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Gudding was born in a Norwegian-American part of northwestern Minnesota. He spent his formative years in Moorhead, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota. At fifteen, Gudding moved with his family briefly to Iowa before settling in Washington state. Gudding attended The Evergreen State College, an experimental school in Olympia, Washington, Purdue University and Cornell University. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where he was hired to teach about "experimental" poetry writing and poetics. Gudding practices vipassana meditation in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin (as taught by S. N. Goenka). A recipient of The Nation Discovery Award, Gudding received the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Pitt Poetry Series, edited by Ed Ochester for his first book A Defense of Poetry. Gudding's second book of poetry, Rhode Island Notebook, was published in November 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press. Rhode Island Notebook is a four hundred thirty-six page poem interlarded with essays and the ubiquitous flotsam of quotidian awareness. It was written in Gudding's car on the highways between Normal, Illinois, and Providence, Rhode Island, during twenty-six roundtrip journeys, and has been called by the polymathic writer and artist Alan Sondheim, "the first 21st Century classic."

Beth Gylys is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has published two award-winning collections of poems: Bodies that Hum won the Gerald Cable First Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in 1999; Spot in the Dark won the Journal Award and was published by Ohio State University Press in 2004. Her chapbook Balloon Heart won the Quentin R. Howard Award and was released by Wind Publications in 1997. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Antioch Review, Columbia Review and other journals, and she has had work in several anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation. Eds. Gerald Costanza and Jim Daniels, the 1996 Anthology of Best Magazine Verse, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets from 1951-1977.

Born with the breaking of metal and glass, I passed through an orifice like a TV screen Into the bright sheen of a media campaign Red white and blue red white and blue As I tumbled to the checkerboard floor in the hospital Where spin doctors picked me up and cooed “The truth. The truth. The truth,” they said, “Is that we love you, our sweet consumer.” Rumor has it my garden is full of terror plots Tilled by nimble fingers that linger over vulnerable power plants And spots where scant defense lines are scratched in dry soil. Hot days are spent rubbing oil beneath straw hats Buzzed by military flybys Spies are everywhere Terror is everywhere Blooming like white convolvulus, weaving its way into desert sands Abrams are jammed in a bad gag commute Hands, tied by ticker tape news, Outline the rise (and fall) of the price of crude, Imply democracy while others pay our rent. Let’s portray sporadic resistance (Turn your head and cough) Then in the distance the bombs go off And everyone bows down to our (fallen) monument. (Cue theme music) Five years on with my umbilical still attached I come back to TV for warmth, Your glow of digital manipulation. Mama mama mama Don’t abandon this child Stay with me stay with me stay with me Keep me awake, keep me abreast With news breaks and shakes of paranoia Amid earthquakes and floods and the falling stars Keep me safe in my shell Keep me safe in my shell Keep me safe in my shell.

Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1] Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University. In the fall of 2005, Clayton and his wife Caryl were in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como, Italy, where he studied Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and wrote a 67 page work on the triptych in poetry and prose, "The Paradise of Alchemical Foreplay." For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied Ice Age cave art of southwestern France. In June

Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient (with José Rubia Barcia) of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. In 2006, a translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, with an introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, was published to much acclaim, won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly-regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, while Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology, Eshleman founded Sulfur magazine. Forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000, the year its final issue went to press. Eshleman describes his experience with the journal in an interview which appeared in an issue of Samizdat (poetry magazine).[1] Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg, including: Armand Schwerner, Rochelle Owens, Kenneth Irby, Robert Kelly, Jed Rasula, Gustaf Sobin, and John Taggart. Over the course of his life, his work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University. In the fall of 2005, Clayton and his wife Caryl were in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como, Italy, where he studied Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and wrote a 67 page work on the triptych in poetry and prose, "The Paradise of Alchemical Foreplay." For over thirty years, Clayton Eshleman has studied Ice Age cave art of southwestern France. In Ju

Mark Strand was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook prize and the Bergin prize. After receiving his B.F.A. degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his M.A. degree from the University of Iowa. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel (Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968). He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005), The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976). His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.