Biographies

LEONARD ABRAMS is a writer and videographer living in New York.  He is currently making a documentary film in Brasil, tentatively called "Quilombo Country."

RICHARD BARRETT was born in Swansea (Wales) in 1959. His compositions have won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1986) and Gaudeamus Prize (1989) and have been performed and broadcast worldwide by ensembles such as L'Itinéraire, Ensemble Köln, Ensemble Modern, Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble InterContemporain, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Klangforum Wien. His 1994 work Vanity has been internationally acclaimed as one of the most important orchestral scores of the 1990s. Of central importance is his collaboration with Elision Ensemble, for whom he has written Another heavenly day (1989-90), negatives (1988-92), Opening of the Mouth (1992-97) transmission (1996-99) and DARK MATTER (1990-2000) together with the Norwegian ensemble Cikada Ensemble and artist Per Inge Bjørlo. In 1997-98 Richard Barrett was composer-in-residence with the Belgian ensemble Champ d'Action, for whom he wrote the music-theatre work Unter Wasser, on a text by the Austrian writer Margret Kreidl. As a performer of live electronic music, he has worked since 1986 in the electronic duo Furt (with Paul Obermayer), and has also played with many leading improvising musicians such as George E. Lewis, Evan Parker, Mary Oliver, Peter van Bergen, Michael Vatcher, Fred van Hove and the 'Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra', as well as with the Elision, Champ d'Action and Reservoir ensembles. CD recordings include:  Richard Barrett/Elision Ensemble (Elision, Sandro Gorli conductor, ETCETERA); Furt Live in Amsterdam 1994 (X-OR); Vanity (BBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Tamayo conductor, NMC); Furt: angel (JdK); Opening of the Mouth (Elision, Simon Hewett conductor, ABC Classics)

DAVID BIRCUMSHAW was born 1955 in what can be variously described as Meriden or Coleshill, or Warwickshire. Rescued as a baby from a public pond. Thrown out of some of the best Grammar Schools in Birmingham. 5 "O" levels. Accidently came to Leicester some 13 years ago and has not yet found his way out. Earlier this year founded the magazine A Chide's Alphabet.

IAN DAVIDSON: Born in 1957. Lived most of my life in Wales. Currently working at the University of Wales, Bangor. Previous publications include Human to Begin With (Poetical Histories) and The Patrick Poems (Amra Imprint). Harsh is forthcoming from Spectacular Diseases. Recent work has appeared in The Gig, A Chides Alphabet and The Paper.

RACHEL CAMPBELL  is a young musicologist based in Sydney.

CHRIS EMERY was born in Oldham, Manchester in 1963. His work has appeared in numerous print and web journals including Jacket, JAAM, Oxford Poetry, Parataxis, Plastic, PN Review, Quid and Salt. Dr Mephisto was published by Arc Publications in 2002. He is Press Production Director at the Cambridge University Press and an Editor of Salt Publishing. He lives in Great Wilbraham, England, with his wife and two children.

KATE FAGAN is a writer and musician who lives in Newtown, Sydney. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The Long Moment (Salt Publishing: Cambridge & Fremantle), was launched at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May 2002. Kate is completing a doctoral thesis on Lyn Hejinian's writings and is the managing editor of US-based HOW2 magazine, dedicated to innovative contemporary and modernist writing by women.

MICHAEL FARRELL is the Australian editor of the ezine slope. His pamphlet, living at the z was published by Vagabond in 2000, and his first book ode ode is forthcoming from Salt Publishing. He lives in Melbourne.

JAMES GRAHAM  continues his photographic adventures at www.mindspring.com/~percheron22, where later this summer he will unveil the complete labyrinth of words and text. While preparing a photo retrospective, he is writing and translating Alfredo Molano and Juan Gelman and trying to figure out where to live next. Any suggestions?

JAAN KAPLINSKI was born January 22nd, 1941 in Tartu. His mother was Estonian, Polish father disappeared in the Gulag archipelago during the war. Studied linguistics in Tartu University and has worked as researcher in linguistics, sociologist, ecologist and translator from several languages into Estonian. Interested in Celtic mythology and languages, American Indians and classical Chinese philosophy and poetry. During the perestroika and Estonian national revival active as journalist both at home and abroad. 1992 - 1995 deputy of the Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu). Politically adhering to the liberal Left. Has lectured on history of Western civilization in Tartu University. Published several books of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English. Has been translated also into Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Russian and Czech. Influenced by Western modernism (Rimbaud, Eliot, Pound) and classical Chinese poetry he has also translated. Has translated mainly poetry from French, English, Spanish, Chinese and Swedish (a volume of poems by Tomas Tranströmer).   jaan.kaplinski.com

DANIEL KEENE'S plays have been performed all over the world and most recently are being produced extensively in France. He has won South Australian Premier's Prize for  Drama, the Victorian Premier's Prize for Drama (twice), the Wal Cherry Play of the Year, The New York New Dramatist's Award, and most recently the 2000 New South Wales Premier's Prize for Literature (best play).  His play Half and Half premieres this month (July 2002) at the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, starring Robert Menzies and Dan Spielman. He has been awarded the Green Room prize for his Outstanding Contribution to Theatre and the Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts.  He is married with three children and lives in Melbourne.

GERALDINE MONK lives in Sheffield in the north of England.  Her lastest collection of writings Noctivagations was published in 2001 by West House Books.

KATE MIDDLETON is a young Melbourne writer and composer. Her work has appeared in many journals and newspapers including Heat, Meanjin, Australian Book Review and The Age, and she has written the libretti for three operas. She is currently working on a single-hander opera based on Jordie Albiston's The Hanging of Jean Lee for mezzo-soprano and electro-acoustics.

LES MURRAY was born in 1938 and lives with his wife Valerie and his two youngest children in Bunyah, near Taree in NSW.  He has published some thirty books.  He has been made AO and has an honorary D. Litt from the University of New England.  His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into about half a dozen foreign languages.  Awards include the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, several Premier's Awards, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the European Petrach Award for his life's work, and the 1999 Queen's Medal for Poetry. His most recent collection is Poems the Size of Photographs (Duffy and Snellgrove 2002) from which some of the poems in Masthead are taken.

HOLLY PETTIT was born on a SAC base in Washington state and raised in Alabama.  She served as a Russian Linguist in Germany for the U.S. Army, graduated Harvard Divinity School, and worked for the homeless community in Boston.  She lives in New Hampshire. Her poetry has appeared in various magazines including most recently:  Exquisite Corpse, Many Mountains Moving, Mid-America Poetry Review, ONTHEBUS, Sojourner, and Spillway. Holly is a moderator for the online poetry workshop Zeugma.

PETER RILEY was born in 1940 near Manchester, educated at Cambridge, and has since worked in various kinds of teaching and casual employment in Denmark and the Peak District of central England. Since 1985 he has lived in Cambridge, where he operates a poetry bookselling  business, publishes poetry pamphlets and has been involved in organising poetry readings. His poetry has appeared in ten principal collections.  He has also written about music and travel.  A selected poems entitled Passing Measures was published by Carcanet in 2000, and in 2003 the same publisher will issue a book-length poem entitled Alstonefield. The Gig (Toronto) issue 4/5 1999-2000, was devoted to discussion of his poetry, with a detailed bibliography.

REBECCA SEIFERLE'S third new poetry collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow, 1999), poems from which won  the Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and were included in Best American Poetry 2000.  Her first collection, The Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award and the Writer's Exchange Award. Her new translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Black Heralds is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in late 2003. Her translation of Vallejo's Trilce (Sheep Meadow) was the only finalist for the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She is the founding editor of www.thedrunkenboat.com, an online magazine of international poetry and poetry-in-translation.

JOHN TEMPLE was born in County Durham in 1942 and educated at Cambridge and in the USA ('64-6). Has lived in Belgium since 1970 and taught at Ghent University ('70-90) and Erasmushogeschool, Brussels ('90-98). Recent publications: A Tension ( Poetical Histories, 2001) and 21 Poems ( I Saw Johnny Yesterday, 2002), Brooklyn NY.

LAWRENCE UPTON has been making poetry for nearly four decades, working in a variety of writing genres. He divides his time between London, where he was born, and the west of Cornwall and Scilly, where his family originates.  His most recent collection, Wire Sculptures, is due this year from Reality Street Editions.

CÉSAR VALLEJO was born in 1892 in Santiago de Chuco, a small town in north central Peru, the youngest of eleven children. He completed his secondary schooling in 1908 and entered the School of Philosophy and Letters in 1910, but was forced to drop out for lack of money. He eventually achieved his degree in 1917. In 1920 he returned to his home village and after a violent incident in which a subprefect's aide was shot at the general store, he was accused of being an "intellectual instigator" and was jailed for almost six months. The incident was the catalyst for his departure from Peru two years later, when he left Peru for Paris. He lived in Europe for the rest of his life in more or less continuous poverty, unable to return to Peru for fear of being arrested, and wrote the poems which make up his three posthumous books and a large number of plays. He died in 1938. During his life he published two books of poetry: Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Heralds) in 1918, from which these translations are taken, and Trilce (1922). His posthumous poems comprise three books: Nómina de huesos (1923-36), Sermón de la barbarie (1936-38) and Espana, aparte de mí este cáliz (1937-38).

LENARA VERLE is an artist and researcher in the field of net art and collaborative art. Since 1994, she has been a participant in the award-winning group Sito Electronic Arts (www.sito.org - receiver of the Prix Ars Electronica in 1996 for the collaborative project HyGrid). She also participated in collaborative art exhibits in Rome, Italy; Porto Alegre, Brazil; Montreal, Canada; New York and Los Angeles, USA. www.lenara.com