F. Richard Thomas was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1940. He attended Purdue University, University of Minnesota, and Indiana University. Currently, he is Professor of American Thought & Language at Michigan State University (since 1971) and editor/publisher of Years Press and Centering Magazine.

His publications include six chapbooks of poems; a full-length book of poetry, Frog Praises Night: Poems with Commentary (Southern Illinois University Press); a novel, Prism: The Journal of John Fish (Canoe Press); and a book on the relationship of poetry to photography, Literary Admirers of Alfred Stieglitz. He is also editor of Americans in Denmark: Comparisons of the Two Cultures by Writers, Artists, and Teachers, and The Landlocked Heart: Poems from Indiana (Indiana Writes/Indiana University). He has published in many magazines, including Articulate Magazine, Images, Poet Lore, English Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Bridge, and others.

A selection of his poetry will appear in the anthology New Poems from the Third Coast, which will be published by Wayne State University in spring 2000. He has received a Michigan Council for the Arts award, a MacDowell Artist Colony fellowship, and two Fulbright Awards to teach in Denmark. He recently received a Michigan State University grant for a leave to work on an experimental novel in spring 2000. A new full-length book of his poetry, Death at Camp Pahoka, will be published by Michigan State University Press in fall 2000.

He lives with his wife, Sharon, in Haslett, Michigan, and spends part of every year in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where his son and daughter own and manage the Red Mountain Cafe.

"The power of an individual poet's work depends upon intensity of vision. With the subjects he has chosen to write about in Death at Camp Pahoka-science, spirituality/religion, sexuality, family, and community-F. Richard Thomas is clearly obsessed. Focusing on the richness of language and content, his poems are at once accessible, yet profound. Additionally, all of the poems, while grounded in the "real" and the "physical," have a metaphysical twist to them. At their best, they cannot be read without the reader being momentarily lifted up and out of the physical world into wonder. This collection is one that reveals the beauty, joy, and pain of daily life, a fascinating life rich in uncertainty and chaos, a life that presents an unlimited number of situations on which the metaphysical light of poetry can be cast. Whether it's food, family, or travel, Dick Thomas has a different slant on the subject. His is a voice laced with love and anger, frustration and humor, the voice of a man simply trying to get home no matter where he happens to be." -Roger Pfingston, author of Something Iridescent.

Margo LaGattuta. MFA, has five published collections of poetry: Embracing the Fall (Plain View Press), The Dream Givers (Lake Shore Publishing), Noedgelines (Earhart Press), Diversion Road (State Street Press), and The Heart Before the Course (. She is Midwest Editor for Plain View Press in Austin, Texas, where she has edited six new anthologies: Variations on the Ordinary, Almost Touching, Wind Eyes, Up from the Soles of Our Feet, At the Edge of Mirror Lake and Beyond the Lines. A two-time winner of the Midwest Poetry Award and a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Founders Award, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her work in small press publishing. She publishes a column in Phenomenews and is Associate Editor for Suburban Lifestyles, where she writes a column, articles and theater reviews (Meadowbrook Theatre). She teaches writing at UM-Flint and Oakland Community College and hosts a radio program "Art in the Air" on WPON radio (AM 1460). Her poetry is featured in a 1999 national literary anthology, Everywhere is Someplace Else, and her essays in a new creative non-fiction journal, PENinsula. She is currently working on a new writing process book, Writing like a River, as well as a new book of poems, Bears Are Taught to Use Cameras.

For more information, please go to http://www.inventingtheinvisible.com/index.htm

Original works read by student authors of Michigan colleges and universities. Featuring: Anne Henningfeld, Matt Duke, Vanessa Heng and Nathan Blom.

Katherine Fishburn writes: "In one way or another I have always been a poet-in the way I see the world and in the way I write about it. From both my parents I learned early the habit of words. I learned to look up their meaning, follow the path of their usage, revel in their sound and construction. The unabridged dictionary has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. One might even say it elevated my thoughts. For, not only did my family consult it regularly, we also used it as a booster chair to help young children reach their dinner.

From both my parents, but most particularly my father, I learned the art of seeing nature-comets in their orbits, spiders at their webs, beetles in their astounding numbers (weighing in at a quarter million species), birds in residence and in migration. Nothing was too small or insignificant to examine for hours on end. Everything must be accounted for, identified, researched, and understood. Only then could I say that I had truly seen an assassin bug, a garter snake, a snapping turtle.

From my mother, herself an English teacher, I learned to hear the poets sing and note their patterns. Be they from Chaucer, Shakespeare or Tennyson, the poets' words thundered and echoed throughout my childhood and in conjunction with my father's scientific training helped to shape my relationship with the world-be it the relationship I have had with canines, amphibians, arthropods, or humans.

The Dead Are So Disappointing is my first collection of poetry. "

"The Dead Are So Disappointing is a daughter's unflinching meditation on the days immediately preceding and following her father's death-and an interrogation into the lasting impact his life has had on her own. This collection stands revealed as an integral part of a long-delayed mourning process as the daughter struggles to reconcile the competing emotions of anger and grief, betrayal and loyalty, that surfaced after her father's death. ... Katherine Fishburn's first collection of poems is truly moving. As she probes 'the grief of time,' she rehearses the complexities of life in families, with families and without them, easily taking us with her into the private tangles of contemporary relationships." - Linda Wagner- Martin Hanes Professor of English UNC, Chapel Hill

For more information on Katherine Fishburn, please go to:
http://www.cal.msu.edu/english/courses-faculty/

A native of Warren, Mich., a working-class suburb less than a mile from Detroit, Daniel's poetry reflects the physicality of manual labor, the noises and smells of machine shops and factories, the metallic glint of polished steel and iron.His first two poetry collections, Places/Everyone and Punching Out, set in Detroit neighborhoods and factories, have been described as realistic, gritty, and sometimes violent but were praised for their tough, spare style and unsentimental portrayal of working people's lives. His third book, M-80, centers on urban violence and its aftereffects, while his more recent books, Niagara Falls, Blessing this House, and Blue Jesus changed course with their issues of faith. Daniels has edited American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race (Wayne State University Press, 1995), and The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993). His first collection of short stories, No Pets (Bottom Dog Press, 1999), was made into a feature film by director Tony Bubba. His next book, City Pool, will be out from New Issues Press in 2002.

Educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University, Daniels is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie-Mellon University. Places/Everyone, won the Brittingham Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize and was included in Best American Poetry 2000. Jim Daniels lives with his wife, the writer Kristin Kovacic, and their two children, Ramsey and Rosalie, in Pittsburgh.