Aaron Balkan grew up in Arizona. He received his MFA from New York University, where he was a New York Times fellow, and now teaches in the school's Expository Writing Program.

Michael Broder lives in New York City where he works as a freelance medical writer, studies creative writing at NYU, and curates the Ear Inn reading series. His poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Review, La Petite Zine, and the Capilano Review. He is domestically partnered with the poet Jason Schneiderman.

Kim Church has received writing fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Northern Lights, North Carolina Literary Review, The Independent Weekly, and other publications. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Shanna Compton's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gastronomica, Both, La Petite Zine and The La Petite Zine Reader, failbetter, Good Foot, CROWD, The Monday Poetry Report, and elsewhere. She is the editor of LIT, the literary journal of New School University, and co-curates the Frequency Reading Series at Soft Skull Shortwave in Brooklyn with Daniel Nester (www.softskull.com/events).

Leigh Anne Couch lives in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, Carolina Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, and other journals.

Oliver de la Paz has been published in Asian Pacific American Journal, North American Review, Quarterly West, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His book of prose poems and verse, Names Above Houses, was a winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in poetry and was published by Southern Illinois University Press. He teaches creative writing at Utica College.

Denise Duhamel's most recent collection is Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.) An assistant professor at Florida International University in Miami, she co-edited, with Nick Carbo, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (The Anthology Press, 2002.)

Shafer Hall is still very earnest about poetry and as such is the object of considerable derision from the New York staff of Painted Bride Quarterly.

Joan Harvey writing has appeared in The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, The Distillery, Artisan, Visions, Fuel, 96 Inc., Worcester Review, Aspen Daily News, Aspen Times, and others. She received a prize for best poem in the West Wind Review, The Sixteenth Anthology, and for best fiction in the Santa Barbara Independent. Her work has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado.

Katy Hawkins is finishing a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU where she teaches philosophy.

Nicole Heffner was born in North Carolina but spent her early years moving from town to town in the South. She now lives in New York where she writes poems, stories, and essays.

Upon graduating from Yale University, David Kear hit the road in search of a story that contained all stories. After two years looking in Hollywood, he currently resides in Brooklyn with this wife, Nicole, and temps in the meantime while the search continues.

Jennifer L. Knox thinks PBQ is the ballsiest lit mag going, bar-none. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry in 1997 and 2003. It has also appeared in Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, and Nerve. She teaches poetry writing at Hunter College in New York City, and is finishing her first book of poems, A Gringo Like Me.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published three books of poetry, most recently The Milk of Inquiry, and five books of prose, most recently Andy Warhol. He is a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Matt Longabucco is an Associate Editor at PBQ and is pursuing his PhD at NYU, where he teaches in the Expository Writing Program.

George Murray's third book of poems is The Hunter (McClelland & Stewart, 2003). His poems have appeared in many publications in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the US. In July 2003 he moved from New York City to small-town Canada where he now makes banjo noises at the locals.

We love Daniel Nester. We knew him when he was a struggling writer on The Gleaner here at Rutgers, and now look at him: God Save My Queen was reviewed by the New York Times, and his work appears in Best American Poetry 2003. (Imagine the whole editorial board all misty-eyed and clutching their pearls: that’s our boy!).

We’ve had Renato Rosaldo’s translations of Miguel Hernández's for so long he probably forgot he sent them to us in the first place.

Jackie Sheeler is a poet, curator and teacher who has lived and worked in NYC all her writing life. Her first book, The Memory Factory, received the Magellan Prize and was published by Buttonwood Press in 2002. Her second book, an anthology of poetry written by and about the police, was recently released by Soft Skull Press. Jackie founded the Poetz.com website and its associated monthly arts newsletter, and curates a weekly reading series at the Cornelia Street Café in addition to performing widely (and frequently!) herself.

Laurel Snyder received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is the grateful recipient of a 2002 Paul Engle-James Michener Fellowship. She has poems forthcoming at The Styles and Gulf Coast.

Andrew Spear's work has appeared in River City, Sundog: The Southeast Review, and the anthology Venice: The Invisible City. He lives, teaches, and writes in Berkeley, California, where he's at work on a novel.

As of the time of this posting, we can’t find David Staudt. David? Are you out there? Give us a holler when you can. We worry.

Matthew J. Sullivan recently moved to Central Washington with his wife Libby and baby Milo. His work has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Evansville Review, The Bloomsbury Review and other publications. He is currently revising his second novel, a literary mystery set in a rural zoology museum.

Susan Varon is a poet and artist living in New York City. She began writing poetry in 1992, after suffering a severe stroke. In 1999 she won the New Voice Poetry Award of the Writer’s Voice. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She teaches writing at Marymount College and facilitates writing workshops for survivors of physical or emotional trauma at her home in Manhattan. Her work can also be seen in the current issue of Notre Dame Review.

Max Zimmer