John Ashbery is the poet laureate of New York State and Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Among his many other awards and honors are a Bollingen Prize in Poetry; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (awarded by France); Robert Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America; and the Gold Medal for Poetry, American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1988. Mary Caponegro is Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing at Bard College. She is the author of four short story collections: Tales from the Next Village, The Star Café, Five Doubts, and the recently released The Complexities of Intimacy: Stories. Robyn Carliss, from Martha’s Vineyard, is working on a senior project in poetry and poetics at Bard. Jennifer Cazenave is from Bordeaux. She is translating the fiction of Boris Vian, and writing a senior project involving texts in French and English. Ian Dreiblatt has studied Russian, classics, and Ethiopian, and is writing a senior project in poetry at Bard. Mathias Göritz is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Bard College. He has taught at the University of Hamburg, and at universities in Kiel, Lübeck, and Lüneberg, Germany. He is the recipient of fellowships from Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation, Poet’s Exchange of the City of Marseille, Chicago/Hamburg Writers’ Exchange, and the Rudolf and Erika Koch Foundation. Bob Holman is Visiting Professor of Writing and Integrated Arts at Bard College. He produced a five-part series for PBS, The United States of Poetry, and coedited the accompanying book. He directed the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City for many years and coedited Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, winner of the American Book Award. He curates the annual People’s Poetry Festival in New York City, and directs New York’s newly opened Bowery Poet’s Café. Pierre Joris is professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany. A native of Luxemburg, he compiled and edited (with Jerome Rothenberg) a two-volume anthology of avant-garde poetry, Poems for the Millennium. He recently published a manifesto-essay, "Towards a Nomadic Poetics," and a book of poems from OtherWind Press. He also has translated Robert Kelly’s A Transparent Tree into French. Jeffrey Katz is Dean of Information Services and Director of Libraries at Bard College. He was a Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation Fellow in Poetry in 1990 and his work has appeared in many small press publications. Ann Lauterbach is Ruth and David E. Schwab II Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College and director of the writing program of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. In addition to her forthcoming volume of selected poems, If in Time (April 2001), her collections include On a Stair; And For Example; Clamor; Before Recollection; and Many Times, But Then. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and many other grants. Kimberly Lyons is the author of Abacadabra, a collection of poems published by Granary Books in 2001; Mettle, a limited edition collaboration with Ed Epping, also published by Granary; and several chapbooks. She has taught poetry workshops and worked at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. Thomas Meyer lives in the mountains of western North Carolina and the Yorkshire Dales. Much of his time over the past decade has been taken up by three collaborations with the late Sandra Fisher–Sappho, Sonnets & Tableaux, and Monotypes & Tracings. His most recent work is At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering of Poems 1972—1997. Nicole Peyrafitte, a native of France, modeled, cooked, and worked for theater and local television in Paris and Toulouse before moving to the United States, where she now resides in Albany, New York. Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages, writing, computer animation, voice works, and performances. Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College and codirector of Bard’s Workshop in Language and Thinking. The author of six books of poetry, she received the America Award in Belles-Lettres for M U S I C A G E, her book about and in collaboration with composer John Cage. A book of interrelated essays, The Poethetical Wager, and a book on Gertrude Stein are forthcoming from the University of California Press, Berkeley. Leonard Schwartz is Visiting Assistant Professor of Integrated Arts and First-Year Seminar at Bard College. He is the author of five poetry collections, and coeditor of An Anthology of New American Poetry and Primary Trouble. Schwartz was poet in residence at the Lacoste School of the Arts in France for two summers (1999, 2000). Jeffrey Sichel, Assistant Professor of Theater at Bard, is founder and artistic director of the Empty Space Theatre Company in New York City. He was a musical collaborator with Gordon Gano of the band Violent Femmes, and has worked with the New York Theatre Workshop, En Garde Arts, and Julie Taymor, director of The Lion King. Sichel was artist in residence at Bard’s Lacoste School of the Arts in France. John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and has contributed essays to many catalogues and monographs. His collections of poetry include Forbidden Entries, Berlin Diptychon, and Edificio Sayonara; books of criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol and The United States of Jasper Johns. He has written a book of short fiction titled My Symptoms; edited an anthology of fiction, Fetish; and coedited The Collected Poems of Fairfield Porter.