began his literary career in the late 1950s working primarily as a translator.  He is responsible for the first English appearances of Paul Celan and Günter Grass.  Hawk’s Well Press published his first book, White Sun, Black Sun, in 1960.  In 1974, he moved to California to teach at the University of California, San Diego.  He has published over seventy books and pamphlets of poetry.  His books have been translated into multiple languages; two of them have been turned into stage plays and performed in several states.  He has translated an enormous amount of world literature, including Pablo Picasso and Vítezslav Nezval.  He is probably best known for his work in ethnopoetics, a term he coined, involving the synthesis of poetry, linguistics, anthropology, and ethnology.  Through it he sought to perpetuate fading oral and written literary legacies of the world and render them relevant and necessary to modern literature.  His 1968 anthology, Technicians of the Sacred, a collection of African, American, Asian and Oceanic poetics, went beyond mere folk songs and included the texts and scenarios for ritual events and both visual and sound poetry.  His numerous awards and honors include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; two PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Awards; two PEN Center USA West Translation Awards; and the San Diego Public Library’s Local Author Lifetime Achievement Award.  In 1997 he received a Doctorate of Letters from the State University of New York and was elected to the World Academy of Poetry in 2001.  He remains teaching at the University of California, San Diego, where he is an emeritus professor of visual arts and literature.

has been a Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine since 1981.  He spent a sabbatical semester as Balkan Scholar at the American University in Bulgaria teaching American poetry and 20th century fiction, and returned there again as a Fulbright professor.  A second Fulbright award brought him as Senior Scholar to Minya University in Upper Egypt.  His sojourns in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have had a major impact on his teaching and writing.  He is a widely published American poet whose books include, Whole Horse, No Snake, No Paradise, and most recently, The Origins of Tragedy, published by CavanKerry Press.  His work appears regularly in The Paris Review.   He is the founder of the Stonecoast Writers Conference and lives in Portland, Maine.

was born in 1942 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  His father was a bootlegger who also traded cars, his mother a housewife who also helped with the bootlegging.  Around the age of 13, he began scribbling his thoughts and poems in spiral notebooks.  In high school he discovered contemporary literature and started a little magazine called The White Dove Review.  In its five issues (1958 –1960) the magazine published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones, Ted Berrigan, and others. In 1960 he moved to New York City to attend Columbia College where he studied English and Comparative Literature.  During his college years, he published his work in a number of “underground” literary magazines.  In 1965–66 he was able to spend a year in Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship, studying and translating 20th – century French literature. which he did for the next nine years.  He served as Director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1978–1980, then took the position of Publications Director at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, the nonprofit organization that specializes in teaching imaginative writing to children. There he edited and wrote books on that subject for 20 years.  His extensive list of publications includes: Poems I Guess I Wrote, (Cuz Editions, 2001); You Never Know, (Coffee House Press, 2002); Oklahoma Tough, (University of Oklahoma, 2003); and How to Be Perfect, (Coffee House Press, 2008).

is the author of twenty books of poetry, plays, and fiction, the most recent of which are Solitary Workwoman, (Junction Press, 2011), Journey to Purity, (Texture Press, 2009), and Plays by Rochelle Owens, (Broadway Play Publishing, 2000).  A pioneer in the experimental off – Broadway theatre movement and an internationally known poet, she has received Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle.  Her plays have been presented worldwide and in festivals in Edinburgh, Avignon, Paris, and Berlin.  Her play Futz, which is considered a classic of the American avant – garde theatre, was produced by Ellen Stewart at LaMama, directed by Tom O’Horgan and performed by the LaMama Troupe in 1967, and was made into a film in 1969.  A French language production of Three Front was produced by France – Culture and broadcast on Radio France.  She has held fellowships from the NEA, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and numerous other foundations.  She has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Oklahoma and held residencies at Brown and Southwestern Louisiana State.