Emily Carmen: was born in Lexington, Massachusetts. Pursuing an interest in languages and the arts, she attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she attained a degree in Literature and Languages. Recently, she earned a Masters Degree in Mind/Body Psycotherapy through the Independent Studies Program at Leslie University in Cambridge, Massachusetts culminating with a research paper on Alternative Healing Modalities for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Her poetry represents a sincere attempt to come to terms with life-so-far, and to cultivate an awareness of her place in the sphere of day to day existence.
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Melissa Crowe:  earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, and Seneca Review.  She writes and makes art in Portland, Maine, where she lives with her husband, Mark, and their daughter, Annabelle.
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William Heyen:  was born in Brooklyn New York in 1940.  He is professor of English and Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater.  A former Senior Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has won NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and other fellowships and awards.  He is the editor of American Poets in 1976, The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, and September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.  His work had appeared in over 300 periodicals including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New Yorker, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, and in 200 anthologies.  His books include, Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology, The Host: Selected Poems, Erika: Poems of the Holocaust, and others.  Carnegie-Mellon University Press has recently released his first book, Depth of Field (LSU P, 1970) in its Classic Contemporaries Series.  Etruscan Press has just released his new book of poems, A Poetics of Hiroshima.
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Joanne Kyger:  studied at University of California, Santa Barbara. She moved to San Francisco in 1957 and became involved in the beat poetry scene.  In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan, where they soon married.  She later traveled to India with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky.  She returned to the United States in 1964 and her first book, The Tapestry and the Web was published the next year.  Kyger has published more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including, Going On: Selected Poems, 1958-1980, (1983) and Just Space: Poems, 1979-1989, (1991).  She has lived in Bolinas, California since 1968, where she has edited the local newspaper and done some occasional teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.  In 2000, her 1981 collection of autobiographical writings was republished as Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals, 1960-1964, which Anne Waldman has called “one of the finest books ever in the genre of ‘journal writing’.”  More recent poetry collections include God Never Dies (Blue Press), The Distressed Look (Coyote Books), Again (La Alameda Press), and As Ever: Selected Poems published by Penguin Books.  Her most recent book is About Now: Collected Poems from National Poetry Foundation.  It won the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Poetry.
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Steve Luttrell:  founded The Café Review  twenty years ago and remains the publishing editor.  We, who know him, applaud and congratulate him on this long-standing “service to the muse.” He was born and continues to live in Portland, Maine, is a graduate of Franklin Pierce College, and is the author of ten books of poetry.  His latest title, Twelve Moons, Twelve Poems, is currently available.  He is married to Catherine who has a phenomenal handwriting.
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Peter Money:  his work has been found in The American Poetry Review, Provincetown Arts, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Talisman, The Hawaii Review, The North Dakota Quarterly, Origin, Hunger Mountain, Rivendell, Napalm Health Spa, in the City Lights’ anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, among others.  His books include These Are My Shoes (1991), Finding It: Selected Poems (2000), To day—Minutes Only (2004) with Iraqi exile modernist Saadi Yousef, the CD Blue Square, and the underground novella, Che (2006 -2008).  He has been founder or cofounder of the literary magazines, Writers Bloc (1985), Lame Duck (1988), and Across Borders (2005).  He lives on a foothill of Mt. Ascutney, in Vermont, with his librarian wife and son and daughter.  He directs a new Associate of Arts program at Lebanon College in NH and teaches courses such as “A Seminar In Form and Flux” at The Center For Cartoon Studies in VT.
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Joanne Lowery:  her poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Birmingham Poetry Review, Eclipse, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, Atlanta Review, and Poetry East.  Her most recent recollection is, Jack: A Beanstalk Life from Snark Publishing.  She lives in Michigan.
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Jack Myers:  the 2003-04 Texas Poet Laureate, and Professor of English and creative writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is the author of sixteen books of and about poetry, including: Routine Heaven (2005), the textbook The Poet’s Portable Workshop (Wadsworth, 2004) and The Glowing River: New & Selected Poems (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), winner of The Violet Crown Award.  Others include OneOnOne (Autumn House Press, 1999) and Blindsided (Godine, ’93) winner of the 1993 Texas Institute of Letters Award, and an anthology of contemporary poetry coedited with Roger Weingarten, New American Poets of the 90s.  He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Texas Institute Awards, is a National Poetry Series Open Competition winner, and Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at several universities.  He served as the co-Vice-President for Associated Writing Programs from 1993-95, as well as Chairman of The Writer’s Garret, a Dallas literary center founded by his wife Thea Temple.
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normal:  lives in Saugerties, New York.
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Ed Sanders:  achieved fame in the counterculture world of the 60’s as poet, magazine founder, and leading force of The Fugs, a satirical folk rock protest band.  In 1962, he founded his infamous avant-garde journal, F**k You: A Magazine of the Arts.  Two years later, he opened the famous Peace Eye Bookstore, in Greenwich Village which became an international Mecca for Bohemians and radicals.  Later, he achieved national recognition for his 1971 book, The Family, a study of mass murderer Charles Manson and his followers that was critiqued as “excellent” and “terrifying.”  His poetry has been likened in energy and ambition to William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg, blending slang, neologisms, classical Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.  His book 1968: A History in Verse (1997), was named the Poetry Book of The Year.  If you haven’t heard Ed’s CD, “Songs in Ancient Greek,” (1990) you haven’t heard the epitome of scholastic lyrical poetry.  He not only wrote but is exemplary of Tales of Beatnik Glory.  Ed lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, the writer and painter, Miriam R. Sanders.  Together they publish the Woodstock Journal.
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Natasha Sajé:  is the author of two books of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and Bend (Tupelo, 2004), and many essays.  She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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Dan Stryk:  originally from the “cornlands” west of Chicago, he now lives among the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia, in Bristol.  He has published seven collections of poems and prose parables, including The Artist and the Crow (Purdue UP) and Solace of the Aging Mare (The Mid-America Press). Dimming Radiance, a fusion of Far Eastern and Western concepts and writing forms, was released by Wind Publications in fall, 2008.  His work continues to appear in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, and was anthologized in Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (UVA Press).  He has held an NEA Poetry Fellowship, among other writing awards.
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Lucien Stryk:  has been a presence in American letters for sixty-five years.  His international reputation is based, not only on his own work, but also on his ground-breaking translations of Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry.  Influenced by poets as diverse as Walt Whitman, Paul Eluard, and the great haiku master, Basho, Stryk’s work provides a striking example of how poetry can evoke the universal by focusing on the particular.  His two edited anthologies, Heartland (1967) and Heartland II (1975), have become important documents in the history of U.S. Midwest poetry.  He served on the Northern Illinois University faculty from 1958 until his retirement in 1991, has taught at universities in Japan, and was a Fulbright lecturer both in Japan and in Iran.  Stryk has written or edited more than two dozen volumes of poetry, collections, and translations of Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry.
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Philip A. Waterhouse:  lives in Sonoma, California.  This is his first appearance in The Café Review.
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