Prose writer, travel photographer, and Internet technologist, Namit Arora has lived in four countries, visited dozens more, and now divides his time between San Francisco and New Delhi. He is currently at work on his first novel. For more information, visit www.shunya.net.

Beau Blue lives, works and plays in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California and in a virtual world known as Blue's Cruzio Cafe, at http://members.cruzio.com/~cafe on the internet.

Robet Bohm is a poet and culture writer. He was born in Queens, New York. His new chapbook, Uz Um War Moan Ode, is available from Pudding House Press. His other credits include two books, another chapbook and work published in a variety of print and online publications.

In the early 1980s, after his poetry volume In the Americas won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best book of poetry by a new U.S. writer, Bohm increasingly wrote in isolation. Eventually, for all practical purposes, he disappeared as a writer. During the following 20-plus years, Bohm continued his work in private, producing the equivalent of over a thousand book-pages of poetry. He is currently seeking publishers for 11 manuscripts.

More information on Bohm's work, including excerpts from new as well as older writings, can be found at his website, Unburials: The Writer as Graverobber, and blog, Lethal Injections for the Conditioned Mind.

Garth Buckner's writing has appeared in the literary magazine Tin House, among other places. He lives in Nassau with his wife and two sons and is currently at work on his next novel. The fiction in this issue is from The Origins of Solitude, his first novel.

Janet Butler, originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, re-located to the Bay Area after many years in central Italy, arriving with a suitcase in one hand and a rescued Border Collie/Springer Spaniel mix (a very beautiful mix, she would add), Fulmi, in the other. While in Italy she collaborated with Romeo Giuli in the translation of his poetry and a selection was published by Solveig Publishing House, Siena, Italy. Ms. Butler then decided, in 2004, to dedicate herself to her own writing. Her poems have since appeared in Scrivener's Pen, ken*again, JMWW, Prose Toad, SubtleTea, Carnelian, Mannequin Envy, The Penwood Review, Miller's Pond, Spiky Palm, Wild Violet, Slow Trains, Flutter, The Green Muse, Wild Violet and others.

Future publications include Niederngasse, Amarillo Bay, The Persistent Image and The Indented Pillow, 2008. She was featured writer for Sage of Consciousness, 2005 and an online chapbook, Eden Fables, will be published by Language and Culture, 2007. One of her poems has been selected for inclusion in an upcoming Anthology to be published by Mannequin Envy.

Her watercolors have been featured on ken*again, Scrivener's Pen, and Ascent Magazine.

Born in 1981, Australian Sam Byfield's first chapbook From the Middle Kingdom is available through Pudding House Press. He has been published or is forthcoming in print and online magazines including Meridian, Diner, the 2007 Outside Voices Anthology, The Pedestal Magazine, Stirring and many others. He was shortlisted for the Sundress 2006 Best of the Net Anthology and is an editorial assistant at Lily Lit Review. He currently lives in Changchun, north east China, where he teaches English, studies Mandarin, writes and eats a lot of dumplings.

Patrick Carrington teaches creative writing in New Jersey, and is the poetry editor at Mannequin Envy (www.mannequinenvy.com). His manuscript Thirst (Codhill, 2007), winner Codhill Press' 2006 Poetry Chapbook Award, has just been released (www.codhill.com). His work has appeared recently (or is forthcoming) in The Connecticut Review, The Potomac Review, Rattle, Poetry Southeast, The Evansville Review, The New York Quarterly, and other journals. His first collection, Rise, Fall and Acceptance (MSR Publishing, 2006), was released in December by Main St. Rag Press (www.mainstreetrag.com).

Website: mannequinenvy.wordpress.com/patrick-carrington-poetry-editor-2.

Jared Carter's latest collection, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, is available from Wind Publications (windpub.com/books/bridgewalk.htm). For more information about Jared Carter and his work, please visit his website at jaredcarter.com.

Dan Chelotti has been published in several journals, including Boston Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Dusie and Kulture Vulture. He just published his first chapbook, The Eights, out from the PSA and introduced by Yusef Komunyakaa.

Sean Cooke served for 5 years in the U.S. Military as an interrogator and Russian linguist. During his time in the military, he was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and his writing is deeply influenced by those experiences. Sean is currently a full time student pursuing a degree in Ethnic, Gender and Labor Studies with a minor in Human Rights.

John Michael Cummings' short stories have appeared in North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. His story "The Scratchboard Project," which appeared last year in The Iowa Review, has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. He has fiction forthcoming this year in The Chattahoochee Review and he Kenyon Review.

In addition, his first novel will be published by Penguin in early 2008..

Darren C. Demaree's work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Good Foot, Karamu, HazMat Review, Goliard, Nuthin Zine, Offerings, and on poetz.com. He is currently shopping his first manuscript, a collection of poems entitled Small Weird Loves. Darren lives in Central Ohio, and is convinced that it might snow at any moment, despite the temperature and the laws of weather that might follow it.

G.F. Diaz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and now resides in Denver, Colorado, working as a photographer, writer, and serial entrepreneur.

Diaz's digitally-constructed collages, explore the concept of visual metaphor, by infusing the imagery of nature, chaos and survival, with the artist's own human experience. Diaz hopes to create a connection in the physical with intangible symbolism, as an inquiry into the very essence of our perception.

Her work has been featured in publications and venues such as Twenty3 Magazine, TIE Film Festival, Eclectic Fusion, Blue Fifth Review, and Jen Beckman Review. Diaz is the editor-in-chief of Ghetto Pubs and founder of ARTiculation Collective.

Paul Dickey's poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry, The Cider Press Review, Swink Online, Rattle, and other online and print journals. His collection They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was a finalist in the 2005 Red Mountain Review chapbook contest. Biographical information and additional notes on previous publishing activity can be found at mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/dickey.htm.

AnnMarie Eldon, an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England. She was taught by her gypsy grandmother to say the alphabet backwards before the age of three. Juggling various personae interiorae, children and hormones and practicing counter-cultural reclusiveness, she achieves adult differentiation and spiritual equanimity within the mediocrity of a picturesque Oxfordshire market town.

Her poetry has been published in 5 Trope, Arabesques, Argotist, mprsnd, Blazevox, Caffeine Destiny, Lily, Moria, Nthposition, Niederngasse, No Tell Motel, Sentinel, Shampoo, Stirring, Tears In the Fence, xPressed, annd zafusy, among others.

She edits Web Del Sol's Writers Block and features in the Women of the Web Anthology.

Website: annmarieeldon.blogspot.com

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Spring Tide, winner of the Aldrich Poetry Award (Aldrich Museum, 2005). New poems appear or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Silk Road, Eleventh Muse, Pebble Lake Review, and the anthology Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

Annalynn Hammond's poetry has appeared in Diagram, Tarpaulin Sky, Failbetter, Spork, Runes, Slipstream, and elsewhere. She received the 2005 Literal Latte Poetry Award and the 2004 Marc Penka Poetry Award. She lives in Wisconsin.

Ed Higgins' poems have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.'s Pocket Field Guide, Monkeybicycle and Bellowing Ark, as well as the online journals Lily, Cross Connect and Red River Review, among others. He lives on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including an emu named To & Fro. He teaches writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR.

Jnana Hodson's work has appeared recently in Illuminations: Expressions of the Personal Spiritual Experience, from Celestial Arts, and Going Down Swinging, in Australia. He is also the author of two published novels, including the recent Ashram: Adventures on a Yoga Farm.

Nicole Hyde's preferred medium is oil paint. With each subject, she strives to portray tension and mystery through the use of light, color, and texture. In her still lifes, she believes in simplicity in composition and a bit of whimsy in the staging. By using various techniques, her goal is to create a sense of space and depth and encourage the viewer to provide their own narrative.

Her new work is an exploration into those physical spaces that shape not only one's environment, but also, an inner life. She calls them Elemental Landscapes -- landscapes that evoke an emotional tug-of-war between awe and isolation.

A transplanted Canadian, it is now her great joy to share a Colorado studio and a wonderful art-life with her husband Wes, a noted contemporary western artist and plein air painter.

Kevin P. Keating's essays and fiction have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Smokebox, Fringe, Perigee, Megaera, Double Dare Press, Identity Theory, Plum Ruby Review, Fiction Warehouse, Fifth Street Review, Juked, The Oklahoma Review, Slow Trains,, Numb Magazine, Tattoo Highway, Exquisite Corpse, Thunder Sandwich, and many others.

Website: www.kevinpkeating.blogspot.com

Michael Kimball has published two novels, The Way the Family Got Away (2000) and How Much of Us There Was (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His third novel, Dear Everybody, will be published in the UK in the fall of 2007. He has also published many pieces in many literary magazines, including, most recently, Open City, Prairie Schooner, New York Tyrant, and Post Road. He lives in Baltimore with his wife.

Becca Klaver is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She's an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago, where she also teaches and helps edit the Columbia Poetry Review. A poet-in-residence through the Chicago Poetry Center, she's also a founding editor of Switchback Books, a feminist poetry press.

Bryan Larsen was born and raised in the Salt Lake City area, and has been interested in Art as long as he can remember. He studied Illustration at Utah State University and originally aspired to children's book illustration. The need to pay the bills led him to cut the program short, and he got a job as a cabinet maker, painting in his spare time. He sold his first painting in 2000 and for the next three years made a touch-and-go attempt to make a living as a full time Artist, filling in the gaps with occasional stints in the wood shop.

Eventually he became convinced that he would have to make a living in some other field, and cabinetry, while rewarding in its way, was not a long term option. He turned to his second favorite subject, Mathematics, and entered the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Utah. Once again, Art was relegated to his spare time.

Paintings continued to sell, however, and after two years of engineering and a considerable amount of thought, he concluded that while there were more than enough talented engineers, there was room a few more Artists, and that he would never be truly satisfied as a weekend oil painter. So with the support of his wife, Sara, he decided to make a final commitment to a career as a professional artist. He is currently painting full time in his home studio in Draper, Utah, and is represented by Quent Cordair Fine Art in Burlingame, California.

Robert Lietz is a professor of English and Creative Writing (fiction and poetry) at Ohio Northern University. Nearly 500 of his poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals in the U.S. and Canada, including Agni Review, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Northern American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Seven collections of poems have been published, including Running in Place (L'Epervier Press), At Park and East Division ( L'Epervier Press), The Lindbergh Half-century (L'Epervier Press), The Inheritance (Sandhills Press), and Storm Service (Basfal Books). Basfal also published After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems.

He has completed several print and hypertext (hypermedia) collections of poems for publication, including Character in the Works: Twentieth-Century Lives, West of Luna Pier, Spooking in the Ruins, Keeping Touch, and Eating Asiago & Drinking Beer.

Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, a novel out now from Calamari Press. His fiction and poetry has appeared in dozens of journals, including: Bomb, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, The Mississippi Review, Blackbrid, and Nerve. He teaches an experimental fiction workshop at The New School.

Giuliana Mammucari was born and raised in Rome. She lived 41 long years away from her beloved Eternal City, where she has finally returned to live. Politically very active and poetically very non-prolific, she now commutes regularly between Rome and New York. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Grisella Martinez is a native of Washington, D.C., by way of El Paso, Texas. She was formerly awarded a Young Emerging Artist grant in poetry from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and her most recent work can be found in The Baltimore Review. Her other passions include advocating for immigrant rights and flamenco dance.

Caroline Marwitz is a technical editor, writer, and painter who lives in northern Colorado. Her book of essays, Naming The Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship (High Plains Press: 2001), details the passing of time in Wyoming's beautiful, wind-scoured Laramie Basin.

Dale McLain is a suburban wife and mother who lives just north of Dallas, Texas. She considers art her first language and works in many mediums with collage being her current passion. Her poetry has been published online and in print.

Website: http://seadreamstudio.net/

Jim McNitt has been engaged in fine-arts photography since the 1990s using a combination of traditional silver-halide materials, digital techniques and 3D-computer graphics.

Like the Surrealists of the 1920s and '30s -- especially Max Ernst and Rene Magritte -- his aim is to make the imagination visible. For as long as he can remember, he has been fascinated by the way visual meaning is conveyed -- and confused -- by symbols.

Previously, he worked as a marine photojournalist, author, and editor for Newsweek International Special Projects. His marine photos appeared on more than 200 magazine and book covers and are owned by nearly a dozen museums as well as individual collectors. Past corporate clients include Apple Computer, Canon, Club Med, Chris-Craft, Compaq, Dassault Falcon Jet, IBM, Gulfstar Yachts, Kodak, The Moorings, NEC, Nissan, and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

Howard Miller, after a 30-year hiatus, began writing poetry again in 2000 and has had work in such online publications as 3rd Muse, Writer's Hood, Prairie Poetry, Laughter Loaf, The Adroitly Placed Word, and Poetry Super Highway. Having retired from college teaching in 2003, he's now catching up on all that reading he put off.

Joyce Nower's latest book of poetry is The Qin Warriors and Other Poems (Avranches Press, 2003). Recent poetry has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Earth's Daughters, The American Poetry Journal, Terminus, Slant, Visions-International, Andwerve, and Poemeleon. Currently she writes a column of poetry criticism for the The Alsop Review.

After almost a decade of working as a freelance photographer in Europe, Maurice Oliver returned to America in 1990 to work for the Los Angeles Times. Then, in 1995, he made a life-long dream reality by traveling around the world for eight months. But instead of taking pictures, he recorded the experience in a journal, which eventually became dozens of poems. And so began his desire to be a poet. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, Circle Magazine, The MAG, Tryst3 Journal, Eye-Shot, Pebble Lake Review, Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review (India), Dandelion Mag (Canada), Stride Magazine (UK), Retort Magazine (Australia), & online at unlikelystories.org, lilylitreview.com, thievesjargon.com, interpoetry.com (UK), kritya.com (India), blueprintreview.de (Germany) and elsewhere. He is the editor of Concelebratory Shoehorn Review. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a private tutor. His blog is: www.copyat5.blogspot.com

Rumit Pancholi is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Notre Dame. His poetry has appeared in Banyan Review and Double Dare Press, among other places.

Kathryn Rantala is co-editor with Cooper Renner and publisher of Ravenna Press; editor of The Anemone Sidecar; publisher of Snow Monkey, edited by John Burgess. Her third book, The Plant Waterer and other things in common, appeared in 2006.

Farrah Sarafa is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She was the second place winner of the Marjorie Rappaport Poetry competition, (University of Michigan) spring 2003. Her poems have recently appeared in Tablets multicultural journal, Arabesqes, and the Litchfield Review.

Steve Sieren was born in Sun Valley, California, minutes from downtown Los Angeles; a place of never ending sidewalks far from nature. Owing his appreciation of the earth's beauty to his father for taking him out to the wild wilderness from time to time. The photographs are captured the same way any single person gazes out into the natural world in silence for a moment and realizes that the earth has captured you and your emotion. It is yours to protect and cherish for generations to come. He hopes to travel farther and farther as the present fades away and would like to thank everyone that has helped him out through life's seemingly endless journey.

website: www.Sierenphotography.com

Mark Spencer is the author of the novels Love and Reruns in Adams County (Random House) and The Weary Motel (Backwaters Press) and two collections of short stories. His work has received the Faulkner Society Faulkner Award, The Omaha Prize for the Novel, The Cairn short fiction Prize, the Bradshaw Book Award, and four Special Mentions in Pushcart Prize. He is Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Lynn Strongin will have had 14 books published by mid-2007. She will have two books published in winter / spring 2007: Rembrant's Smock (Plain View Press, Austin) (her first full length collection of poems in three decades) and The Girl with the Copper-Colored Hair (Conflux Press). Her work appears in over eighty journals, forty anthlogies. Her anthology THE SORROW PSALMS: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy was published by the University of Iowa Press, 2006, and was nominated "Book of the Month" in England's "Poetry Kit." Two Pushcart nominations for poems in 2006.

Luke Tennis has published short stories in Antietam Review, Connecticut Review, Northwest Review, Puerto Del Sol and elsewhere. His novella, Bernardo the Daredevil, won the St. Andrews College First Novella Award and was published by St. Andrews Press in 2004. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and has just completed a new novel.