Michael Ives was born and raised in western New York. A jazz musician and sound/text performer, Ives' work with the performance trio, F'loom, was featured several times on National Public Radio, the CBC, on radio programs throughout South America and Europe, and in various international anthologies of sound poetry. Between 1996 and 2000 he toured with the group across the continental United States and Canada, sharing the stage with a wide range of artists, including Eric Begosian, Lili Tomlin, Margaret Atwood, and Paul Metcalf. He is the author of The External Combustion Engine, from Future poem Books. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous magazines and journals both in the United States and abroad. A collection of nine-line poems is forthcoming this spring from A Rest Press. He is currently at work on both a modular novel that traces the adventures of a hapless trio of jazz musicians and a book-length poem entitled, Soft Perimeter. He currently lives in the Hudson Valley, where he has taught in the Written Arts Program at Bard College since 2003.

Mary Caponegro is an experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts (which featured narratives based on Italian art works), The Complexities of Intimacy, and most recently, All Fall Down. Her work has been anthologized in You've Got to Read This, The Italian-American Reader, Wild Dreams, the Anchor Book of New American Fiction, and A Convergence of Birds, which was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, pairing writers with individual bird boxes of Joseph Cornell. She has collaborated with the landscape architect Eric Fulford, the sculptor Rita McBride, the book artist Gunnar Kaldewey, and the scuptor Heidie Hatry. She is the recipient of the General Electric Award, the Charles Flint Kellog Award, the Bruno Arcudi Award, and the Rome Prize in Literature, and is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature at Bard College.Reading

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