Bill Adams is an artist who lives in New York. He recently showed his paintings and drawings at K.S. Art in New York.

Jack Anderson is the author of nine books of prose poems and line-and-stanza poems. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies and one of his prose poems provided the title for the New Rivers Press anthology The Party Train (1996). He is also a dance historian and a critic for The New York Times and The Dancing Times of London and coeditor (with George Dorris) of Dance Chronicle, a journal of dance history.

Priscilla Becker writes poetry, essays, and criticism. She runs a poetry workshop in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn and is the author of a book of poems, Internal West. The editors apologize for an error in Open City #18 whereby her byline and title ("Blue Statuary") sat atop William Wenthe's poem (which is actually called "Against Witness"). Priscilla's correct poem appears in this issue (along with a new one).

Joshua Beckman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Your Time Has Come (Verse Press, 2004). A CD, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, featuring his collaborative poetry with Matthew Rohrer, was released in 2004. He lives in Staten Island.

Jason Brown has published one collection, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (W.W. Norton). "North" is from a new collection all about the same town called The Town by the River. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona.

Robert olen butler has published ten novels and three volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His new book of stories, Had a Good Time, was inspired by his collection of antique picture postcards. The assembled heads of Severance will first appear next spring in French (Rivages) to coincide with a ballet based upon them which will be performed in Lyons. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, he also won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University.

Bryan Charles grew up in Michigan.

Born in 1920, Trevor Dannatt has published widely, including nine editions of the Architects' Yearbook (1945–60), Modern Architecture in Britain (1959), Architecture, Education, and Research: The Work of Leslie Martin (1996), Trevor Dannatt: Buildings and Interiors, 1951–1972, a monograph. An academician at London's Royal Academy and honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, he has maintained his own architectural practice for over fifty years. Built works include the Friends' Meeting House, Blackheath, London; the Victoria Gate Entrance and Visitor Centre at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Vaughan College, Leicester; the King Faisal Conference Centre, Mosque, and Hotel in Riyadh; and the British Embassy in that same city. These are his first published poems.

Amber Dermont is the fiction writer-in-residence at Rice University in Houston. Her work received Special Mention in the 2004 Pushcart Prize anthology, and has recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, and Zoetrope.

Norman Douglas has played many roles; some good, some he'd rather not recall. Although the past is gone, "Male Order," was written in 1985 for Tina—who was last heard from in Guadalajara—and her nephew. Thanks for being there.

Juliana Ellman lives and works in Brooklyn. She has shown her work with Marc Foxx in Los Angeles and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts in New York.

Alicia Erian's first collection of short stories, The Brutal Language of Love, is currently out in paperback from Random House. Her first novel, Towelhead, will be published by Simon & Schuster in spring 2005. Her fiction has appeared most recently in Playboy, Zoetrope, The Sun, Nerve, and The Iowa Review. She teaches creative writing at Wellesley College.

Matthew Fluharty's work has appeared in journals such as Metre, Poetry Ireland Review, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Minus Times. He is the coeditor of Breaking the Skin: An Anthology of Emerging Irish Poets (Black Mountain Press, Northern Ireland) and editor of Way American magazine (www.wayamerican.com). He was recently the poet-in-residence at New Light Studios and now lives in Boston.

Wayne Gonzales is an artist living in New York. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and has on view a one-person exhibition at Galerie Almine Rech in Paris through mid-July. His image of the White House in this issue is easier to see from across the room.

Sarah Gorham is the author of three books of poetry—Don't Go Back to Sleep, The Tension Zone, and, most recently, The Cure, which appeared in October, 2003. New work has been published in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, and American Poetry Review. Gorham is president and editor in chief of Sarabande Books in Louisville, Kentucky.

Zach Harris was raised in North Hollywood, California. He has attended U.C. Santa Cruz, The New York Studio School, and Bard College. He is currently enrolled in the Hunter College MFA program where he enjoys practicing painting, poetry, and philosophy.

im harrison's most recent novel, True North, came out this spring from Grove Press. His other publications include Legends of the Fall (novellas), Dalva (a novel), and Off to the Side (a memoir). He divides his time between Montana, Northern Michigan, and Arizona.

Katherine Hollander graduated from Marlboro College, where she studied poetry and German history. Her poems and critical writing can be found in Potash Hill, The Mind's Eye, and forthcoming from The Marlboro Review and Poet Lore. She lives and writes in Ithaca, New York.

Luis Jaramillo teaches at The New School Writing Program. This is his first published story. His essay "Big Buck Hunter II" will appear in Gamers, an anthology coming out this fall from Soft Skull Press.

Daniel John, from Saskatchewan, Canada, is a landscape designer. His essays and poems have been published in numerous literary magazines, including The Comstock Review, English Journal, and Phi Kappa Phi Forum. He has ten children.

Janet Kaplan's two poetry collections are The Glazier's Country, winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press, and The Groundnote, winner of the 1997 Alice James Books New England and New York competition. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Sentence, Interim, and Barrow Street, among others. She teaches poetry and creative writing at Hofstra University.

Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—crystal meth capitol of the nation, and home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the space shuttle. Her first book A Gringo Like Me is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in spring 2005. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2003 and 1997), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present. She is the cocurator of the Pete's Big Salmon poetry reading series in Brooklyn.

Giuseppe O. Longo is professor of information theory at the electronic engineering department of the University of Trieste. He has done research in network theory and algebraic coding, specializing in coding for finite memoryless and Markov sources. In 1998 he published a book on the cultural effects of the Internet, Il nuovo Golem. Longo has published three novels and six collections of short stories as well as numerous texts for radio and stage. In 1996 his novel L'acrobata was published in France by Gallimard, receiving the Laure Bataillon award for best novel translated into French. As an actor, he has taken lead roles in plays by Ionesco and Pinter.

Cameron Martin lives and works in Brooklyn. He is represented by Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York. In his first curatorial effort, for this issue he has organized a group of images by artists adapting traditional representational genres to a contemporary perspective.

Chad McCracken, first out of North Carolina and then Texas, is now a lazy

lawyer and occasional philosophy lecturer in Chicago.

David Mendel is very old indeed. He did so badly in school that he was considered unsuitable for further education. He entered his father's millinery business, and was delighted at the outbreak of World War II as it enabled him to escape into the army. After an undistinguished military career, he took advantage of the British equivalent of the G.I. Bill to take up medicine because he couldn't think of the name of any other profession. He became a cardiologist, and at retirement did a degree course in Italian, which led to a career as a translator.

Nadine Nakanishi was born in Santa Monica and grew up in both the U.S. and Switzerland, where she currently lives. She has done deck design for Project Skateboards, sculptures for The Face, and design and editorial work for Realrocker, Bail, and Monster.

Dawn Raffel is the author of a story collection, In the Year of Long Division, and a novel, Carrying the Body. She's at work on a new collection.

Thomas Robertson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he currently lives with his wife and two cats. He has lived in Dover, New Jersey and New Orleans, Louisiana. He's currently working on a comic book about dreams, miscalculated aspirations, and coffee.

Rick Rofihe is the author of Father Must, a collection of short stories published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, and Epiphany. A recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, he teaches writing privately and at the Gotham Writer's Workshop in New York City.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the 1994 National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton; Satellite; Nice Hat. Thanks. (with Joshua Beckman); the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (with Joshua Beckman); and A Green Light. His latest collaboration with Joshua Beckman was a ten-hour, nonstop, improvised poem performed overnight at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York City, in May.

Sally Ross is an artist who lives in New York City.

George Rush is an artist who lives in Brooklyn. He has had recent solo exhibitions with Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, and Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami. His next show, at Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen, will result from an upcoming two-month residency in Denmark.

Harvey Shapiro is the author of eleven books of poetry, including How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001. His anthology Poets of World War II was published by the Library of America in 2003.

Nina Shope received an MFA from Syracuse University in 2003. Her work has appeared in 3rd Bed. She is a past resident of the Millay Colony for the Arts and has recently completed a collection of three experimental novellas, entitled Hangings.

Peter Nolan Smith learned how to drink growing up Yankee Irish in Boston and to cook soft-shell crab for twenty from a Virginian mistress. He has ridden a motorbike through Tibet, leapt off a balcony to fight skinheads, been jailed in Paris for graffitiing the British Embassy with a love poem, and ordered Jean-Michel Basquiat to wipe off all the drawings he'd just created on Smith's fridge. He has been a substitute at Southie High during the 1974 bussing riots, run a bar for a Hamburg pimp, traded diamonds on New York's West Forty-Seventh Street, skirted the film business in L.A., and been employed as a "physionomiste" at nightclubs across the world. He currently lives in Pattaya, "the Last Babylon" with his wife and adorable six-month-old daughter.

James C. Strouse is a writer and cartoonist from Goshen, Indiana. His screenplay, Lonesome Jim, was recently made into a feature film, directed by Steve Buscemi, starring Casey Affleck and Liv Tyler. His first published story appeared on Nerve and in The Best American Erotica 2004. This is his second published story.

Wendy Walker is the author of the underground classic of science fiction, art history, and espionage, The Secret Service, as well as two volumes of tales, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of Life and Stories Out of Omarie (all from Sun and Moon Press). My Man and Other Critical Fictions is forthcoming from Green Integer. "Sophie in the Catacombs" is from her novel-in-progress, The City Under the Bed.

J. Patrick Walsh III is the third John Patrick Walsh in the John Patrick Walsh family. He is the first to pursue drawings, skateboarding, poetry, stories, videos, and performance in his family. He goes by his middle name Patrick. He is six and one half inch feet tall and is studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was born August 7, 1981.

William Wenthe has published two books of poems, Not Till We Are Lost (Louisiana State University Press) and Birds of Hoboken (Orchises). His poems have appeared recently in Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, and forthcoming in The Paris Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas.

Ava Woychuk-Mlinac's poem, "Why?" was composed on February 17, 2000 after a reading at KGB Bar in New York City. The writer was seven years old at the time.

Matvei Yankelevich's translations of Daniil Kharms have appeared in 3rd Bed, Open City, PAJ, and New American Writing. He has poems in Carve, Weigh Station, Fell Swoop, Lit, Fulcrum, New York Nights, and online at Can We Have Our Ball Back, Shampoo, 3am, and Aught. Matvei is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series from Ugly Duckling Presse, and coedits 6x6, a poetry periodical. He teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Christian Zwahlen is a graduate of Boston College. He lives with his wife in Rochester, New York. This is his first published story.