KO UN

Ko Un was born in 1933 in Cholla Province, Korea. He grew up during the Japanese Occupation, and when the Korean War broke out he was conscripted by the People's Army. Following that, he became a Buddhist monk and lived a monastic life for ten years. For his activism confronting South Korea's military regime, he was imprisoned and tortured. He recently travelled with his former jail-mate, President Kim Dae-jung, to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of the Korean Reunification Summit. In his last published text, Allen Ginsberg wrote of Ko Un "...exuberant, demotic, abundant, obsessed woth poetic creation... Ko Un is a magnificent poet."

JEROME CHAPMAN

Jerome Chapmanis a teacher of high school American literature living in Birmingham, Alabama. He also plays in the band, The Mojos. He is a freelance magazine writer and playwright. His other pieces include "Losing the Parody Game", "Scavengers" and "Pitching the Wang Wang Doodle with the Clean Folks."

REGINA CHERRY

Regina Cherry born in the old country-
matured and bloomed in the new-critically honed there and here-
suspended by and in the visual and verbal world- painted for years, still does (first preoccupation)- been immersed in photography, preferably B & W- progressed? from teenage rhyming and dyslexia- to something more serious, have-
over the last decade, accumulated a body of poetry-
live and work in NYC, venture to the East End when not floating around in other parts of the planet.

RAYMOND FEDERMAN

Born in France (1928), he is a bilingual writer. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1957, PhD in French Literature from UCLA in 1963. He did his Doctoral Dissertation on Samuel Beckett. Federman is also a distinguished SUNY professor. He has published four volumes of poetry, several books of criticism and of fiction.

ELLIOT FEDERMAN

Elliot Feldman calls himself an "unreconstructed old-Detroit freak transplanted to San Diego, the heart of the military-industrial complex." He's been a cartoonist since the sixties; his comics appearing in some of the very first underground newspapers. At other times of his life, he's been a meatpacking house "shlep", a city of Detroit urban planning department employee, and a telephone boiler-room salesman. He's also worked for 20 years in Hollywood, creating one-liners and games for TV producers like Mark Goodson. He currently works for Verant Interactive, an online computer game company.

BENJAMIN IVRY

Benjamin Ivry is a New York-based writer on the arts, broadcaster and lecturer. He also translates from the French (Albert Camus: a Life/ Knopf). Benjamin Ivry is author of a new poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises Press) a sample of which may be consulted on www.amazon.com The book has been praised by Muriel Spark and Richard Howard and has been positively reviewed in Publishers Weekly and the Lambda Book Report. It contains poems that first appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Spectator, Ambit Magazine, and The New Republic.

DAVID POLIZZI

David Polizzi was born in Rochester, NY in 1959, and was in the Creative Writing Program at SUNY Brockport in 1980 where he studied poetry with William Heyen, Anthony Piccione, Al Poulin Jr. and Stan Rubin. Polizzi now works as a forensic Psychotherapist at a maximum security prison in western Pennsylvania and serves on the faculties of Pittsburgh's Point Park College and Duquesne University as Adjunct Professor of Psychology.