Anselm Berrigan’s most recent book of poems is Free Cell, just published by City Lights this fall. Born in Chicago in 1972, he was raised in New York City, where he lives currently with poet Karen Weiser and their 22 month old daughter Sylvie. Previous jobs have included foot messenger, copy machine operator, receptionist, errand runner, copy editor, Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, communications consultant, and teacher of composition and creative writing at a number of schools, Bard College and Pratt Institute being current representatives. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005, UC Press). He is poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and a member of the subpress publishing collective, through which he recently put out Selected Poems of Steve Carey (edited by Edmund Berrigan) as well Hoa Nguyen’s Your Ancient See Through back in 2002. Other books include Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life, all published by Edge Books. A cd of poems (no music) from these books is available through narrow house recordings under the title Pictures for Private Devotion. Read all of Anselm’s posts here.

Abigail Deutsch is a poet and writer from New York. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice, n+1, and the Literary Review. She is currently the journalism fellow with the Poetry Foundation. Read all of Abigail’s posts here.

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals including Callaloo, The Hat, and Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Press) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance. A recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Magnet Fellowship, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, she is a currently a PhD candidate in the Graduate Center’s English Department at CUNY. Read all of Tonya’s posts here.

Melissa Friedling is a film and video maker. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA). Her writing on film, art, and culture has also appeared in various publications, most recently as a regular reviews contributor to Flash Art International. She currently teaches at The New School University and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Read all of Melissa’s posts here.

John S. O’Connor has taught for over 20 years. he is currently an English teacher at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois. He is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry, and Room Full of Chairs, a book of haiku. He also released a CD of well-known poems sung to original arrangements called Evenings and Other Beginnings. Read all of John’s posts here.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish 2005) which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Diwata (BOA Editions, 2010). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Asian Pacific American Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Latino Poetry Review, New American Writing, Nocturnes Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, Tinfish, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere. She is a contributing blogger to the Hyphen magazine blog, and an adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. Read all of Barbara’s  posts here.

Edwin Torres is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, The All Union Day of the Shock Worker, Fractured Humorous, Lung Poetry, and forthcoming from Nightboat Books, In The Function Of External Circumstances. He started creating text and performance work in 1988 under the banner “I.E. Interactive Eclecticism,” an invented “movement” whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project. He has since collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. His CD, Holy Kid (which “straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy“-Kenneth Goldsmith) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His current invention, “Noricua” (mid-wifed with the Bronx-based artist collective Spanic Attack), is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement seeped in non-ideology. Read all of Edwin’s posts here.