Barbara Crooker is the author of ten chapbooks, two of which won prizes in national competitions: Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001 and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Radiance, her first full-length book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition, and was a finalst for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Recently, Garrison Keillor read nine of her poems on The Writer's Almanac, National Public Radio. She is the recipient of the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, eleven residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a prize from the NEA.

Olga Broumas' 7 collections of poetry are collected in RAVE, Poems 1975-1999, and her 4 collections of translations from the Greek of Odysseas Elytis are collected in EROS, EROS, EROS, Poems, Selected and Last, both from Copper Canyon Press. A CD of her reading from both these books is also available from Copper Canyon. She in Poet in Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University, and a bodywork therapist on Cape Cod, where she lives with her partner and their 2 dogs.

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard is the author of 5 books and 2 chapbooks of poetry, including the prize winning Journeys Over Water. . She has also written several nonfiction books on the subject of human rights and on grieving. Her poems and articles have been widely anthologized. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

Vilja Virks-Lee is a New Jersey visual artist, and "Iraq 2006 - Ten Works on Paper" was created during a a residency at the VCCA in April 2006.