LEONARD ABRAMS was Editor of East Village Eye, Music Editor of Details, U.S. Editor of Soul Underground and Editor of Rap Express, and music editor, Details magazine, New York. He is New York editor of Masthead.

DENIS BONAL is an actor and director, and has written many plays.  Her work has been widely produced, including productions at the Avignon Festival, the Theatre de Chaillot, the Ubu Repertory (NY), the Theatre de l"Este Parisien and France Culture.  She won the 1994 European Theatre Award and was awarded the SACD Theatre Prize and the Arletty Prize for her complete works.  Blida: or the Little Rose of the Sahel is reprinted with permission from the SACD and first appeared in the magazine Actes du Theatre.

JAMES GRAHAM's latest translations were published in Dream with No Name (Seven Stories Press).  The Fat Man From Lima was published in May 2000.  He publishes photos and texts everywhere he can.

PIERRE JORIS left Luxembourg at 18 & has since lived in the US, Great Britain, North Africa and France.  He has published over 20 books and chapbooks of poetry, among them, Winnetou Old (Meow Press, Buffalo, NY),  Turbulence ( St Lazaire Press, Rhinebeck) and Breccia, Selected Poems 1974-1986 (Editions Phi/ Station Hill).  His most recent volume of poetry is Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan University Press). He has also published many volumes and anthologies of translations into both English & French.  With Jerome Rothenberg he has published a two volume anthology of 20th century avant garde writings, Poems for the Millennium: A University of California Book of Modern and Post Modern Poetry (University of California Press), the first volume of which received the 1996 Penn Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.  Joris is finishing work on two further Paul Celan volumes, Lichtzwangand Eingedunkelt. Towards a Nomadic Poetic, a manifesto essay, was published last year by Spanner Editions, Hereford, UK.

TREVOR JOYCE was born in Dublin in 1947.  Co-founded New Writers Press, Dublin, with Michael Smith in 1967.  Founded and edited the Melmoth Press, Cork, in 1984.  Founder, editor and administrator of the website Sound Eye - Irish Poetry and the Universe of Writing.  Co-founder/organiser (since 1997) of the Cork Festival of Alternative Poetries.  Volumes of poetry include: Sole Glum Trek (1967), Petrahedron (1972), The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (a working from the middle Irish Buile Suibhne, 1976) and Stone Floods (1995), all from New Writers' Press, and Syzygy (1998), Without Asylum (1998), Hopeful Monsters and Stillsman (2000) all from Randolph Healy's Wild Honey Press.  His collected poems, With The First Dream of Fire They Come In From the Cold, was released to acclaim in 2001 By New Writers' Press and Shearsman Books..

JOHN MATEER has published three books of poems, Burning Swans (FACP 1994) and Anachronism (FACP 1997).  His third book, Barefoot Speech, was published by FACP in 2000.  He was recently invited to read his work at New African Perspectives, the 22nd  conference of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific.

DOUGLAS OLIVER's last book, A Salvo for Africa, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2000.  Before that, his most recent books were Penguin Modern Poets (with Iain Sinclair and Denise Riley) and Selected Poems, Talisman House, New Jersey, both in 1996.  Bloodaxe also republished his New York satire, Penniless Politics, in 1994.  At the time of his death in 2000, he was working on Arondissments, the themes of which arose out of the districts of Paris.  Until his death, he lived in Paris with his wife, the American poet Alice Notley.  The text published in Masthead was part of the Arondissments project: a prose-poetry meditation on the Memoires of Louise Michel in relation to modern times.

HAROLD PINTER, one of the most influential English playwrights of the past four decades, was born in London in 1930. He is married to Antonia Fraser.  In 1995 he was awarded the David Cohen Literature Prize for a lifetime's achievement in literature.  In 1996 he was given the Laurence Olivier Award for a lifetime's achievement in theatre.  He is the author of such seminal modern works as The Birthday Party and The Homecoming and is a prominent spokesman for human rights.

CARLYLE REEDY is a poet, performance artist and collagist/painter.  She has performed her work at prestigious venues, notably the Royal Court in London.  Early on she worked in arts ventures such as Jim Haynes' Arts Lab, IRAT, Electric Centre (Haarlem, Holland) etc an d later at Franklin Furnace (NY), Chisenhale (London).  Peter Biddulph Gallery in London presented her one woman exhibition in 1986.  Recently her work was included in the MOMA exhibition Out of Actions (catalogue published by Thames and Hudson).  Her poetry has appeared in Out of Everywhere (RSE), PAJ 61 (John Hopkins), Other (Wesleyan Poetry) and the Oxford Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry edited by Keith Tuma.

VASILI STAVROPOULOS lives and works as a lawyer in Sydney.

LAWRENCE UPTON's linear poetry includes Letters to Eric Mottram and some postcards (Form Books UK 1997), Unsent Letters and Messages to Silence (both Writers' Forum, UK). huming/queuing is published by Reality Street Editions, UK.  He directs Sub Voicive Poetry readings in London and convenes Sub Voicive Colloquium.  He co-edited with Bob Cobbing Word Score Utterance Choreography in verbal and visual poetry (Writers Forum, 1998), a major consideration of the performance of visual poetry and has performed with him as Domestic Ambient Buoys.