Dinu Adam is among Romania's most unusual poets of his generation,a kind of anomalous figure in that he chose to remain silent undercommunism and, after 1977, put only some translations into print. Hisfirst volume, The High Gates, came out in 1974, and his second, Lullaby, two years later; he appeared in most of his country's notableliterary magazines and won a number of literary prizes before he stoppedpublishing. Currently he is managing editor of Romania's leadingsatirical weekly, Academia Catavencu.

Christine Baines lives in Arizona, Armenia and London. Recentpublications include Messages From the Heart (USA), The YerevanLiterary Journal (Armenia) and YILTP (England). She also writesbook reviews and teaches journal writing and life writing - both inEngland and the USA. Her book on journal writing, Inner Horizonsis to be published in 1998.

Lisa Borders is the recipient of a 1995 fellowship in fiction fromthe Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in suchjournals as Iowa Woman, Black Warrior Review, Snake Nation Review,Agassiz Review and Painted Bride Quarterly. "The Day PrairieRose, Texas Disappeard From the Map" is an excerpt from a novel inprogress and the winner of the 1996 Open Voice Fiction Award from theWriter's Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York.

David Breskin has work which recently appeared, or are shortlyforthcoming, in The New Yorker, New American Writing, DoubleTake,TriQuarterly and Boulevard. Additionally, this spring FreshKills was nominated for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Poetry.

Marcus Cafagña's first book, The Broken World, was selectedby Yusef Komunyakaa for the National Poetry Series and published byUniversity of Illinois Press in 1996. He has poems published inPoetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The AmericanPoetry Review, Boulevard, and forthcoming from The Southern Review,DoubleTake, and The Threepenny Review.

Christopher Chambers is the editor of Black Warrior Review.His work has recently appeared in Quarterly West, and isforthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly.

Anthony W. DeAnnuntis has published fiction in such sources asNorth Atlantic Review, California Quarterly, Cimarron Review, PoeticSpace, and Luna Negra, among others. He is a graduate ofCommunity College of Philadelphia where he teaches in the EnglishDepartment.

Robert Klein Engler is a regular contributor toCrossConnect. His books of poetry, Shoreline and MedicineSigns, are published by Alphabeta Press. He was the recipient of anIllinois Arts Council Literary Awards for his poem "Three Poems forKabbalah," which appeared in Fish Stories Collective 2.

Debra Hoffman works and lives in Philadelphia.

Pablo García Casado (Córdoba, 1972) has participated in thecreation of various literary magazines, including Reverso andRecuento, and his poems have appeared in such journals asPliegos de la Posada, Navalá and Lúnula. His first book ofpoetry, Las Afueras (The Outskirts), was published in 1997.

Saku Gunasegaram's artwork was featured in Xconnect Issue#8's Art Gallery. Her piece "Cirrus Carcinoma" is on this Issue'sFeatures Page.

Eli Goldblatt directs the University Writing Program and teaches atTemple University. His work has appeared most recently in Hambone,Paper Air, Another Chicago Magazine, Madison Review, Louisiana Literature,Prosodia and 6ix. Forthcoming in 1998 is a new collection ofpoems, Speech Acts (Chax Press).

Rebekah Grossman has published poems in the Antioch Review,Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Confrontation amongothers. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvaniawhere she is a Phd. student in Folklore and Folklife.

Karmelo C. Iribarren (San Sebastián, 1959) made his literary debutwith the chapbook Bares y Noches (1993). La condiciónurbana (1995) was his first full-length book of poetry. His upcomingbook Serie B, is due out shortly.

Halvard Johnson is a regular contributor toCrossConnect. He is the author of 5 volumes of Poetry. 4 werepublished by New Rivers Press and the fifth, Americans PlayingSlow-pitch Softball at an Airbase near Kunsan, South Korea iscurrently seeking a publisher. Eclipse is archived on-line at CAPA. Poems have appeared on-line in Deep Breath and RealPoetikand fiction in Blue Penny Quarterly.

Yusef Komunyakaa received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and theKingsley-Tufts Poetry Award for Neon Vernacular: New and SelectedPoems. He is the author of ten books, including Magic City(1992), Dien Cai Dau (1988), I Apologize for the Eyes in MyHead (1986), and Copacetic (1984). He also co-edited TheJazz Poetry Anthology (with J.A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991). His awardsinclude the Thomas Forcade Award (1991), the William Faulkner Prize fromthe University of Rennes in France (1994), the Levinson Prize fromPoetry magazine (1997), and the Hanes Poetry Prize (1997). His newbook, Thieves of Paradise, was just published by WesleyanUniversity Press. He is professor in the Council of Humanities andCreative Writing Program at Princeton University.

Thomas LeClair teaches at the University of Cincinnati. His workhas appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as The Paris Review,TriQuarterly, Fiction International and Witness. His novel,Passing Off, was published by Permanent Press in 1996. He is alsothe author of two critical books; In the Loop and The Art ofExcess.

Michael Magee is a contributing editor for CrossConnect. Helives in Rhode Island and is finishing his Phd. dissertation on Emersonand American experimental writing, in English at the Universityof Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared or forthcoming in The FloridaReview, America, Spoon River Poetry Review, Amelia, Crazy QuiltQuarterly and elsewhere.

John McCalla is a freelance writer who lives and works inPhiladelphia. His work has been published in many sources, including theNew York Times and the Philadelphia City Paper. He authors aweekly columnin the Philadelphia Daily News.

Kate Moran lives and works in Philadephia where her show "VitreousHumours" recently appeared at the Museum of American Art of thePennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts.

Dennis Must is the editor/founder of Flying Horse. He hashad several of his plays performed Off Off Broadway, and his work hasappeared or is forthcoming in Sun Dog - The Southeast Review, TheWashington Square Review, Java Snob Review and Red Hen Press' 1998New American Short Fiction anthology, among others.

Deirdre O'Connor teaches in The Writing Center at BucknellUniversity. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Thirteenth Moon, Hayden'sFerry Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly among others.

Toby Olson has published several books of poetry, the mostrecent of which are We Are the Fire (New Directions) andUnfinished Building (Coffee House Press), and 6 novels includingThe Life of Jesus and Seaview (New Directions); The WomanWho Escaped from Shame (Random House); and Utah, Dorit inLesbos, and At Sea (Simon & Schuster). He has received NEA,Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and numerous awardsincluding the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is a Professor of English at TempleUniversity.

Mark Ostrowski lives in Spain, where he works as a freelance writerand translator. Some poems from his first collection, FavelasUntold, have appeared in The Cortland Review and The SaltRiver Review. Ostrowski is a regular contributor to the Spanishcultural magazine, Antorcha.

Ed Pavlic is a professor of English at Union College inSchenectady, NY. Among the magazines in which his creative and criticalwork has appeared are African American Review, Screen Noir andBlack Camera. His Essay on David Bradley's The ChaneysvilleIncident won the 1996 Darwin Turner Award for the year's best piece ofcriticism devoted to African-American writing.

C.C. Russell's work has appeared in or forthcoming from OysterBoy Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Hiram poetry Review, Pearl,and Agnieszka's Dowry.

Jeffrey L. Schneider teaches English composition, literature andcreative writing at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Hiswork has recently appeared in Porcupine, The Onion River Review,Studies in Contemporary Satire, Snake Nation Review and WhiskeyIsland Magazine.

Paul C. Sherr, Ph.D., is a retired professor of English at RiderUniversity and the author of The Short Story and the OralTradition. A veteran bassoonist and clarinetist of musical theaterorchestras in New York, he can currently be heard playing jazz clarinet atthe Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, PA.

Adam Sorkin has published his collaborative translations inThe New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry,Michigan Quarterly Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Sulfur and TheLiterary Review. His fifth book, The Sky Behind the Forest, aselection of Liliana Ursu's poetry in a three-way collaboration with bothUrsu and Tess Gallagher, was published by Bloodaxe Books last January; itwas a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. His anthologyof 16 contemporary Romanian prose poets, Speaking the Silence,edited and translated with Bogdan Stefanesca, is due out later this yearfrom Prose Poem Press.

Robert Sward, the recipient of a Guggenheim Award and a VillaMontalvo Literary Arts Award, currently teaches at the University ofCalifornia in Santa Cruz. He is the author of 16 books, includingUncivilizing (Insomniac Press, Canada), A Much-Married Man, ANovel, and Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems (CoffeeHouse Press). He is a contributing Editor to Blue Moon Review andPares cum Paribus.

Amber Dorko Stopper has received two Pushcart nominations for shortfiction and is the recipient of a 1993 Pennsylvania Council of the ArtsFellowship. Her work has appeared in such journals as Two Girls Review,Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and AmericanWriting.

James Tate won the 1995 Tanning Prize from the Academy of AmericanPoets. His Selected Poems received the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and hiscollection Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the 1994 NationalBook Award. He is on the permanent faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

William F. Van Wert is the author of several recent books:Memory Links (essays, University of Georgia Press, 1995, winner ofthe AWP Creative Nonfiction Competition); What's It All About(novel, Simon & Schuster, 1996); Stool Wives (novel, Plover Press,1996); Don Quickshot (novel in verse, Livingston University Press,1997); The Invention of Ice Skating (poetry, Avison Press, 1997);Proper Myth (poetry, Orchises Press, 1998); Vital Signs (poetry,Urthona Press, 1998, winner of the William Blake Award); and TheAdvancement of Ignorance (short stories, Bookmark Press, forthcoming).He teaches Film and Creative Writing at Temple University.

Mark Wisniewski is the author of a novel, Confessions of aPolish Used Car Salesman (High Jinx Press. Over seventy of his shortstories are published or forthcoming in magazines such as TheGettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, American ShortFiction, Nexus, California Quarterly and Haight Ashbury LiteraryJournal. He is the Fiction Editor of New York Stories.

Roger Wolfe (Kent, 1962) was born in England, he has lived in Spainsince the age of four. He has published the following books of poems:Diecisiete poemas (1986), Días perdidos en los transportespúblicos (1992), Hablando de pintura con un ciego (1993),Arde Babilonia (1994) and Mensajes en botellas rotas (1996).His next book of poetry, Cinco años de cama,together with a volumeof selected poems tentatively called Noches de blanco papel, willbe published later this year.