her poems will be in Spring 2005 issues of columbia poetry review, Court Green and Cue. Her first book, Echolalia, is forth-coming from Four Way in 2007.

Elizabeth Ames is completing her MFA at the University of Michigan, where she'll teach writing next year. She's at work on a collection of short stories and hopes to be able to say the same about a novel in the near future.

Thomas Hummel is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in CROWD, The Paris Review, and Western Humanities Review. He works for the Poetry Society of America and lives in Manhattan.

Jennifer Sears has published work in Ninth Letter, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and The Boston Globe. She received a Barbara Deming Memorial/Money for Women grant for fiction in 2004. She teaches English and dance in New York City while completing her MFA at Columbia University.

I attended the MFA program at the University of Arizona and currently teach community college and work at the UofA Poetry Center. The desert is lovely.

"Great Bloated Nation Seeks Uneducated Third World Country for Fucky-Sucky" by Sarah C. Harwell

"Poem" by Jibade-Khalil Huffman

"TimeWise" by Devon McC Jackson

"Slow Start" by Erika Mikkalo

"We Came Upon" by Cecile Rossant

"Prize-Winning Photograph" by Alison Stine

"Triptcy in Bed" by Ellen Wehle

"Big Nose Kate Muses About the Freckles on Doc Holiday's Shoulders" by Shana Youngdahl

"Betwen Death and Dreaming" by Yvonne Zipter

"Laudanum" by Monica Ferrell

"Guts" by Daisy Fried

"The Art of Poetry" by Karen Kovacik

"The Privilege of Hermes" by Michael Leong

"Woman at the Well" by Carolyne Wright