Robert Gibbons was recently nominated for The Pushcart Prize for his poem “Ode to New York City,” published in the Summer issue of Slow Trains. His work is forthcoming in: The American Journal of Print, Big Bridge, Canary River Review, Carnelian, The God Particle, In Posse Review, Janus Head, Small Spiral Notebook, Snow Monkey, and Taj Mahal Review(India). He has just been appointed Poetry Editor at Gargoyle. His second online chapbook of prose poems, Time on Water, appeared in the previous issue of The Drunken Boat.

Michel Haddad (1919 - 1996), the “father” of Arabic poetry in Israel, published 11 collections of poetry and an autobiographical work entitled From My Diary. A book entitled A Poet Under Scrutiny, written by a number of writers, critics and thinkers, and printed in 1992, expressed deep appreciation for Haddad's influence on poets writing in Arabic in Israel.

Schulamith Chava Halevy writes poetry in Hebrew and English. She has been anthologized in Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1997, Alan F. Peter, ed.). Her first book of (Hebrew) poetry, The Interior Castle, was published in 1998 (Eked, Tel-Aviv) and is being translated into Spanish; her second book, Mark of Abel, is in press (Carmel, Jerusalem). She researches the heritage of anusim, the crypto-Jewish descendents of the forced converts of fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal.

Barbara Hendryson grew up, lives, and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 literary journals and anthologies, including The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Montserrat Review, Kalliope, Bellingham Review, Coracle, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine and Speculon, as well as in anthologies from Queen of Swords Press, Beacon Press, Grayson Books, Mariposa Press, and many others. Her poetry recently won first prize in the Pen American Women's 2002 poetry competition. Also, this past summer she was awarded a literary artist's grant from the Peninsula Community Foundation. She recently served on the advisory board of the New England Writers.

Geoff Hargreaves is a playwright and translator who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. His translations of Fabio Morabito's Toolbox were published in 1999, and his translation of Carmen Boullosa's Leaving Tabasco is forthcoming in 2000.

Lisa Katz teaches literary translation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she has lived since 1983. Her translations of Israeli literature have appeared or will appear in American Poetry Review, Runes, Bridges, jubilat, the New Yorker and other magazines. Her poetry has appeared in Leviathan Quarterly (England), The Reading Room, The Mississippi Review and Nimrod; her chapbook Breast Art was featured in the Spring Issue. In the current issue, she is represented by her Elegy for Plath, her interview of Agi Mishol and translation from Mishol's The Dream Notebook.

Joan Logghe has lived in northern New Mexico with her husband since 1973 and raised three children, and built three houses. Her books include Sofia, Blessed Resistance, and Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man. Her awards include an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Barbara Deming Grant, and a Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship. She was co-editor of In Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico (reviewed in Spring 2000).

Khaled Mattawa is the author of two books of poetry, Zodiac of Echoes (forthcoming from Ausable Press) and Ismailia Eclipse (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). He has translated three books of contemporary Arabic poetry, the latest of which, Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef, is forthcoming this December from Graywolf Press. Mattawa has also co-edited Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.

rob mclennan is an Ottawa-based poet, editor & publisher, & a few other things besides. the author of over 45 poetry chapbooks, his 7th trade collection of poetry is paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press). the winner of the 1999 Canadian Authors Association / Air Canada Award for most promising writer (in any genre) in Canada under the age of 30, he has published work in seven countries, & read in three. the editor/publisher of above/ground press & STANZAS magazine (both 10 years old in 2003), he has edited a number of anthologies, including YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (with Andy Brown), side/lines: a new canadian poetics & GROUNDSWELL: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003. he is currently working on a novel, a collection of essays, a collection of interviews, & a multi-volume long poem titled "the other side of the mouth," among other things. He has a chapbook in this issue and an interview with Gil McElroy.

Eduardo Milán , born in Rivera, Uruguay, in 1952, has lived in Mexico since 1979. He has worked as a literary critic and university professor. The author of several poetry collections, his complete poetry was gathered in the volume Manto published in 1999. He has also published two volumes of literary criticism.

Agi Mishol (b. 1947 Hungary, in Israel since 1950), co-winner of the first Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize in 2002, is one of Israel's most well-known contemporary poets; she is also a farmer, and a teacher of poetry in the MA Creative Writing Program at Ben Gurion University, as well as other workshops venues, and a literary critic and translator. The Dream Notebook, her ninth book of poetry, was published in Israel in 2001. A comprehensive New and Selected Works, with an introduction by Professor Dan Miron, is forthcoming soon from Bialik Press (in Hebrew), as is a chapbook, Wax Flowers (Even Hoshen Press). Her poetry has appeared or will appear in the American Poetry Review, Speakeasy, The Mississippi Review Online, and in Leviathan Quarterly 2 & 4 (England), as well as other magazines, and in the anthology The Defiant Muse (Feminist Press/CUNY); a bilingual edition of 18 poems was published in Ireland in 1999. She is interviewed in this issue by Lisa Katz.

Harita Mona was born in Athens in 1969. She is a graduate of the Classics Department of the School of Philosophy, University of Athens and is working as a teacher and writer. She has cooperated with the American poet Don Schofield, in translating modern Greek poets into English and his own poems into Greek. Her translation of W. K. C. Guthrie's book Orpheus and Greek Religion has been published by Kardamitsa Publishers. She has published a multitude of articles in Greek magazines (Diavazo, Anikhnefsis, Avaton, Hellenic Mensa Magazine, Hermeion). She is the author of Neo-Paganism: the Rebirth of the Ancient Religion and her articles in English have appeared in SageWoman and The Beltane Papers, as well as the anthologies: Women and the Sacred, Ways of Knowledge, Typology, Sacred Greece, Predicting the Future, and The Revival of the Hellenic Religion. Her writing explores women's roles, alternative forms of religion and spirituality and the Hellenic tradition. She teaches offering seminars on ancient Greek literature and on self-exploration through myth.

Asher Reich was born in Jerusalem on September 5, 1937. He has been appearing in print in Israel since he received the Anne Frank Poetry Prize from the American Israel Cultural Foundation in 1961. Raised in Yeshivot in Jerusalem, Reich's first schooling was exclusively in religious studies, but his departure from the sequestered orthodox life at the age of eighteen brought him into western culture. Asher Reich is editor of the popular monthly journal of the Hebrew Writers' Association. Reich's poems have appeared in 20 languages, and his many books have won almost all of the prizes available to Israeli writers.

Pedro Serrano was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1957. He is the author of three poetry collections. He co-edited and translated a bilingual anthology of contemporary British poetry. He wrote the libretto for the opera Las Marimbas de l'Exil/El norte en Veracuz (music by Luc LeMasne) which was first performed in Besancon and then toured to Paris and Mexico. His translation of Shakespeare's King John is forthcoming.

Don Schofield , born in Nevada and raised in Northern California, has lived since 1980 in Athens, Greece, where he teaches literature, humanities and creative writing at the University of La Verne, Athens Campus. Poems, essays and translations of his have appeared in various American journals, including Seneca Review, New England Review, The Antioch Review and Partisan Review, as well as in journals in England, Ireland, Japan and Greece and on the World Wide Web. He is the recipient of a Roberts Writing Award (H.G. Roberts Foundation), the Cynthia Cahn Memorial Poetry Prize (Anhinga Press) and a Paumanok Poetry Award (SUNY). His first collection of poems, Approximately Paradise, is just out from University Press of Florida.

Ruth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915. She is author of eight books of poems and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1959, after her husband committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative writing at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. She lives in Vermont. For more biography and information on Ruth, see our interview in Spring 2000.

Roberto Téjada is a Los Angeles-born poetry, translator, and curator. His poetry has been featured in The Best American Poetry, 19996, and he is the author of Gift Verdict (Leroy, 1999) and Amulet Anatomy (Phylum, 2001). He has published critical reviews and writings on contemporary Latin American artists and photographers. AFter ten years in Mexico City, editing Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Tejada now lives in Buffalo, New York.

Mónica de la Torre edited and translated a volume of selected poems by Gerardo Denix published by Lost Roads and Ditoria in 2000. She is coauthor (with artist Terence Gower) or Appendices, Illustrations & Notes (Smart Art Press, 19999). She was brought up in Mexico City and moved to New York in 1993 when she received a Fulbright to study for a MFA in poetry at Columbia University.

George Wallace is author of six chapbooks of poems, including a group of poems published in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of California statehood. swimming through water, his first full length collection of poems, translated by Anny Ballardini and published bi-lingually by La Finestra, is introduced to the Italian and American markets by Paolo Ruffilli and Mary de Rachewiltz. Wallace is editor of www.poetrybay.com, and co-hosts poetrybrook usa, a poetry radio show streamed on line from Stonybrook University, at www.wusb.org. A wide sampling of his work may be found in the editorial board section of www.poetrybay.com.

Kenneth Wolman grew up in the Bronx, has degrees from Hunter College and SUNY-Binghamton, and has lived in various parts of New Jersey since 1976. He currently lives in Sea Bright, on the Jersey Shore. He works sporadically as a technical writer and editor. In 1995 he was a Fellow in Poetry of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and was a 1996 scholarship awardee of the White River Writers Workshop at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas. He has published in both print and electronic venues, including The Paterson Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Carnelian, Blue Fifth Review, Talus & Scree, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Conspire, The Doomed City, and Defined Providence.

Linda Stern Zisquit was born in Buffalo, New York and educated at Tufts University, Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo. She has published two full-length collections of poetry, Ritual Bath (Broken Moon Press, Seattle, WA, 1993) and Unopened Letters (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 1996) as well as a number of translations from the Hebrew including Desert Poems of Yehuda Amichai (Schocken Press, Tel Aviv, 1991), The Book of Ruth (with woodcuts by Maty Grunberg, Osband Press, London, 1997) and Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, 1997) for which she won an NEA Translation Grant and a PEN Translation Award nomination. She has lived in Israel since 1978 with her husband and five children; she teaches in the Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) MA Creative Writing Program and runs an art gallery in Jerusalem. The poems included in The Drunken Boat are from her new manuscript of poems, The Face in the Window.