<ppfi contributors>

Beach, James : Capricorn, 38. Into: camping, cards, chess, history, live music, meditation, philosophy, politics, sports, the theatre, travel. Also: studying literature, noticing art, doing stuff. Scoring is a prerequisite?! Published in little venues, worldwide.

Bellamy, Joe David : Lives in Florida. His two latest books are New World Extra and The Lost Saranac Interviews, the latter co-edited with Connie Bellamy. The books are available through his website: joedavidbellamy.com.

Fowler, S.J. : Is a postgraduate student in philosophy at the University of London, works for the British Museum, is archivist for Peter Owen publishers and conducts poetry journalism, with a speciality in Slavic, Balkan and Scandinavian poets. He has published poetry in over 50 journals and ezines.

Masterson, Robert : Is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher who divides his time between New York and New Mexico. Author of Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber Press, 2008) and Trial by Water (Dog Running Wild Press, 1982), Masterson’s creative work has appeared in numerous publications including Blue Mesa Review, Tierra: Contemporary NM Fiction, Tyounyi, The Temple and Bombay Gin. He has been a regular contributor to the magazines BRAVO, local flavor, La Ventana, and Albuquerque Monthly, his poetry and commentary has been broadcast on KUNM (public radio station, Albuquerque, New Mexico), WFUV (Fordham University) and WPKN (community radio station, Bridgeport, Connecticut). He is an editor-for-life and publisher with Lords of Language, a literary/arts organization based in New Mexico that has most recently published Voices Behind Bars, an anthology of women prison inmates’ writing, in conjunction with Sarah Lawrence College.

Masterson works as a professor of English at The City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and at The Bedford Hills Correctional Institute for Women in Bedford Hills, New York. In the past, he has held similar positions at Fordham University in Manhattan, Concordia College in Bronxville, New York, Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut, and at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He has worked as a free-lance journalist and as Senior Staff Writer at both the Westchester County Weekly and the Fairfield County Weekly, alternative newsweeklies in New York and Connecticut.

In addition to university and public school classrooms, Masterson's teaching has taken him to the People's Republic of China and inside New Mexico and Colorado state penal institutions. He received the 1987 Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of New Mexico and the first Ted Berrigan Scholarship from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993 and has been a featured workshop leader during the Taos Poetry Festival / World Heavyweight Poetry Bout.

Masterson holds both a BA and an MA (with distinction) in English Literature from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; an MFA from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and a weird little academic certificate from Shaanxi Normal University, Xian, Shaanxi Province, the People’s Republic of China.

Randall, Margaret : Was born in New York City, lived for a quarter century in Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua) where she founded and edited the bilingual literary journal EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, and returned to the U.S. in 1984 only for the U.S. government to order her deported because of opinions expressed in some of her books. Her case gained national and international celebrity, and many writers and artists supported her. With all that solidarity, she won it in 1989. Of her more than 100 published books, some recent titles are WHEN I LOOK INTO THE MIRROR AND SEE YOU: WOMEN, TERROR AND RESISTANCE (Rutgers University Press), NARRATIVE OF POWER (Common Courage Press), STONES WITNESS (The University of Arizona Press), TO CHANGE THE WORLD: MY YEARS IN CUBA (Rutgers), and THEIR BACKS TO THE SEA (Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas). The poem published here is from a forthcoming collection, MY TOWN, soon to appear from Wings.

Rosenthal, Barbara : Born in New York, she is an artist and writer who has taught photography at Parsons School of Design and writing at the City University of NY. She has published four books of photography and journal-text, Clues to Myself, Sensations, Homo Futurus, and Soul & Psyche, which, along with twenty other works, are in the collections of MoMA and The Whitney. She currently writes art criticism for NYArts magazine while filing rejections from literary agents who don't think they can sell her novel Wish For Amnesia. emedialoft.org.

Weishaus, Joel : Was born in New York. He edited On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, (City Lights Books). His translation of the Ch’an Buddhist Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Block Prints by Arthur Okamura, was published by the Cranium Press, San Francisco. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he wrote the Introduction and Notes to Thomas Merton’s Woods, Shore, Desert (Museum of New Mexico Press). He became an adjunct curator at the University of New Mexico’s Fine Arts Museum, Albuquerque, and a Writer-in-Residence at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. His third book is “The Healing Spirit of Haiku,” co-authored with David Rosen and illustrated by Arthur Okamura. (North Atlantic Books, 2004) He has also published over forty essays and book reviews.

Weishaus presently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on Digital Literary Art projects. Home page.

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