Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the U.S. in 1975, and has also lived in Italy and England. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003), American Tatts (Chax 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax 2007), with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008 by Seven Stories Press. His work has been anthologized in several editions of Best American Poetry and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. Linh Dinh is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (Seven Stories Press 1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (Tinfish 2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (Tupelo 2006). He has also published widely in Vietnamese. He has taught creative writing at Bard College, Naropa University, The University of Pennsylvania and the University of Montana.

Daisy Fried’s books of poems are My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She’s received Guggenheim, Hodder, Pennsylvania Council in the Arts and Pew Fellowships, and won a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. She has taught creative writing as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College, at the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband Jim Quinn and daughter Maisie Quinn.

Ada Limón’s first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize. With an MFA from NYU in creative writing, she’s won the Chicago Literary Award and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the Copy Director for GQ magazine and teaches a Master Class for Columbia University’s MFA program. She is particularly fond of rivers and is at work on a third book of poems as well as a novel.

D.A. Powell's fourth book, Chronic, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2009. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Reginald Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (forthcoming from Counterpath Press). He is the author of five volumes of poetry, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Fata Morgana (2007), Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry. His prose book Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry is forthcoming in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series. Shepherd is the recipient of a 1993 “Discovery”/The Nation Award and of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Florida Arts Council, among other awards and honors. He lives with his partner Robert Philen, a cultural anthropologist, in Pensacola, Florida, where magnolias and live oaks are evergreens. He maintains a blog on poetry and poetics at reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com.