Ammiel Alcalay's poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles, and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Nation, and various other publications. His books include Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture.

Greg Ames lives in Brooklyn. His stories have appeared in Fiction International, The Sun, McSweeney's, Literal Latte, and Other Voices.

Jill Bialosky is the author of two books of poetry, The End of Desire and Subterranean (Alfred A. Knopf), and a novel, House Under Snow (Harcourt). She lives in New York City.

Julia Bolus is literary assistant to playwright Arthur Miller, academic director of Kent School Summer Writers Camp, and cofounder of Digital Dream Multimedia. She also works as an archivist and researcher. A play based on her most recent collection of poems, Circus of Infinite Attractions, premiered at the 2001 New York International Fringe Festival. Selected poems and more about the book/theater piece can be found on her site, www.circusplay.com.

William Bowers is a South Carolinian in Florida. He has written about music for The Oxford American, Magnet, No Depression, and Pitchforkmedia.com. He went through a phase of publishing poems in small places, such as The Wallace Stevens Journal and Sonora Review. A book is forthcoming from Harcourt.

Peg Boyers is executive editor of Salmagundi magazine. She is most recently the author of Hard Bread, a book of poems.

Marcelle Clements's novel, Midsummer, from which Reliable Alchemy is an outtake, was published in May by Harcourt. Her previous books include The Dog Is Us, a collection of essays, and Rock Me, a novel.

Marcel Cohen's most recent book is Faits: Lectures courante ˆ l'usage des grands dŽbutants (Gallimard, 2002). Two of his earlier books have been translated into English, Mirrors (Green Integer, 1998) and The Emperor Peacock Moth (Burning Deck, 1995).

Rick DeMarinis is the author of seven novels, including A Clod of Wayward Marl, his latest; five collections of short stories; and The Art and Craft of the Short Story. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic, GQ, and many literary quarterlies. In 1990, he won a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his collection, Borrowed Time: New and Selected Stories, won the 1999 Independent Book Publishers Award for best book of short fiction. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Lori Ellison is the Mary Poppins of Tribeca.

Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of seven books of poetry, in print at Liveright/Norton and Overlook/Viking, most recently, The Traveler's Calendar. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other magazines. He is also the author of biographies of Nat King Cole and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jack Fitzgerald grew up in southern Vermont, and for the time being he resides in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first published story.

Jason Fox is an artist who lives in Poughkeepsie, New York. He is represented by Feature Inc. in New York City.

Carolyn Forché's new collection Blue Hour was published this spring by HarperCollins. Her previous collections are The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches in the graduate writing program at George Mason University.

Peter Gizzi's latest book is Artificial Heart. He has two new limited-edition chapbooks: Revival with artwork by David Byrne and Fin Amore with artwork by George Herms. His new book, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in fall 2003.

Jesse Goldstein shares his birthday with Barry Hannah and lives off the most beautiful train in Brooklyn. This is his first published story.

Eamon Grennan is from Dublin and teaches at Vassar College, where he is the Dexter M. Ferry, Jr. Professor of English. He has also taught recently at Villanova University, New York University, and Columbia University. His most recent collections are Relations: New & Selected Poems and Still Life with Waterfall.

Tom Healy owned one of the first contemporary art galleries in Chelsea. He is now president of Creative Time. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Salmagundi, LIT, Drunken Boat and the anthologies Tigertail and Aroused. He lives in New York and Miami.

Christoph Heemann lives in Germany where he was born in 1964. Since 1983 he has worked on music with various projects and individuals (Mirror, Mimir, Jim O'Rourke, Current 93, Keiji Haino, et cetera) and has also recorded albums under his own name. He operates the Streamline label and has enjoyed graphic work ever since he can remember.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is a teaching fellow in the MFA poetry program at George Mason University. She is the founding editor of Frantic Egg: A Mini-Journal of Poetry, and she is a member of the editorial board at the Word Works. Her publications include the journals Rattapallax, Phoebe, and Heliotrope, and her awards include the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the Virginia Downs Poetry Award, and a scholarship to attend a poetry workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Fanny Howe's book of poems, Gone, was published this spring, and a collection of essays, The Wedding Dress, will be published this fall, both by University of California Press.

Suji Kwock Kim's first book, Notes from the Divided Country, won the 2002 Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, and was published by Louisiana State University Press in April. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, DoubleTake, Threepenny Review, Tin House, and other journals. Currently she is assistant professor of English at Drew University.

Chuck Kinder's most recent novel is Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale. ÒThe Girl With No FaceÓ is a chapter from his forthcoming metamemoir, The Last Mountain Dancer. He is the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Joanna Klink's first book of poems, They Are Sleeping, was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana.

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, a founding member of the New Politeness, is a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University. This is her first publication.

Joan Larkin's poetry collections are Housework, A Long Sound, Sor Juana's Love Poems (co-translated with Jaime Manrique), and Cold River. The Living, her play about AIDS, was produced at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She teaches poetry writing at Sarah Lawrence and New England College.

Elizabeth Macklin has published two collections of poems, A Woman Kneeling in the Big City and You've Just Been Told. In 1999Ð2000 she spent an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship year studying the Basque language in Bilbao, Spain. She lives in New York City.

Donna Masini's books include That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press) and the novel, About Yvonne, (W. W. Norton). A recipient of NEA and NYFA grants, her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Boulevard, and others. She is a professor of English at Hunter College. Her new collection of poems, Turning to Fiction, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

Richard Matthews is the author of The Mill Is Burning (Grove Press, 2002). He lives in New York City.

Stu Mead lives in Berlin and exhibits his work at Endart, Berlin. From 1991Ð1997 he collaborated with Frank Gaard on a zine called Manbag, which is available as a compilation published by le Dernier Cri, Marseille. His new book, Miniput, will come out this year, also from le Dernier Cri.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in Bosnia in 1960, and was educated at the University of Sarajevo. In 1994, with five other Bosnian writers, he received the Hellman-Hammet Award from PEN for persistence in preserving democracy in the midst of war. Mehmedinovic arrived in the United States as a political refugee in 1996, and he is currently living in Alexandria, Virginia. His books include Sarajevo Blues (1998) and Nine Alexandrias, forthcoming next fall; both are from City Lights and translated from the Bosnian by Ammiel Alcalay.

Jane Miller's book-length poem, A Palace of Pearls, will be out in 2004 from Copper Canyon Press.

Honor Moore is the guest poetry editor for this issue. Her most recent collection of poems is Darling (Grove Press, 2001).

Eileen Myles is a poet who lives in New York and a novelist who teaches fiction at UCSD. She is working on a libretto called Hell and a novel called The Inferno.

Poet and translator G. E. Patterson's first book, Tug, is available from Graywolf Press. Recent work can be found in American Letters and Commentary, Five Fingers Review, Swerve, XCP, and Seneca Review.

Mark Jude Poirier is the author of two collections of short stories, Unsung Heroes of American Industry and Naked Pueblo; and the novel, Goats. He's currently on the literature faculty at Bennington College in Vermont.

Robert Polito is the author of the poetry collection, Doubles (Chicago), A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (Michigan), and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (Knopf/Vintage), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is editing a book of Manny Farber's film and art criticism, and completing a new book of poems. He directs the graduate writing program at The New School.

Victoria Redel's most recent book is the novel Loverboy. Her collection of poems, Swoon, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University.

Raphael Rubinstein's books include The Basement of the CafŽ Rilke (1997), Postcards from Alphaville (2000) and the forthcoming Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990Ð2002, all published by Hard Press. In 2002, the French government named him a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Art et des Lettres.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's essay, ÒReflections of a Savage,Ó appeared in the anthology, Before and After: Stories from New York. He is currently at work on a playwrighting commission from New York Theatre Workshop about the New York City draft riots of 1863. He lives and works in New York City and is terrified of cockroaches.

Bruno Schleinstein was born in 1932 as the illegitimate child of a German father and a Polish mother. He was brought up in orphanages and in institutions for the mentally ill. In 1955, he was released after several escapes. Living in Berlin in the sixties, working as a forklift operator, he began to play the accordion and illustrate his songs with drawings. In 1974, he starred as Kaspar Hauser in Werner Herzog's film Every Man for Himself and God Against All; two years later he acted in another Herzog film, Stroszek. The filmmaker Miron Zwonir recently released a documentary about Bruno S.'s life entitled Estrangement Is Death.

Sophie Toulouse is a visual artist. She lives and works in New York City and spends summers on Nation of Angela Island. To learn more, go to www.nationofangela.com

Kirmen Uribe is the author of Bitartean heldu eskutik (Meanwhile Hold Hands), which won Spain's 2001 Premio de la Cr’tica, and, with the musician Mikel Urdangarin, Bar Puerto, a CD-book. He makes his living as a scriptwriter for Basque public television and lives in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Euskadi).

Lara Vapnyar came to New York from Moscow in 1994. Her short-story collection, There Are Jews in My House, will be published by Pantheon this fall.

Cynthia Weiner teaches at the Writers Studio and Pace University in Manhattan. She is working on a collection of short stories.

Susan Wheeler is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Source Codes from Salt Publishing. The recipient of a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002, she teaches at Princeton University and is on the graduate faculty in creative writing at The New School.

C. K. Williams's most recent books of poetry are The Vigil; Repair, which won the Pulitzer Prize; and a collection of his poems on love, Love About Love. A book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998, and a book of autobiographical meditation, Misgivings, in 2000; it received the PEN Martha Albrand Memoir Award. He has recently completed a play, Operations. His new book of poems, The Singing, will be published in the fall of 2003. He teaches in the writing program at Princeton University.

Elizabeth Willis's third book of poetry, Turneresque, is forthcoming from Burning Deck this spring. Her second collection, The Human Abstract, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by Penguin in 1995. She teaches at Wesleyan University.