at the age of 22 he gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.”  Today, he is more active than ever, writing and performing his poetry.  He has worked extensively with his friend Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist, at festivals and colleges and clubs.  He has given hundreds of reading in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale University, The National Biodiversity Conference at the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress.  He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award, and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting.  He has written twenty plays and musicals; fourteen books of poetry including Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror, and Plum Stones; eight books of plays; four collections of essays; and two novels, The Mad Cub and The Adept.  His songs include “Mercedes Benz,” popularized by Janis Joplin.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area hills with his wife, the sculptor, Amy Evans McClure.

grew up on the borderlands of California and Baja.  He organized farm workers with Cesar Chavez, studied poetry in graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, and lives near Taos, New Mexico.  Long associated with the Taos Poetry Circus and Mexican Bob’s Poetry Camp, he has published widely in journals across the United States and Europe.  Recent anthologies featuring his work include Venus in the Badlands (ed. J. Macker, Santa Fe, 2006), between sleeps: the 315 experiment 1993–2005 (ed. Dinsmore and Alley, Vancouver BC, 2006), and Wandering Hermit Review (Seattle, 2006).  Ranchos Press has published almost a dozen of his chapbooks in the last 10 years; Lost in the Chamiso (wild embers press 2006) is his first full – length book.  He performs his work frequently throughout New Mexico and the west in featured readings, seminars, television and radio, as well as on videos and CDs.

is an international public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero.”  He lives in London and Beirut.  He has had poems published in several dozen journals, four pamphlets, and in two full collections: A Cracked River (Slow Dancer Press, London, 1999), and Mourning in the Presence of a Corpse (Dar al – Jadeed, Beirut, 2008).  www.bertzpoet.com.

lives in Kittery Point, Maine.  Her chapbook What becomes of Words was published by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, and her poems have appeared in several journals, including Mid – American Review, The Comstock Review, Presence, Vineyards, and The Anthology of New England Writers.  She was selected in 2005 for the Maine Community Foundation’s Martin Dibner Fellowship in Poetry, and she is a recent MacDowell Artist Colony Fellow.