David Barringer has written for Details, Playboy, The American Prospect, and others. His stories have appeared and will appear in Nerve, 3AM Magazine, Wisconsin Review, New Graffiti, Sweet Fancy Moses, and others. He recently published a story collection, The Leap and Other Mistakes: 35 Stories and maintains a web site, at www.davidbarringer.com. David currently lives in Michigan.

Jenny Browne is a 2002-03 Texas Writer's League Poetry Fellow. She has poems forthcoming in the Seneca Review, PostRoad and Skanky Possum. At Once, her second collection of poetry, will be published by the University of Tampa Press in Fall 2003.

Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, PoetryBay, Red River Review, Aremis, The Pedestal Magazine, Runes, Gertrude, Sand to Glass, PoetryMagazine.com, Southern Ocean Review, OffCourse, The American Muse, and various other jouirnals.

Jon Boilard was recently awarded first place in the Berkeley Fiction Review's annual sudden-fiction contest. His short story entitled, "Settright Road," received honorable mention in the SF Bay Guardian's annual short fiction contest. His short fiction has also appeared or is forthcoming in Barbaric Yawp, Dalhousie Review, Event, Ink, Puerto del Sol, San Francisco State University Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, Transfer and Whiskey Island Magazine.

Macgregor Card coedits The Germ.

Jan Clausen's most recent book is a memoir, Apples and Oranges (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Her new poetry manunscript, From a Glass House, contains work published or forthcoming in Hanging Loose, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares among others. She teaches at Eugene Lang College and in the Goddard College MFA Writing Program.

Randall Couch is a poet, translator, and critic whose work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Lone Star Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. Currently enrolled in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, he received a 2000 poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He serves on the planning committee of Kelly Writers House.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Mary K. Hall received an M.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College (formerly part of Norwich University, now part of Union Institute & University). Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English, with a concentration in film and nineteenth-century American literature, at the University of Kentucky. Mary's fiction piece, "Paralyzed," won second place in the 1998 Louisville Magazine short story contest, and was subsequently printed in the journal, Short Story. Her scholarly work has been published in Journal of Film and Video. Apart from writing, Mary is an amateur cellist, and plays in the Lexington Community Orchestra.

Mark Halliday taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1983-1990. His books of poetry include Little Star (1987) and Tasker Street (1992). He directs the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University.

Zbigniew Herbert (1923-1998) was one of the great poets of post-WWII Polish literature. These poems are from his volume Struna Swiatla (String of Light).

Michael Hyde's fiction has recently been published in Ontario Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Millennium Writings, and Best American Mystery Stories 2001. A previous contributor to Xconnect, he lives in New York City and is completing his first novel.

Mytili Jagannathan's poems have appeared in Combo, Interlope, Salt, Mirage#4/Period[ical], and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. She also has workforthcoming in Cities of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from the United States and Brazil (Rattapallax, 2003). She is the recipient of an Inspiration Grant from the Leeway Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for poetry.

Stephen Jones has recently been published in Beloit Fiction, Open City, Sundog, Meridian, Pleiades, and more. His first novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong was published by FC2 in 2000, while his next novel, The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto is due out from FC2 in Fall 2003. Stephen is 30 and lives in Shallowater, Texas, and just recently received an NEA fellowship.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis currently lives and teaches in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Literary Salt, Optic Magazine, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, and Quarterly West.

Cralan Kelder has been writing poems for over fifteen years. During this time, he has had many alternate identities: graduate student, bicycle courier, overseas development worker, nursery clerk, dot.commer, and boyfriend. He lives just over there. Recent contributions include Drought, Black Bear Review, Augustus Truhn's Magazine and Osiris.

David Koppisch lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife Bridget and their daughter Ingrid. David works as a community organizer. He has had poems published in American Writing (Philadelphia), Journal of New Jersey Poets (Randolph, NJ), Rafters (State College, PA), Folio (Washington DC) and Combo (Philadelphia).

Marek Lugowski is a contributing editor for Xconnect. He is the editor of A Small Garlic Press and co-edits Agnieszka's Dowry.

Martha Silano received her MFA from the University of Washington, where she studied with Heather McHugh and David Wagoner. Since graduating, her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, cleansheets.com, Hanging Loose, Paris Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Raven Chronicles, River Styx, Switched-on-Gutenberg, Verse and in the anthology American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000). Her book-length collection is What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press, 1999). Her unpublished manuscript, All Things Want to Float, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series Open Competition.

Lauren Rile Smith writes poetry and fiction, and lives in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in journals including Ixnay, ShrinkWrapped, and The Vocabula Review, and is forthcoming in Skanky Possum.

Poet and cartoonist Gary Sullivan is the author of How to Proceed in the Arts (Faux Press) and, with Nada Gordon, Swoon (Granary Books). He and Nada edit the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Leonore Wilson teaches creative writing at Napa Valley College. Her work has been published in Quarterly West, Laurel Review, Madison Review, and Poets On.