Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) published more than twenty books, including The Sonnets(1964). He is a key figure of the second generation New York School, and within innovative American poetry more generally.  The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, edited by Alice Notley, with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, was published by the University of California Press in 2005. His PennSound page is here.

Taylor Davis-Van Atta will soon launch The Black & White Review, a new literary magazine dedicated exclusively to high-quality literary criticism.

Michel Deguy, who turns eighty this year, is one of the major poets France has produced since World War Two. The author of over fifty books of poetry and essays on cultural, philosophical and literary matters, there are at this point only two volumes of his work available in translation, namely Given Giving, translated by Clayton Eshleman (University of California Press, 1984) and Recumbents, translated by Wilson Baldridge (Wesleyan University Press, 2005). He is emeritus professor of philosophy & literature at the University of Paris, and the editor of the most vital French poetry magazine of the last 20+ years — PO&SIE. Deguy also belongs to that prestigious group of intellectuals and writers including Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida & Jean-Luc Nancy, who shared the directorship of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris.

Marta Del Pozo Ortea is a Ph.D. candidate in Peninsular Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her book of poetry La memoria del pez received the Best Young Poet Prize from the Fundación Jorge Guillen (Spain) and is forthcoming. She has published numerous articles on science and literature, the occult, and avant-gardism in academic and cultural journals. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (http://www.latashadiggs.com) is the author of three chapbooks which include Ichi-Ban and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna Press), and the album, Televisíon. Her work has been published nationally, performed internationally, and has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Naropa Institute, Caldera Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts (2003/2009), the Eben Demarest Trust, Harlem Community Arts Fund, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Grant for Women. As an independent curator and director, LaTasha has curated and produced several events with The Black Rock Coalition Orchestra. A native of Harlem, LaTasha is a 2009-10 LMCC Workspace Artist in Residence.

Anna Elena Eyre holds an MFA from CCA and is a second year PhD student whose research concerns animality, representation and the body in 20th-21st century poetry and philosophy of poetry. She is interested in the performative aspect of laws and rights as concomitant with the written. Her poetry and criticism are forthcoming in EOAGH, Jacket, Moria, Sous Rature, No Tell Motel, Latino Poetry Review, among others.

Chad Hardy has invented many kinds of musical instruments merely by presenting his material outward in a genital display.

Robert Harvey is Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he teaches topics ranging from literary and film theories to modern and contemporary literatures and the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse.  He has written extensively on Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Duchamp and Michel Deguy and has translated Lyotard, Deguy, Derrida, Ricœur, and other French thinkers. His most recent books are De l’exception à la règle (Éditions Lignes, 2006) and Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras (Éditions de l’Imec, 2009). His latest monograph, Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics, is forthcoming in 2010 from Continuum. Harvey is chair of the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook and was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, from 2001 until 2007.

Robert Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. His first book, Armed Descent, was published in 1961.  Since then he has published  more than fifty poetry titles, including Axon Dendron Tree (Salitter, 1967), Finding the Measure (1968), Flesh Dream Book (1971),  The Loom (1975)Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993, (1995), all from Black Sparrow Press. Recent poetry collections include  Lapis ( Godine/Black Sparrow, 2005), May Day (Parsifal Press, 2007) and Fire Exit (Black Widow Press 2009). He has also published one collection of essays, In Time (Frontier press, 1972) as well as two novels and several volumes of short fiction.  A new collection of short stories, The Logic of the World, has just come out from McPherson & Co. In recent years he has also been concerned with writing-in-collaboration with artists living (Birgit Kempker: Scham/Shame, 2004, andBrigitte Mahlknecht: The Garden of Distances, 2000) and dead (P.B.Shelley, Mont Blanc, 1994).  Forthcoming are a long poem on the discourse of psychoanalysis, The Language of Eden, and another collection of essays.  He teaches in the Writing Program at Bard College, where he lives with his wife, the translator Charlotte Mandell. Check out his online site, rk-ology.

Natalie Knight‘s poems and poetics essays appear in Jacket, The Poetic Front, West Coast Line, Critiphoria, ditch, Octopus, Little Red Leaves, and foam:e. She is a Carson Carr Diversity Scholar and co-organizer of the 2010 interdisciplinary conference, “Turning On Rights: Politics, Performance, and the Text” at University at Albany, SUNY.

Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently)Reason and Other Women; Grave of Light, New and Selected Poems 1970-2005; andIn the Pines.  With her sons, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, Notley edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.  She is also the author of a book of essays on poets and poetry, Coming After. Notley has received many prizes and awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry.  Often considered an important figure in the New York School, Notley lives and writes in Paris, France.

Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor, has taught at UGA since 2001, having previously taught at Queen’s University in Canada and Pomona College in California. His PhD is from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books of poetry—Tabula Rasula(1986), Hot Wax, or Psyche’s Drip (2007), and a completed manuscript, Sophisticated Boom Boom—was editor of the poetry magazine Wch Way (1976-1983), and served on the editorial board of Sulfur (1986-1990). Scholarly publications include The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940-1990 (1996), This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (2002), Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in American Poetry (2004), and two books in press, The Shadow Mouth: Studies in Poetic Inspiration, and Lower Frequencies: Genre and Extravagance in the Novel. Rasula is co-editor, with Steve McCaffery, of Imagining Language: An Anthology (1998), and is presently co-editing, with Tim Conley, Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity. A manuscript on modernism, called Jazzbandism, is well underway, and is the project for which Rasula will have a residency fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin in spring 2009.

Nicholas Rattner holds an M.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He writes about basketball for SLAM Magazine’s online edition. He and fellow translator Marta Del Pozo’s translations of Iván Yauri’s Viento de fuego/Wind of Fire received support from the NEA and will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in February 2011. He lives in Shutesbury, Massachusetts.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003),Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), and Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), and the chapbooks Easter Sunday, Cherry, and West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM and other Oakland Poems. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Asian Pacific American Journal, Border Senses, Fourteen Hills, HOW2, In the Grove, Latino Poetry Review, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, as well as the anthologies Babaylan (Aunt Lute, 2000), Going Home to a Landscape (Calyx, 2003), Pinoy Poetics (Meritage Press, 2004), and Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press, 2010). She currently teaches in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband poet Oscar Bermeo in Oakland. Find her online at http://www.barbarajanereyes.com, http://bjanepr.wordpress.com andhttp://pawainc.blogspot.com.

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet and the author of over seventy books of poetry including Poems for the Game of Silence, Poland/1931,  A Seneca Journal, Vienna Blood, That Dada Strain, New Selected Poems 1970-1985, Khurbn, and most recently, A Paradise of Poets and A Book of Witness (all from New Directions). Describing his poetry career as “an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present,” he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry: Technicians of the Sacred (tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania), Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), America a Prophecy (a radical revision of the poetries of the North American continent co-edited with George Quasha),Revolution of the Word (American experimental poetry between the two world wars),A Big Jewish Book (subtitled “Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present”), and Poems for the Millennium (two volumes, co-edited with Pierre Joris). Check out his blog Poems & Poetics.

Lytle Shaw and Jimbo Blachly collaborate on The Chadwick Family Papers. Blachly is an artist based in New York City whose work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States. Shaw is a writer who teaches American literature at New York University.

Habib Tengour, writer and ethnologist, born in Mostaganem (Algeria) in 1947, lives and works between Constantine (Algeria) and Paris (Université d’Evry val d’Essonne). Considered as“one of the Maghreb’s most forceful and visionary poetic voices,” Tengour, who authored a “Manifesto of Maghrebian Surrealism” in 1981, explores the Algerian cultural space in all its ramifications : the oral and hagiographic traditions, the popular imagination and the founding myths, collective memory, raï music and the lived experiences of exile – all this in writing formally so profoundly hybridized that the critics have forged a term to define this phenomenon, namely “soufialism” (Hédi Abdel-Jaouad).

Closest to his heart are the Algerian cultural identity and memory as they are being mestizoed between Orient and Occident, especially under the impact of the experiences of exile and migration. See for example L’Epreuve de l’Arc (1990), his “maqamât-novel,” Gens de Mosta (Short stories,1997), or Ce Tatar-là (1999), his poem set in the working class suburbs. The double vision of poet and ethnologist achieves surprising symbioses, for Tengour, the cynical observer of his society, proposes through his narratives a fragmented chronical of post-colonial Algeria under the dismal light of History or of myth: emigration in Tapapakitaques (1976), the decline of socialism in Sultan Galièv ou La rupture des stocks (1981/85), the rise of fundamentalism in Le Vieux de la Montagne (1983). Le Poisson de Moïse (2001), his latest novel, tries to understandwhat makes young Algerians eager to join the Taliban.

Edwin Torres has taught his workshop ‘Brainlingo: writing the voice of the body’ across the country and overseas. A recepient of fellowships from NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council among others, his work has been published across the spectrum of poetry’s many divisions, including a recent guest spot on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog. His books include, “I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said,” “Fractured Humorous” (Subpress), ‘The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker” (Roof Books), “The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language” (Atelos Books), and his collaborations create performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He is inventor of a noh-boricua inspired non-movement called NORICUA, and has performed its non-ideologies with Spanic Attack in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the soon-to-be-online poetry journal “Rattapallax.” His recent collection, “In The Function Of External Circumstances” was published by Nightboat Books.

Rodrigo Toscano‘s two latest books are Collapsible Poetics Theater and Globo-Exilio-Ejercito. Toscano is the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His most recent CPT piece “Feel Your Media – Bitch” (an hour length body-movement poetic sequence set to music and texts) is currently being labbed and tested in several cities across the United States. The complete score can be found in the latest issue of 1913. Toscano’s Spanish language poetry can be found in the anthology, Malditos Latinos, Malditos Sudacas. Toscano’s English poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Catalan. He works in Manhattan at the Labor Institute, and lives in the Greenpoint township of Brooklyn.

Iván Yauri was born in 1963 in the small city of Quillabamba (“Plain of the Moon” in Quechua) in the Cusco region of Perú. In 1984, he moved to Spain where he lived until his return to Perú in 1997. Upon his return, he published his first book of poetry,Rastro (1998), and began participating in public demonstrations to remove Fujimori from power. In the last three years, he has published three books of poetry: Viento de Fuego (2007), Reapertura del sumario (2007), and Saga errante (2009).  He is a member of the Association of the Writers of Perú and hosts a radio show, also namedViento de fuego. He currently resides in the Wanchaq district of Cusco.

Rachel Zolf’s latest book is Neighbour Procedure (Coach House, 2010). Human Resources (Coach House, 2007) won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her other collections include Shoot and Weep (Nomados, 2008), from Human Resources (Belladonna, 2005), Masque(Mercury, 2004) – finalist for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry – and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks, 1999), finalist in the CBC Literary Competition. Zolf’s poetry and essays have been published in journals such as Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, West Coast Line, Capilano Review and Open Letter and in the anthologies Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics(Coach House, 2009) and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She was the founding poetry editor of The Walrus magazine. She has been awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and received poetry, non-fiction, and video grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Bravo arts network. Her work has been translated into French and Spanish and into video art form. A former documentary writer-producer and communications consultant, Zolf has also made experimental poetry videos and collaborated with other artists on various performance and publishing initiatives. Her literary papers are housed at York University archives, and she is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers Union of Canada. Born in Toronto, Zolf is presently living in New York City.