was born in Brooklyn, New York.  His poetry has won several awards including the 2004 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press for his sixth poetry collection, Somebody Stand Up and Sing (2005).  Other awards include two New York Foundation for the Arts grants (2003, 1990), a New York State Creative Artists Public Service grant (1971), and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1985, 1972, 1970).  His first book, Collecting Evidence, (Yale University Press), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (1970).  His fourth book, People Live, They Have Lives, (Miami University Press, Oxford, OH), was judged the winner of the Camden Poetry Award (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts, 1990).  His book Selected Poems: 1965–1995 received a 1995 Critics’ Choice “Best Books” citation and was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1995” by The Village Voice.  He has taught writing at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, Columbia University, the College of William and Mary, the New School University, and several other institutions.

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).