August Franza is a novelist and poet living on the south shore of Long Island with his wife, Amy. He is the author of four novels: The Murder of Hitler (2002), The Events At Vista Bay (2005 -- optioned for film development), If I Die Before I Live (2008) and The Man in the Middle (2009). The last named novel is volume one of a completed trilogy called American Ecstasy. His literary archives are held by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he earned a Ph.D. in English in 1981.

Bruce Haywood was a professor and provost at Kenyon College in Ohio for seventeen years, then president of Monmouth College in Illinois for fourteen years. Born in 1925 in York, England, he served with army intelligence in Germsany at the end of World War II, then continued his education at Leeds University. He is a 1950 graduate of McGill University in Montreal and earned a Harvard Ph.D. in 1956. His previous books include The Essential College and Allerton Bywater, both from XOXOX Press. Bruce resides in Galesburg, Illinois.

Charlene Fix is a Professor of English at the Columbus College of Art Design and a member of The House of Toast Poets. She received poetry fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council (1993) and the Greater Columbus Arts Council (1995 and 2002), and has published poems in various literary magazines, among them The Antioch Review, The Ohio Review, Chicago Review, The Journal, The Manhattan Review, Artful Dodge, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Alimentum, and Poetry. Her chapbook Mischief is available from Pudding House Publications, and her book of poems, Flowering Bruno: A Dography, a finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, is available from XOXOX Press. Charlene’s poems were chosen by Eleanor Wilner for the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America in 2007. Her essay, “The Lost Father in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman," appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in the summer of 2008.

Ed Schiebel works for IBM Software Group out of his home, where he may or may not choose to put on pants on any given day. Ed's home is Littlewood Farm, a couple miles off highway 62, near Johnstown, Ohio. Littlewood holds a long gravel driveway, their house, the barn and fields, fences, lines of trees. Adjacent farmers grow corn and soybeans; the Schiebels keep pasture for their horses. It's from his front porch where Littlewood Farm 5AM was recorded. In his spare time (when not coding software and tending horses), Ed drums for the jazz quintet, Padula Oblongata.

Fielding Dawson's fiction, essays and art/literary criticism appeared in books, magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad for over thirty years. He published 23 books during his lifetime, including stories, novels, memoirs and poems. His writing roots reach back to Black Mountain College in 1949, where he went to study art and stayed to write and make images. After years spent writing in New York City, he taught writing in U.S. prisons for 17 years, while also working with at-risk teenagers in alternative high schools. Fielding was chairman of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and director of the PEN Prison Writing Workshop Program. His literary archives are held by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Fred Andrle is known to many as the voice of WOSU-820/NPR radio in Columbus, Ohio. His twenty years of intelligent talk on WOSU's public affairs show "Open Line" provide a rich, insightful alternative to normal talk-radio fare. What is less known is Fred's dedication to the craft of poetry. He is the recipient of a Thurber House/Greater Columbus Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2003) and Playwriting Fellowship (2000). Fred's work has been published in Chiron Review, the anthology Prayers to Protest: Poems that Center and Bless Us (Pudding House) and The Columbus Dispatch. He is a member of the Columbus poetry writing and performing group "House of Toast."

Harry Marten is Edward E. Hale, Jr., Professor of Modern British and American Literature at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He has published in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, The Gettysburg Review, The Ohio Review, New England Review, The Cortland Review, ELH, Agenda, The Centennial Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He has written books on Conrad Aiken (The Art of Knowing: The Poetry and Prose of Conrad Aiken) and Denise Levertov (Understanding Denise Levertov). His personal essay on the subject of old age and dementia, "Shadowlands," is online in the August, 2006 issue of Inertia Magazine. Harry has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Huntington Library.

Laura McCullough is a Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry and has won two New Jersey Arts Council Fellowships. She holds an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Essex, where her work focuses on poet Stephen Dunn. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner and The American Poetry Review, among other journals. She is a professor of English at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.

Loranne Marsh Temple grew up in Louisiana and now lives with her husband in Mount Vernon, Ohio. She began writing fiction after many years spent raising their six children. She won the "Best of Ohio Writers" prize for a story in 2000. Her stories have been published in Potpourri and The Ohio Writer magazine. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from The Ohio State University in 2007. She recently completed a new novel called Lady House, the story of three generations of Louisiana family.

Jerry Kelly is the editor and publisher of XOXOX Press. Born in New York City and raised on Long Island's south shore, he now lives in Gambier, Ohio. He is the author of Bushville: Life and Time in Amateur Baseball, published by McFarland and Company in 2001, and has served as a technical writer and instructional designer for Bell Labs, Canon USA, Linotype Company, Covidea, Computer Associates and other technology firms.

Mike Newell is the author of No Bottom: In Conversation with Barry Lopez, which includes what reviewers have described as a “relaxed,” “wide-ranging” original interview and a critical inquiry that “greatly advances scholarship on Lopez’s writing.” Newell previously published three books of poetry—uNderground Fires, The Unlived Life and Aestivation—and is listed in the directory of Poets and Writers. Following his early years as a wildland firefighter in Alaska in the 1970s and early 1980s, he taught at-risk populations in a variety of venues that included public schools and correctional facilities. In 2000 he re-certified his wildland firefighting qualifications and has worked numerous Western fires. Newell lives and writes in upstate New York.

Patrick Meanor, Ph.D. has taught at the State University of New York, College at Oneonta since 1974. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Professor Award and the State University Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. A graduate of John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, Patrick completed his Ph.D. at Kent State University. A prolific writer, he has published six books and more than 120 essays and reviews. Dr. Meanor teaches a wide array of courses on Contemporary Literature at SUNY Oneonta, and in his spare time, is a contributing editor for Fanfare Magazine, where he reviews classical CDs and interviews musicians.

Perry Carlton Lentz is undertaking his final year as Charles P. McIlvaine Professor of English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Perry joined the Kenyon faculty in 1969, and has served as department chair and as director of the Kenyon Exeter Program, which he helped establish in 1974. He is the author of the novels The Falling Hills and It Must Be Now the Kingdom Coming and a scholarly study of literature, war and history, Private Fleming at Chancellorsville. Born in Anniston, Alabama in 1943, he attended preparatory school at Indian Springs School, in Helena, Alabama. Married to Jane Anderson in 1965, he has two daughters, Robin and Emily, and five grandchildren.

New York native Peter Rutkoff has been teaching at Kenyon College in Ohio since 1971, and is currently the Robert Oden Professor of American Studies. Peter took his bachelor's degree at St. Lawrence University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1999-2001, Peter held the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished teaching chair at Kenyon. His current scholarly interests include African American cultural studies and the African-American migrations, which are the subject of his forthcoming book with Will Scott, Fly Away: The Great African American Migrations. His other books include New York Modern: The Arts and the City with William B. Scott, Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago and Cooperstown Chronicles: Camp and Other Love Stories.

Novelist, journalist and teacher, P.F. Kluge is Writer in Residence at Kenyon College. His six previous novels include Eddie And The Cruisers and Biggest Elvis. His non-fiction books include The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia and Alma Mater, an account of a year in the life of Kenyon College. Two films, Dog Day Afternoon and Eddie And The Cruisers, have been based on his work. His journalism appears in National Geographic Traveler, where he is a contributing editor, and elsewhere. A native of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Kluge lives in Gambier, Ohio with his wife, Pamela Hollie.

Robert Hamburger's first three books have been the subject of an exhibition at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as television, radio and theatrical treatments. They form a loose nonfiction trilogy of studies of race and social injustice in contemporary America, and were praised by the likes of Dr. Kenneth Clark, Robert Coles, and Julian Bond. Hamburger has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Paris and in India and Morocco, and has had several residencies at the MacDowell Colony and at the Ossabaw Island Project. He has been the recipient of research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in New York City.

Susan Gluck Rothenberg is an oral historian living in San Francisco. She has used her training as a psychiatric social worker with a variety of populations: troubled families; abused and neglected children; young families learning parenting skills; and older adults. Recently, she has found a niche in helping elders record their life experiences and editing those remembrances into a coherent tale, leaving their families and friends with privately-published books that are far more than just a chronology of their lives. To Be A Man: Johnnie Wilson, Jr. is her first book. Her work has previously been published in The Oral History Review.

Galbraith Miller Crump married Joan Lee in 1952 and spent the next 54 years by her side, raising five sons while teaching in the United States, Canada, France and England. He took his B.A. from Hamilton College, then a Masters at Reading University, England and a Ph.D. at St. John's College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Wisconsin; Yale; the University of Mount Allison in New Brunswick, Canada; the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France; the University of Exeter in England; and at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he served as the John Crowe Ransom Professor of Literature and as Editor of the Kenyon Review from 1982 to 1987. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Human Letters by Kenyon College in 1990.

Michael Barich has taught at Kenyon College in Ohio since 1985. His courses there include Greek and Latin at all levels, literature in translation, and ancient history, and he has recently offered advanced Greek and Latin courses on Plato, Aristophanes, and Petronius. His scholarly work is devoted in particular to epic poetry and the literature of the early Roman Empire. Barich also has had a lifelong interest in astronomy, and in recent years has helped conduct public sessions at Kenyon’s Franklin Miller Observatory to introduce students and others to the wider universe. He earned his B.A. at Haverford College and his Ph.D. at Yale.