E. Ethelbert Miller is the former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College in Vermont. He has been the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University since 1974. Author and editor of several books of poetry including Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators? How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love and In Search of Color Everywhere.

His memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer was published in 2000. It was selected by the DC WE READ program in 2003 as the book all Washington residents were encouraged to read.

Mr. Miller has been honored by Laura Bush and the White House at the National Book Festival in 2001 and 2003. His poetry has been heard on the HBO Def Jam Poetry program. Mr. Miller can also be heard on a regular basis on National Public Radio.

Recently he became one of the editors of Poet Lore magazine and a board member of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. (visit web site)

Further information available at The Academy Of American Poets.

Emmett Till Looks At A Photo Album From Iraq  
Borderline

 

David Trinidad's most recent book, Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse, a mock-epic based on the 1950 film All About Eve, co-written with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2003. His other books include Plasticville (Turtle Point, 2000), Answer Song (High Risk Books, 1994), and Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981-1988 (Amethyst Press, 1991). He edited Powerless, the selected poems of Tim Dlugos, and with Maxine Scates, Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. In 2002 he moved from New York City to teach poetry at Columbia College in Chicago, where he also directs the MFA Poetry Program and co-edits the literary journal Court Green.   The Big Valley

Photo credit: William Fridrich
www.fridrichdesign.com

Timothy Liu is the author of five books of poems, most recently Of Thee I Sing  (Georgia, 2004). His new book, E. Pluribus Unum AKA Kamikazee Pilots In Paradise, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois in 2005. An Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University, he lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Further information available at The Academy Of American Poets.

Three poems from E PLURIBUS UNUM A.K.A. KAMIKAZEE PILOTS IN PARADISE, forthcoming from Southern Illinois in Fall 2005: Ars Poetica, Beauty and Terrorism.
 

 

David Hernandez's first full-length book of poems, A House Waiting for Music, was published by Tupelo Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Epoch, Iowa Review, Cream City Review, AGNI and Quarterly West. His drawings have also appeared in literary magazines, including Other Voices, Gargoyle, and a feature in Indiana Review. A recipient of a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, his chapbook collections include Man Climbs Out of Manhole and Donating the Heart. David is the poetry editor for Swink. He lives in Long Beach, CA and is married to writer Lisa Glatt. Visit his website at www.DavidAHernandez.com. Darlene So The Pilot Says Over The Intercom How Alexander Graham Bell Built His Speaking Machine

Rita Maria Martinez lives in Miami, Florida. She is a writer and proofreader for Miami Dade College. A graduate of Florida International University’s M.F.A. Creative Writing Program. Rita’s poems have appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, Diagram, Mangrove, Street Miami and Ploughshares.

Nautica
Contrition
Reading Jane Eyre II
Letter To Bertha Mason Rochester
Cause And Effect

Ted Mathys's first book of poetry, Forge, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2005. Poems have appeared or are slated to appear in Aufgabe, Black Warrior Review, The Canary, Colorado Review, Fence, Jubilat, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Originally from Ohio, he currently lives in Manhattan. Photo credit: Leah Wiste.

 

 Cherries In The Factory Of Blackness
 Chora
 Unfortunately The Object
 


 

Blanco’s first book, City of a Hundred Fires, received the Starrett Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). His second book, Nowhere Yet Here is forthcoming form the University of Arizona Press Camino del sol Series. Blanco’s work on the Cuban-American experience has appeared in The Nation, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly, TriQuarterly, National Public Radio, and anthologies including, The Best American Poetry 2000 and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He is a Bread Loaf Fellow and recipient of a Florida Artist Fellowship. A builder of Bridges and poems, Blanco holds a degree in Civil Engineering and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University. A former Assistant Professor at Central Connecticut State University, Blanco now lives in Washington, D.C. where he has taught creative writing at Georgetown and American University.


Three poems from NOWHERE YET HERE, forthcoming form University of Arizona Press, Camino Del Sol Series: Return From El Cerrado, Winter Of The Volcanoes, Guatemala and Looking For Blackbirds, Hartford.

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of Planet of the Blind: A Memoir, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year” for 1998, and Only Bread, Only Light, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He is currently working on a memoir about “the listening life” which will be published by W.W. Norton in 2005.


 The War Production Canzon
 Life In The Family
 Nothing In Particular
 By Halves

Michael Schiavo's poetry has appeared in LIT, McSweeney's, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Good Foot, La Petite Zine, Small Spiral Notebook, and several other fine publications. A work-study scholar (waiter) at the 2004 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, he currently lives in Connecticut.  The Town Where God Will Retire

Kelle Groom's first collection of poems is Underwater City (University Press of Florida 2004). Her second collection, Luckily, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Luna, The New Yorker, Poet Lore, Witness, and others. She works as the director of grants for the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida.   Lake Ivanhoe   Debtor's Anonymous   Story Of My Life

Photo credit: Michael Burkard

Diane Wald's awards include a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, The Open Voice Award, and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation grant. She has published three chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her latest book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002.  In addition to her poetry, she's writing a nonfiction book about People with AIDS and their companion animals.  She works for animal welfare at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Boston. Please invite her to your city to give a reading.


 during the mozart string quartet in d

Douglas Goetsch's poetry collections include The Job Of Being Everybody, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition, Nobody's Hell (Hanging Loose Press) and three prizewinning chapbooks. He lives in New York City, teaches creative writing to incarcerated teens at Passages Academy, and is founding editor of Jane Street Press (www.janestreet.com).

Complete Bio available at The Academy Of American Poets.

 EASTER, HAMPTON BAYS
 RIDING IN THE BUICK 

Patrice Vecchione is the author of Writing and the Spritual Life: Finding Your Voice by Looking Within (McGraw-Hill) and the book of poems Territory of Wind. Her poetry anthologies include, Truth and Lies (Henry Holt), Whisper and Shout (Cricket Books) and most recently, Revenge and Forgiveness (Henry Holt).

Outside The Market

James Brock is the author of two books of poetry, The Sunshine Mine Disaster and Nearly Florida. His poetry has recently been published in North American Review, Sunspinner, Caffeine Destiny, and 88.  Currently he lives in Fort Myers, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University.  For kicks, he travels between Miami, Nashville, and Idaho.

 Sun Valley Serenade
 Her Silvermoon Café

Photo credit: Paul Godwin
www.paulgodwin.com

Marina Wilson is from northern California, where she attended the University of California at Berkeley and worked closely with late poet and activist, June Jordan. Her work has been published in The Berkeley Fiction Review, Crowd Magazine, and the online magazine La Petite Zine. She currently lives in New York City where she earned an MFA from New School University in 2002. She dedicates herself to writing and to teaching poetry in underserved communities throughout the New York City area. The poems in this issue are from a series of poems loosely connected to the Russian River in northern California.


 A History Of Rivers
 Home

Esteban R. Arellano was born in Moorhead, Minnesota to migrant parents, but his families roots are in Texas. Currently he resides in the Midwest. He is a cyberspace-vagabond visiting communities where he shares poems with brothers & sisters who are lovers of the written word. You can find his poems on Wal-Mart's, Target's, or Border's benches; or taped to telephone booths, or stuck to windshield-wipers, or carried by the wind in the form of paper-jets. His poems can be heard at any inviting & kind corner, home, tavern, church, or coffee-shop. His work has also appeared in Unlikely Stories, MiPo, & Writer's Hood, & he was a 2003 Pushcart Prize nominee. He is currently working on his first book of poetry, Poesias Chifladas. Esteban earned a BA in Literature from a small, private liberal arts school & earned his MA in philosophy from the streets. Esteban says, "I'm a preacher's son & a mama's boy & damn proud of it."


San Pio
Sister, Twilight Is A Thousand Candles

Lola Haskins is happy to be in such nice company. Her new book is Desire Lines (BOA, 2004) which, besides including 31 new poems, selects from all her previous books except The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001) and Extranjera (Story Line, 1989). Besides writing poetry, Ms. Haskins enjoys performing it, especially in collaboration. Most recently, she shared the title role of Mata Hari in a ballet whose libretto she wrote for Dance Alive!. Her day job is teaching programming and web design at UF. She has lived in Florida since the mid-seventies, mostly outside Gainesville in a house she and her husband built. A word about owner-built houses: they are never finished; this is good and bad. For more of her work, please visit Lola's web site.

Instructions from the Couturier

April Ossmann has published her poetry in numerous journals including Harvard Review and Colorado Review, and in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England, and The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse. She won the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award for ten poems published in the Summer 2000 issue. She is Director of Alice James Books, and has taught creative writing and literature courses at Lebanon College and at the University of Maine at Farmington.


  Here & Then

is a teacher of English at Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, NJ. His poems have been published in Mars Hill Review, Poet's Canvas, Pedestal Magazine, and other print and electronic outlets. "Metheselah Knew" is the title poem of Scott's MFA thesis which he recently earned at William Paterson University. Scott hopes to publish his thesis as a chapbook. He lives in Northern NJ with his wife Laura and their children, Reanna and Garrett.

  Methuselah Knew

Paul Guest is the author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World. His poems appear in Poetry, Crazyhorse, Slate, Hunger Mountain, Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

  My Jazz Poem

Gabriel Gudding's first book, A Defense of Poetry, won the Starrett prize by the University of Pittsburgh press and was published as part of their Pitt Poetry Series in November, 2002. His work appears in places like New American Writing, Fence, Jacket, APR, CONDUIT, Lit, The Nation, Sentence, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner 2003). He's an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University.

Rhode Island Notebook 05/11/03 - 05/14/03

Fred Longworth pays the bills by restoring vintage audio components and by renting out property. For five years, he co-hosted a popular poetry reading in San Diego at Twiggs Coffee & Tea. His work has recently appeared in hardcopy in California Quarterly, City Works, miller's pond and Pearl; and on-line in Melic Rewiew, Poetic Voices, Worm #28 and Worm #29.

    A Noise, A Noise

PJ Nights lives by the sea, buys most of her books from the "wall of poetry" at the Gulf of Maine Bookstore, and teaches astronomy and physics at an inland urban high school. The banjo has been put aside for poetry, family, and work, but this is temporary (hopefully! she misses fiddle tunes!). You can read more of her work (and that of others') at her website from east to west: bicoastal verse where you will also find links to her work on the web and in print.


After Monstrous And Cruel Things
 

Michael Hettich has published twelve books of poetry, most of them chapbooks and limited editions. His poems and essays have appeared widely in such journals as The Cimarron Review, Hayden’s Ferry, The Literary Review, New Letters, TriQuarterly and Witness. He has two new books forthcoming in 2005. He lives with his family in Miami.

 Color Blind
 Several Ways To Vanish

Terry Lucas, an only child of a long-haul truck driver and a mother who never allowed him to "waste paper," grew up in the "four corners" area of New Mexico, where he spent weekends and summers inside discarded refrigerator boxes, writing and illustrating poems and short stories. While attending New Mexico State University, studying under the poet, Keith Wilson, he worked full time, making enough money to buy his own paper, and has been writing poems down ever since. Terry is a previous contributor to MiPoesias Magazine and has placed twice with the IBPC. He is also a featured poet for summer 2004 in from east to west. In print journals, his poetry appears or is forthcoming in Rosebud, Solo, and Grain Magazine (Canadian). For the past several years, Terry has lived on the west coast in both the US and Canada, and currently resides with his wife, Annie, and his son, Matt, in Chicago, where he is working on his MFA in Poetry at Columbia College.

  Eclipse 
 

Kate Evans's poetry, stories, and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The North American Review, Seattle Review, Santa Monica Review, The National Poetry Review, Under the Sun, Elixir, Rhino, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, and others.  Her book, Negotiating the Self:  Identity, Sexuality, and Emotion in Learning to Teach, was published by Routledge in 2002.  She lives in Santa Cruz, California and teaches at U.C. Santa Cruz. She can be reached at kattacruz@aol.com.  (visit web site)

 Two Women On A Summer Morning
 Above The Town 

Mia, editor of Tryst, was born in Korea. She graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor's in Creative Writing.  Her most recent poetry has been published at Lotus Blooms, Ariga, MiPo Zines, three candles, Pixiport and others.  Her archived work is available at Mentress Moon, Wired Hearts/Wired Art, Pierian Springs, Snow Monkey Press, and Comrades.


 Eleventh Hour Of Aquarius

Barbra Nightingale has had over 200 poems accepted for or published in numerous poetry journals and anthologies. Her latest manuscript, The Geometry of Dreams, explores the relationship between language and math, and is looking for a publisher.  Singing in the Key of L, her first full length collection, won the 1999 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Award and was published by the National Federation of Poetry Societies (June, 1999). She is a Professor of English at Broward Community College, South campus, Florida.

 Romancing the Numbers

 

Terri Carrion is assistant editor for Big Bridge magazine online and is last year’s director of FIU’s Study Abroad Program-Creative Writing in Dublin. Terri’s other poems have or will appear in Vox, Slipstream, Pearl, Mangrove, Hanging Loose, The Cream City Review, Penumbra, Paper Tiger, TigerTail, Street Miami, The Miami Sun Post monthly arts section Mad Love and online at BigBridge, Jack Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin and Poetic Inhalations. Her photography will be featured in the next issues of Jack magazine online, Dead Drunk Dublin and in print in Gulf Stream Magazine.


 How They Sneak Up On You

Steve Mueske holds an MFA in Writing from Hamline University and has published poems and short stories in Water-Stone, The American Poetry Journal, Redactions, 88, Typo Magazine, The Drunken Boat, Blaze, The Wisconsin Review, The South Dakota Review, Redactions, Diner, ArtWord Quarterly and others, and in the anthology Hymns to the Outrageous: an American Poetry Sampler.  Editor of the online literary arts journal three candles, he was a recent Pushcart Prize nominee and a runner up in the Winnow Press First Book Prize.  His first chapbook is Whatever the Story Requires (2004, Pudding House Press).  He can be reached at steve@threecandles.org.

Something Like Quiet
Still Life, With Mother

 

Zachary Schomburg has recent poems in Skein, La Petite Zine, Diagram, and Forklift, Ohio. He co-edits Octopus.

What I Found in the Forest
The Man with Two Arms
 

Lisa aka Djuana99 lives in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in MiPO, Junket, Writer's Hood & PoetrySZ.

  Happy Hour

Gwendolyn Mintz is a fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared in various online and print journals as well as four anthologies. Mintz lives with her children, turtles, cats and a dog in New Mexico. When she isn't writing, she designs teddy bears, reads and performs comedy. She is a former news writer and college instructor, but now writes creatively full-time.

 The Woman Who Gave Birth To Stones

Howard Camner is the author of 15 books of poetry. During his years in New York he was the headliner with the West End Poetry Troupe. He has had over 1400 poems published and his books are housed in prominent literary archives worldwide, including 10 historical archives and six royal libraries. He represents the United States in the Poet 2000 Sculpted Library in Dublin, an international exhibition of the works of contemporary poets. He resides in Miami, Florida with his wife and children.

    Tracks

 

Chuck Levenstein is a retired professor.  He has published poems widely on the internet.  His first collection of poems, Lost Baggage, was published by Loom Press.  His most recent non-fiction book is The Cotton Dust Papers (with G. DeLaurier and M.L. Dunn).

  Aria