Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz founded the three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue, NYC-Urbana, at age 19. She is the author of four books, including 2007's Oh, Terrible Youth, and her first book of non-fiction, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, which will be released this winter by Soft Skull Press.

Fresh from the Bay Area, Aaron Bair is a poet and writer who now calls Brooklyn home. He is an acute sufferer of freight train blues and is currently working on his second collection of poetry and prose entitled Babyloncology.

Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, who now makes his home in Oakland, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party magazine and lives with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.  Oscar's current work in progress is a poetry manuscript entitled Anywhere Avenue. When looking up information about the Bronx in which he grew up, all he could find were stories about a place so dangerous that no one could have possibly lived there; his writing is a response to, and rejection, of this stereotype.

James Bezerra is a too-old creative writing major at CSU Northridge. He has been a journalist, a playwright, and a pet cemetery manager, and among other things he is also a produced screenwriter and a terrible, terrible blogger. 

Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad and Tobago, a Cave Canem fellow and author of two collections of poetry; tarnish and masquerade (Cypher Books 2006) and GULLY (Cypher Books 2009).  He is co-founder and Artistic Director of the louderARTS Project.  He lives in Brooklyn.

Mahogany L. Browne (Coffee & Brooklyn), author of Unlikely & Other Sorts & Black Secret Soul, Editor of women's anthology HIS RIB, owner of PoetCD.com and slammistress of the Nuyorican Poets Café, loves drinking coffee, reading poetry and watching her daughter sing the lead in school plays.

Tony Brown, 47, is a poet, performer, musician, freelance writer, and consultant from Worcester, MA.  He spends as much time in NYC as he can, since it's been a personal touchstone for him since his first visits there in the early 70s.

Jai Chakrabarti’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Rattapallax.  A native of Kolkata, India, he calls Brooklyn home.

Michael Cirelli's first full-length collection of poems, Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard, will be published in the Spring of 2008 by Hanging Loose Press. After living in Oakland for many years, he came to NYC to further his "writing career." Aside from completing an MFA at the New School, he works with thousands of NYC teens every year as Executive Director of the award-winning not-for-profit organization Urban Word NYC.

Tim Clancy is a 24 year old writer/waiter hailing from Hell's Kitchen, NYC. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from one of the top 25 state universities in New York and utilizes this degree every day, when he uses proper English to ask tourists if they've saved room for dessert. 

South Bronx born and bred, and attending local schools there in 50s and 60s, J.T. Clark is a retired NYC teacher with fifty poems currently appearing in twenty poetry journals. He penned The Joy of Lex, an upbeat romp of seventy-two sonnets and a crown which tells of life with his black lab, Lex -- the best service dog in the world -- and has also written Othering, a mss of 150 sonnets which recounts the journey of a person who others, who becomes "an other" as he faces a burgeoning physical disability.

Lawrence Clayton lives and works in New York City.  He has been a stagehand, an ironworker, and a dishwasher since moving here in 1995.

Jessica Colley is a northern New Jersey native and grew up with the NYC theater, art and poetry scene saturating her weekends. Currently a freelance travel writer dividing time between Europe and the tri-state area, Jessica looks back fondly at a summer spent studying poetry at the New School.

kevin coval is the author of slingshots (a hip-hop poetica) (em press, 2005), whose work recently appeared in I Speak of The City: New York City Poems (Columbia University Press, 2007). as part of his '08 political platform he hopes to build a commuter train between the upper west side and chicago's ukranian village.

Caroline Depalma is a poet living in the East Village. She will be completing her MFA in Poetry at New School University in May, and samples from her thesis can be found at her blog.

Panika M. C. Dillon hails from Fairbanks, AK and Austin, TX. She recently graduated with her MFA in creative-writing poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and will be on death-metal-poetry.com.

A Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry, fiction and non fiction, Liz Dolan was born, braised and bronzed in The Bronx.

Ainsley Drew studied screenwriting at NYU Tisch and has written for GO NYC magazine, neither of which prepared her for her current gig as a legal assistant. A native New Yorker who doesn't blush to admit her Long Island roots, she lives in Brooklyn with her best friend where they are known to cavort naked and tempt both genders from their second floor window.

Erica Miriam Fabri received her MFA in poetry from The New School and her publications include: High Heel Magazine (chapbook) and Texas Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly and Hanging Loose. She teaches creative writing for Urban Word NYC, The School of Visual Arts and Hunter College.

Jane Flett is a Scottish philosopher yearning for a US visa so she can live out the rest of her days noisily in the Chelsea Hotel.  Until then, Jane spends her time running a bar called The Bowery, writing stories about misfits, and pretending she is Edie Sedgwick.

Anne Germanacos' work has appeared recently in Descant, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Salamander, Florida Review, Pindeldyboz and others. She lives in San Francisco and on Crete, with stopovers on the Upper West Side to visit her older son and forays down to the Village for drinks with friends.