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Born and raised in Akron, Ohio, David Brendan Hopes now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is Professor of Literature at the University of North Carolina and director of Urthona Press, the Black Swan Theater Company, and the Downtown School of the Arts. After completing his BA at Hiram College, Hopes earned an MA at Johns Hopkins University and an MA and PhD at Syracuse University. His first books of poems, The Glacier's Daughters, won the Juniper Prize and the Saxfrage Prize. He has published a nonfiction book, A Sense of the Morning, and a second collection of poetry, Blood Rose.

Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. She is the author of three books of poetry: Black Shawl (Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series. Byer's poems have appeared

read one of her poems here. 

Rick Chess, director of both the Center for Jewish Studies at University of North Carolina-Asheville and UNCA's creative writing program, has been a member of UNCA's faculty since 1989. He has published a book of poetry, Tekiah (University of Georgia 1994). His poems have been anthologized in Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry (Beacon 1997) and The Sacred Place (Utah 1997). 

Read a poem here. 

Jane Mead is the author of The Lord and the General Din of the World. She was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College and in the Iowa Summer Writing festival. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares and The Antioch Review. Publishers Weekly praises: “[Mead] employs taut, colloquial language and firmly places her personal hostory against a searching, almost existential understanding of the world. . . . .” 

Read a poem here. 

Julie Fay is a member of the writing faculty at East Carolina University. She lives in North Carolina and Languedoc, France, and was the Sarah Matthews Self Distinguished Writer at Converse College in January 2000. Her volumes include The Woman Behind You (Pittsburgh, 1998) and Portraits of Woman (Ahsahta, 1991). Marilyn Hacker describes her work as a "superb manifestation of the contemporary possibilities of lyric poetry and a sustained and gripping narrative of a late 20th- century woman's life, exemplary in its specificities, picaresque in the geographic and erotic vicissitudes of its quest."

Read a poem here.