Magdalena Alagna was the 2001 winner of the Paolucci Prize for Poetry and was an editor at Long Shot magazine. Her publications credits include The Bitter Oleander, Calliope, Paterson Literary Review, Venus in the Mirror, The Pagan's Muse, In Our Own Words, and Estrogenius.

Tomara Aldrich was born in Seattle, WA in 1976. Shortly after, she made her first of many moves as the daughter of an Army Officer. She graduated from Keene State College in 1998. Tomara is currently teaching and pursuing her MFA at Hunter College in New York City.

Meena Alexander's volume of poetry Illiterate Heart was winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines, picked by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1993, appears in a new edition with a coda, 'Book of Childhood', Fall 2003. She teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter where she is Distinguished Professor of English.

Sarah Antine is working on an MFA in poetry and teaching creative writing at Hunter College in New York City. During her undergraduate study at Case Western Reserve University, she won the Finley/Foster and Emily M. Mill Poetry Prize. She lives in Manhattan with her husband.

Marisabel Bonet received her Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida, and her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Hunter College. Her poetry has appeared in The Lullwater Review in Georgia and The Cypress Dome in Florida. She currently teaches 5th grade at the Holy Martyrs Armenian Day School, and is at work on a historical novel for young adults, The Pirate, soon to be published.

Waltrudis Buck earned a B.A. (English 2000) and an MFA (Fiction 2003) from Hunter College. Her awards include The McElligott Gloster Award, The Sylvia Faulkner Award, The Women's Forum Educational Award (Loews Scholar), the Helen Gray Con Fellowship in English, The McGlinchee Prize. Her short stories, essays or poems have appeared in The Olivetree Review and Hunter's Honors Review.

Ashley Crout was born in Charleston, SC, and educated at Bard College and the MFA program at Hunter College. She recently received a 2003 Astraea Lesbian Writers Award in Poetry. Her work has been published in Sojourner, Anteup, and The Hartford Courant. She lives in New York City.

JoAnne Growney lives in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania where she is active in local arts activities. Her work has appeared in several dozen literary magazines, recently in Out of Line and Hanging Loose. With collaborators, she translates Romanian poetry, including in 2002, Lead of Winter, a bilingual collection by symbolist poet George Bacovia (Criterion Press).

Gabrielle LeMay received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry in 2001. While at Hunter, she won several first-place awards for poetry and prose. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in Agha Shahid Ali's Ravishing DisUnities:  Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan, 2000). Her book reviews appear or are forthcoming in Home Planet News and on Big City Lit. She is founder of West Side Poets.

Jan Heller Levi's first book of poems, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, won the 1998 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Poems from her forthcoming book, The Handbook of Inconsolable Forms, have appeared in TriQuarterly, Drunken Boat, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, and Sojourner. Levi is also the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (W.W. Norton, 1994) and is currently working on a biography of Rukeyser. She divides her time between St. Gallen, Switzerland and New York City, where she is a member of the faculty of Hunter College, and teaches in the graduate program in Creative Writing.

Kate Light is the author of The Laws of Falling Bodies (Story Line Press, 1997 Nicholas Roerich Prize), Open Slowly (Zoo Press, 2003), and Oceanophony, a full-length concert piece for children written in collaboration with composer Bruce Adolphe. Oceanophony premiered last summer and will be performed at the American Museum of Natural History in May.
   Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Dark Horse, Western Humanities Review, Hudson Review, The Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, Wisconsin Review, Barrow Street, Carolina Quarterly, Confrontation, Rattapallax, The Formalist, Janus, and other publications, and has been featured three times on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Her work is also included in the anthologies, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet and American Poetry:  The Next Generation. Recipient of a Bossak-Heilbron Foundation Grant and a fellow at Yaddo and at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, she has published articles, profiles, and reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chamber Music Magazine, and Gadfly Magazine.
   Ms. Light currently teaches at Hunter College and in Spring 2004 will be Visiting Professor at Cornell University. Also a professional violinist, she gives many readings annually around the country, and next year will read in Japan and London.

Amy Meckler received her MFA from Hunter College, where she garnered the Academy of American Poets Award, among other honors. Her collection, What All the Sleeping Is For, won the Defined Providence Press Poetry Book Competition and was published in 2002 [Reviewed in the JulAug03 issue.] Her work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Rattapallax and Portland Review. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College.

Shelagh Patterson is a member of the first graduating class of the CUNY Hunter College M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her poems have featured in films, theatre, journals, anthologies, as well as bureaucratic letters. Shelagh is a Cave Canem fellow and has been accepted into the Bronx Writer's Center 2003/2004 Literary Fellowship and Residency Program.

William Pitt Root's recent work appears in Poetry, The Atlantic, OnEarth, Artful Dodge, Rattapallax, The Bark, Laughing Dog. His first five collections came out as Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom, a "Notable Book" according to The Nation. His work has won Guggenheim and Rockefeller awards, an NEA, a Stegner Fellowship; Root also was a US/UK Exchange Artist. His work has been translated into twenty languages and appears in 100+ anthologies, including three Pushcart Award collections. He lives with his wife, poet Pamela Uschuk, near the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and flies in weekly to Manhattan to teach at Hunter College. Until a year ago he flew in from Tucson, Arizona, where he served as that city's first Poet Laureate (1997-2002). [An interview with Wm. P. Root appears in this issue.—Eds.]

Nicole Tavares was born and raised in Rhode Island of Cape Verdean parents. She is a graduate of Bard College and Hunter MFA program in Poetry where she completed her thesis in Poetry "Private Bodies of Public Water". The Fader magazine featured her poetic essay "Na hora di bai" on the Cape Verdean American diasporic experience. She was the recently a co-winner of the Mary M. Fay Award in Poetry and the first prize winner of the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing. She is a teacher of GED, ESL, creative writing, and crochet. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kimberly Jaye Thatcher teaches creative writing at Hunter College where she also earned an MFA in Poetry. Born in Dallas, Texas and raised in the South, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in the Dekalb Literary Arts Journal.

Wendy Wisner teaches writing at Hunter College, where she received her MFA in poetry. She was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and—most recently—the Amy Award. Her poems have appeared in Runes, Sojourner, Main Street Rag, and other journals; she regularly contributes book reviews to Lilith Magazine; and her first collection of poems, Epicenter, will be published by CustomWords in July 2004. Wendy lives in Brooklyn with her husband.