Deborah Ager
Deborah Ager's writing has appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Talisman Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is the founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine (www.32poems.com).

Karren Alenier
Karren LaLonde Alenier is author of five collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press), winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as: the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. "Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On," her opera with composer William Banfield and Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes, premiered in New York City in June 2005.

John Allman
John Allman's poems have appeared widely, recently in such journals as The Yale Review, 5 AM, Crazyhorse, North Dakota Quarterly, Kestrel, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Full Circle. He is the author of six books of poetry: Walking Four Ways in the Wind (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 1979); Clio's Children (1985), Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape (1986), Curve Away from Stillness (1989), and Loew's Triboro (2004), all from New Directions; and Inhabited World: New & Selected Poems 1970-1995 (The Wallace Stevens Society Press, 1995). He is also the author of a collection of fiction, Descending Fire & Other Stories (New Directions, 1994).  Allman, who is retired from teaching, lives in Katonah, New York, and spends his winters on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he is working on a collection of poems, Lowcountry, about that area.  Most of those poems will appear early 2006 as an electronic chapbook that will constitute isssue # 31 of the online journal Mudlark.

Anne Becker
Anne Becker's poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Southern Poetry Review, Washington Jewish Week, Gargoyle, Washington Review, and elsewhere. She earned an M.A. from the Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University. She won the Maryland Heritage Poetry Award in 1984 and has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her collection, The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin (Forest Woods Media, 1996) was completed with a MSAC work-in-progress grant. Ms. Becker serves in the Maryland Poets-in-the-Schools program, teaches creative writing at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, provides poetry tutorials, and conducts a special poetry workshop, Writing the Body, for those who have experience with life-threatening or chronic illness. Following her interest in teaching across disciplines, she has presented a workshop at the Corcoran School of Art on the use of language for the visual artist, read and lectured at the University of Connecticut for a course on the nature of scientific thought and at the Corcoran for classes on the history of science and technology. For many years, she served as Senior Producer of Watershed Tapes, which include those of poets such as Ruth Stone, William Carlos Williams, Jean Valentine, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky.

Mel Belin
Mel Belin's first book, Flesh That Was Chrysalis, was published by the Word Works, September 1999. An earlier version was a semi-finalist in the University of Wisconsin's annual book competition. He was the winner of Potomac Review's annual poetry competition, a runner-up in Antietam Review's annual competition, and has been published in journals and magazines nationwide. He has been a featured reader at many Washington, DC area venues including the Writer's Center, the Library of Congress Noon Series, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Miller's Cabin. He presented one of his poems recently on a program distributed by National Public Radio.

Bruce Bennett
Bruce Bennett is the author of seven books of poetry and twenty poetry chapbooks. His most recent books are Funny Signals (FootHills Publishing, 2003), a collection of political poems and fables, and The Deserted Campus (Clandestine Press, 2003), satirical poems about college life with illustrations by David Grossvogel. His most recent chapbooks are Grief and Love (FootHills Publishing, 2004), and Web-Watching, which won the Bright Hill Poetry Chapbook Competition and was published in April 2005. His New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances (Orchises Press), was chosen by Booklist as "One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999." Bennett co-founded and served as an editor of two poetry magazines, Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, and Ploughshares, and, during the 1980's and 90's, served as an Associate Editor for State Street Press. He has reviewed contemporary poetry books in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and his poems have appeared widely in literary journals, as well as numerous textbooks and anthologies. Volume XXX of Paintbrush, entitled "The World of Bruce Bennett," was devoted to his work. He teaches literature and creative writing at Wells College, where he is Professor and Chair of English and Director of Creative Writing.

Doraine Bennett
Doraine Bennett lives with her husband in Columbus, Georgia, where she is editor of the Infantry Bugler. After raising four children, she went back to school, finished her BA in Professional Writing, and began writing poetry. She also writes for children.

Cliff Bernier
Cliff Bernier has appeared in the Potomac Review, the Baltimore Review, the Alexandria and Mt. Vernon Gazettes, notjustair.com, and elsewhere, and is featured on a CD of poetry duets with Buffalo poet Verneice Turner as well as on two Jazzpoetry CDs, Live at IOTA Club and Cafe and Live at Bistro Europa. Cliff has been featured in readings and jazz poetry performances in Buffalo, Philadelphia, and around the DC area and currently hosts the poetry series Poesis in Arlington, Va. He lives in Alexandria, Va. with his wife and three sons.

Doris Brody
Doris Brody’s first full-length book of poems, Judging the Distance, was published in 2001 by The Word Works Capital Collection. She has published her poems in literary journals and magazines nationwide, has been a Jenny McKean Moore fellow in creative writing at George Washington University and has read at numerous venues throughout the Washington D.C. area, including the Library of Congress.

Trina Carter
Trina Carter is a consultant at The World Bank in Washington, DC where she teaches writing and speaking. She has written for various publications, including The National Business Employment Weekly, and she was editor of The Annals of Mathematics at Princeton University for several years. She has an MA in Comparative Literature and lives with her son in Bethesda, MD.

Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri is the author of 14 books of poetry and 20 staged plays. She's produced "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio, entering its 28th year, now from the Library of Congress. Grace holds the Allen Ginsberg Award for Poetry, the Pen Fiction Award for story, and the CPB Silver Medal for Broadcasting.

Norma Chapman
Norma Chapman lives in Brunswick, a small town in Western Maryland.  She started writing poetry after turning sixty, somewhat to her surprise.  Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from River Styx, Passager, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Iris, and Maryland Poetry Review. She received a 2003 Maryland State Arts Council Grant.

Maritza Rivera Cohen
Maritza Rivera Cohen has been writing poetry in both English and Spanish for nearly 40 years. She is the author of About You, has been published in literary magazines, anthologies and online publications, and has been sharing her work in poetry venues in the DC, MD, and VA area for the past ten years.

Yoko Danno
Yoko Danno was born, raised, and educated in Japan.  A graduate of Kobe College, she has been writing poetry solely in English for more than 40 years.  In addition to being a poet, she is also a playwright, translator, and the editor-in-chief of the Ikuta Press in Kobe, Japan.  Her poetry has been published in various journals, anthologies, and magazines in the US, Canada, and Japan, and she is the author of four books of poetry, including Epitaph for Memories published in 2002 by the Bunny and Crocodile Press.  Her fifth book of poetry⎯a jointly-written poetic experiment with the American poet James C. Hopkins, entitled The Blue Door⎯will be published in May of 2006 by The Word Works press in Washington, DC.

Barbara DeCesare
Barbara DeCesare lives in York, PA, where she works as a paralegal. She is amassing a depressing collection of cute pumps.  Her first book, JigsawEyesore (Anti-Man Press, 1999), was described by The Baltimore Sun as “what thunder looks like in writing.”  A 2003 Pushcart Prize nominee and the Poet Laureate of the 8th biggest rock n’ roll radio show in the nation at WIYY 97.9, Baltimore, her poems have found homes in Poetry, River Styx, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Evansville Review, McSweeney's, Gargoyle, and many other journals.

Donna Denizé
Donna Denizé is an award-winning teacher, former member of the Folger Poetry  Board, and author of two poetry collections: Broken Like Job, published by The Word Works in 2005, and a chapbook, The Lover's Voice. 

Julie Enszer
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One's Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly. Her work is forthcoming in Red Mountain Review and McSweeney's. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

Colin Flanigan
Colin Flanigan's work has been published in Phoebe, Frantic Egg, and Connections.  He has served as a reader for the Washington Prize for poetry.  He works as a firefighter/paramedic.

Roger Fogelman
Roger Fogelman was born in New York City in 1940. From an early age, he wrote poetry and for the next 45 odd years, he has continued to produce poems on various subjects, such as nature and the human condition. He won the Morrison Poetry Prize at Cornell University and the American Academy of Poets Award at the University of Virginia. His work has been published in the American Academy of Poets' Commemorative Volume, 1965; the Cornell Writer; and the Nassau Review. Dr. Fogelman graduated from Cornell University in 1960 and received an MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia. He also holds an MS in TESL from Queens College. He currently resides in New York City.

Martin Galvin
Martin Galvin has had poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The New Republic, JAMA, Commonweal, The Christian Science Monitor, Midwest Review, OntheBus and many others. His book Wild Card won the Columbia Award (1989) judged by Howard Nemerov.

Barbara Goldberg
Barbara Goldberg is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Marvelous Pursuits, winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award (Snake Nation Press, 1995). The Fire Stays in Red contains her translations of the Iraqi-born Israeli poet Ronny Someck (Wisconsin University Press, Spring 2002). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the senior speechwriter of a large, nonprofit organization in Washington, DC.

JoAnne Growney
JoAnne Growney lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a new home after a long-time residence in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary and mathematics magazines. Her work is represented in the anthology, COMMON WEALTH: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, just out from Pennsylvania State University Press. Paper Kite Press will be bringing out her chapbook, My Dance is Mathematics, in Spring 2006.

Sarita Hartz
Sarita Hartz is a relative newcomer to poetry, but passionate about the healing effects of writing.  She earned her B.A. in English from James Madison University where she was editor of the women's journal, Sister Speak.  She has been published in GardyLoo and accepted to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.  She received honorable mention in the Baltimore Poetry Review competition.  She has led workshops on creative writing therapy and is currently planning a volunteer trip to Africa where she will teach and offer crisis counseling.

James C. Hopkins
James C. Hopkins was born in Washington, DC ,and raised in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Potomac Review, Baltimore Review, Carriage House Review, and Heliotrope. He has written three books of poetry--a chapbook entitled The Walnut Tree Waits for Its Bees, and a full-length collection published in 2003, entitled Eight Pale Women. His third book of poetry, The Blue Door, a collaborative experiment with the Japanese poet Yoko Danno, will be published by The Word Works in May 2006.  His poems in this issue of The Innisfree Poetry Journal will appear in The Blue Door.  James is  now living in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he is studying Buddhist philosophy and Himalayan languages in a Tibetan monastery.

John Hoppenthaler
John Hoppenthaler's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's, Tar River Poetry, Pleiades, 5 AM, and the anthologies September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, Chance Of A Ghost, Wild, Sweet Notes II: More West Virginia Poetry, Blooming Through the Ashes, and elsewhere. Poetry editor of Kestrel, his first book is Lives Of Water (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2003).

Laurie Hurvitz
Laurie Hurvitz’s poetry has been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Innisfree, Minimus, Poet Lore and an anthology published by the Women of Reform Judaism.   Her poetry has been selected for display in the Poetry Gallery of  the Montgomery County (Maryland) Executive Office Building and for a Poetry Bench commissioned by The Public Arts Trust of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.  She is an attorney currently working at a financial firm.   She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and two children.

Donald Illich
Donald Illich is a technical writer with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland. He has had poetry published in The Iowa Review and Fourteen Hills and has poems forthcoming in New Zoo Poetry Review, Roanoke Review, and HazMat Review.

W. Luther Jett
W. Luther Jett lives in Washington Grove, Maryland, and has published a chapbook of poems and original graphics, A Leather Dress Fur Mother. He began writing shortly after learning how to hold a crayon and started transcribing his ideas onto paper shortly thereafter. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The GW Review, WordWrights, Syncopated City, SynEsthesia, ABRAXAS, The Burning Cloud Review, Middle Class Review, and Main Street Rag, as well as in several journals published on the World Wide Web.

J. Ladin
J. Ladin’s first collection of poems, Alternatives to History, was published in 2003 and his second, The Book of Anna, is forthcoming, both from Sheep Meadow Press.  His poetry is featured in the current issues of the British journal New Writing and Cross Currents, an interdisciplinary journal of religion, and is forthcoming in the next issue of disClosure.   His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including Parnassus: Poetry in Review, to which he regularly contributes critical essays, North American Review, the Italian journal Storie, Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Minnesota Review, Exquisite Corpse, Seneca Review, Blueline, Cottonwood and Sequoia.  He holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University, where he also directs the Writing Center.  He is currently completing a critical study of the emergence of American modernism and a third book of poetry with the assistance of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.  In 2002, he served as Poet-in-Residence at Tel Aviv University on a Fulbright Scholarship.  He has also taught writing at Reed College, Princeton University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  His critical work has appeared in Parnassus and The Emily Dickinson Journal; the next issue of Michigan Quarterly Review will feature a symposium on Holocaust poetry that centers around his essay on the subject.

Diane Lockward
Diane Lockward's collection, Eve's Red Dress, was published by Wind Publications in 2003. A second collection, What Feeds Us, is forthcoming from Wind in 2006. Recent work appears in Poet Lore, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner, as well as in the Poetry Daily anthology and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times. Diane works as a poet-in-the schools for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Jason Maffettone
Jason R. M. Maffettone is an insufferable malcontent and under-achiever who delights in acts of petty vandalism and the wanton disrespect of his betters. He is a menial laborer without even the decency to be ashamed of it. Recently freed from indentured servitude to the government, he now resides in his ancestral New Jersey where he will no doubt come to a bad end.

Judith McCombs
Judith McCombs grew up in almost all the continental states, in a geodetic surveyor's family. Her work appears in Calyx, Nimrod (a Neruda Award), Poet Lore, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review (Poetry Prize), Prairie Schooner, Prism, Sisters of the Earth, and elsewhere. She has held NEH and Canadian Senior Embassy Fellowships, and Michigan and Maryland Arts Awards. The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected and New (Word Works 2005) is her seventh book. She teaches at the Writer's Center in Bethesda MD, arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop poetry readings, and served as the 2005 poetry editor for Potomac Review.

Louis McKee
Louis McKee has poems in recent issues of Connecticut Review, Brooklyn Review, Crab Creek Review, Poet Lore, Pearl, Rattle, 5 A.M., Southern Indiana Review, Paterson Poetry Review, and Rattapallax among others.  His work is anthologized in such collections as The New Geography of Poets (UArk. Pr.) and Between the Cracks (Daedelus Eds.)  A volume of his selected poems, River Architecture, has been published by Cynic Press.  He has published two recent chapbooks, Right as Rain and Loose Change, and Pudding House has issued a collection of his poems in their Greatest Hits series.  A new volume, Near Occasions of Sin, will be published in 2006.

Larry Moffi
Larry Moffi's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, The Antioch Review, Crazy Horse, California Quarterly, and elsewhere. Formerly Director of Publications for the Associated Writing Programs, for six years, from its inception to its demise, he was managing editor of CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black/Jewish Relations. He works now as a freelance writer and editor. He is the author of three collections of poems, most recently A Citizen’s Handbook (Orchises Press) and two non-fiction books on baseball. His book on the office of the Commissioner of Baseball, The Conscience of the Game, will be published next summer by the University of Nebraska Press.

Miles David Moore
Miles David Moore is a Washington reporter for Crain Communications, Inc. He is founder and host of the Iota Poetry Reading Series in Arlington, VA, a member of the Board of Directors of The Word Works, Inc., and administrator of The Word Works Washington Prize. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Bears of Paris (The Word Works Capital Collection, 1995); Buddha Isn't Laughing (Argonne Hotel Press, 1999); and Rollercoaster (The Word Works Capital Collection, 2004). With Karren LaLonde Alenier and Hilary Tham, he co-edited Winners: A Retrospective of the Washington Prize, published in 1999 by The Word Works. Fatslug Unbound, a CD of Moore's poetry read by himself and 14 other poets, was realeased in 2000 by Minimus Productions. His review/essays on the poet John Haines have appeared in The Wilderness of Vision (Story Line Press, 1996) and A Gradual Twilight (CavanKerry Press, 2003).

Yvette Neisser
Originally from New Jersey, Yvette Neisser received her undergraduate degree in English and Middle East studies from Tufts University, and her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she taught poetry writing and Middle Eastern literature. She has worked for organizations promoting peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East, and currently works as a freelance translator, writer and editor. Yvette’s poems have appeared in various magazines, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, and North Carolina Literary Review, as well as in the anthologies September Eleven: Maryland Voices and Poetic Voices Without Borders, recently published by Gival Press. Her critical work on (and translations of) Palestinian and Israeli poetry has been published in the Palestine-Israel Journal. Yvette is currently translating the poetry of Luis Alberto Ambroggio and collaborating with him on a bilingual collection of “selected poems” to be published in 2006. In addition, she is seeking a publisher for her own first book of poems, Fields of Vision, which was a finalist for the 2004 Gival Press Award. Yvette resides in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband and 4-year-old son.

Brent Pallas
Brent Pallas's most recent work appears or will appear in The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, 2RV, and New England Review.  He designs and executes craft and home projects for magazines.  He lives in New York City.

Lee Patton
Lee Patton's work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly, and Hawaii-Pacific Review, as well as in such anthologies as Hawaii-Pacific Review's Best of Decade, XY-Files, and What's Become of Eden: Poems of Family at Century's End. He was a finalist for the 2001 Lambda Award for best novel (Nothing Gold Can Stay), The Borderlands Playwrights Prize in 1993 (The Houseguest) and the 1996 Ashlands New Playwrights (Orwell in Orlando).

Hilary Tham
Hilary Tham was author of nine books of poetry, including Bad Names for Women, which won second prize in the Virginia Poetry Prizes (judge: Gerald Stern) and third prize in the Paterson Prize for Poetry (judge: Diane Wakoski). Her memoir on the making of a writer, Lane With No Name, Memoirs and Poems of a Malaysian-Chinese Girlhood, was published in 1997. Her short story collection, Tin Mines and Concubines: Malaysian Fictions, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Competition and was published posthumously in 2005. She was a teacher and visual artist, poetry editor of Potomac Review, and editor-in-chief of The Word Works.

Rosemary Winslow
Rosemary Winslow teaches writing and literature at The Catholic University of America.  Her poems and essays on poetry have appeared widely in  journals and books, most recently in Beltway, Poet Lore, 32 Poems, The Schuykill Valley Journal, and Voices from Frost Place, and Don't Call It That.  She has published numerous essays on sound structure in poetry in Poetics Today, Language and Style, Composition Studies, The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Poetry, and other places.  Her work has received awards and grants from The District of Columbia Commission on the Arts, NEH, the Vermont Studio Center, and other foundations.  She lives with her husband John, a visual artist, in downtown Washington, D.C.

Kathi Wolfe
Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet in Falls Church, VA.  Her freelance journalism and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post,  Utne Reader and many other publications.  Her poetry has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Potomac Review, Not Just Air (notjustair.org), The Innisfree Poetry Journal (innisfreepoetry.org), Gargoyle, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Kaleidoscope, Disability Studies Quarterly, Ragged Edge Magazine (raggededgemagazine.com), and The Christian Century.  In February 2004, Wolfe completed a month-long poetry residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.  In 2004, Moon Pie Press, a fine-letter press, published a limited edition of her chapbook, Surrealism Before 10 a.m.  She has read at the Bethesda, MD, literary festival, the Joaquin Miller Cabin poetry series, the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon series, Iota, and elsewhere.

Ernie Wormwood
Ernie Wormwood is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.  Her poems have appeared in yawp, Convergence, The Antietam Review, Underwire, Beltway Quarterly, The Cafe Review, Rhino, Raintiger, and in the anthologies Poetic Voices Without Borders  and Only the Sea Keeps:  Poetry of the Tsunami.  She was recently a finalist for the 2005 Dogfish Head Poetry award.  She lives in Leonardtown, Maryland.