Mimi Chakarova:  Images of Cuba
Mimi Chakarova teaches photography at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She recently completed her graduate thesis in visual studies at UC Berkeley and has a degree in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her documentary work has been featured in solo exhibitions and her photographs remain on display in permanent collections. Mimi's photo essay, The Distance Between Us, appeared in the Outsiders & Community issue of On the Page.

Charles Fishman:  Sleeping Near Water
Charles Fishman''s books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. His book The Death Mazurka was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 1989 and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His poem "New Car Blues" appeared in the Cars issue of On the Page.

Maureen Tolman Flannery:  Utopia
Maureen Tolman Flannery is editor of Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places and author of Secret of the Rising Up: Poems of Mexico and Remembered into Life. Her poems have appeared in thirty-five anthologies and journals including Meridians, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Evansville Review, and Atlanta Review. She lives in Chicago with an actor and their four children.

Denice Aldrich Jobe:  Wild Birds of the Food Court
Denice Aldrich Jobe's work has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, ENC Focus magazine, PBS Online, and WilmingtonBlues.com. She lives in Northern Virginia.

LindaAnn Loschiavo:  A Fig Tree Grows in Brooklyn
A native New Yorker, LindaAnn Loschiavo is an award-winning journalist, reviewer, and poet. She was a featured poet in the journal Italian Americana (Winter 1997) and one of the poets featured at "First Night Out in New Jersey" in 1998. Her translations of nineteenth century Sicilian poems will appear soon in Arba Sicula along with her essay and research into the previously unpublished oral literature of the Eolian Islands.

Shahe Mankerian:  King
Shahe Mankerian calls Pasadena home. He received his graduate degree in English from California State University, Los Angeles, and wrote a book of poetry entitled Children of Honey. Recently, his work was featured in Birthmark, an anthology of Armenian-American poets.

Marco North:  Emily
Marco North lives in New York City. "Emily" was written over the course of seven years and is intended to be part of a larger work titled The Year of the Horse. Other selections from this unfinished collection have been published recently in Stray Dog, Colere, The Raven Chronicles, and The Red Wheelbarrow.

Estelle Padawer:  Lost and Found
In addition to writing poetry, Estelle Padawer leads a Yiddish Club, where her chief function is to prod the participants to "say it in Yiddish." Her poems have appeared in At Our Core: Women Writing about Power and Inside Grief: An Anthology on Death, Loss and Bereavement. She is a member of Bergen Poets.

Mary Jo Pehl:  The Snake Pit
Mary Jo Pehl is a former writer for "Mystery Science Theater 3000." She has been a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" and on "The Savvy Traveler" (Public Radio International). Other credits include The Funny Times, Cranbrook Journal, Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Minnesota Women's Press, and Ironminds.com. One of her essays is featured in Life's a Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women's Humor, recently published by Random House. Ms. Pehl read a shorter version of "The Snake Pit" on National Public Radio in March 2002.