Idris Goodwin is an award winning playwright, break beat poet, recording and cross-disciplinary performance artist. Idris has received grants and awards from The Ford Foundation and The Illinois Arts Council. Idris’ break beat poetry was featured on season six of Russell Simmons’ HBO Def Poetry and published in the Spoken Word Revolution Redux Anthology, Rattle, Diagram, Word Riot, decomP, and featured prominently in the forthcoming The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Idris frequently teaches, performs and lectures at institutions on themes of arts, culture and empowerment. Upcoming projects include the one act play The Story Farm and the full length album Break Beat Poems on SGE records. Visit idrisgoodwin.blogspot.com.

Sarah Stickney comes from Santa Fe, New Mexico, though currently she is working on her MFA at the University of New Hampshire. She likes cooking, talking, friends, flying, foreign languages, drinking, dancing. She loves poetry.

Sean Bishop is the managing editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, and The Minnesota Review, and have recently been featured on the homepage of inknode.com. In 2007, Sean was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation. He is completing the final year of his MFA at the University of Houston.

Alicia Ostriker has published twelve books of poetry, most recently: A Little Space: Selected and New Poems, 1968-1998, The Volcano Sequence, No Heaven, The Mother/Child Papers, and The Book of Seventy. Ostriker has twice been a National Book Award Finalist, and has received awards from The Poetry Society of America, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the San Francisco Poetry Center and the Paterson Poetry Center, among others. She has also published several critical books on poetry and the Bible. Ostriker currently teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA Program of Drew University.

Dan Rosenberg's poems have appeared recently in or are forthcoming from several journals, including Clementine, Thermos, Third Coast, 6X6, Now Culture, and Conduit. He is currently a Teaching Fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL, and his chapbook, A Thread of Hands, is forthcoming from Tilt Press.

M.A. Vizsolyi lives in New York City, and has poems appearing in 6x6, The New Quarterly, and Barnstorm, among others. He is hard at work on his first poetry manuscript tentatively entitled The Lamp with Wings.

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Currently, he is the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Michael Venditozzi was born in Toronto in 1971 and grew up in Scotland. His poems have appeared in various magazines and newspapers including Agenda, Chapman, Acumen, The Times (of London), and The Scotsman. He is a member of a Buddhist Order and the Director of a large online Buddhist archive. He currently lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.