"Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it." --Diane Wakoski

An MSU Alumnus, Poet and award-winning writer, Gildner's work includes eight volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, and a memoir about coaching a baseball team in 1980s Poland titled The Warsaw Sparks.  Gildner is also the author of The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, which won the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1997. His many other books include Blue Like the Heavens: New & Selected Poems (1984), The Second Bridge (1987) and A Week in South Dakota (1987).

"The Warsaw Sparks, his memoir of coaching baseball in communist Poland, has been a 'homerun hit' within a different literary field," said Dr. Joy Dworkin, associate professor of English at Missouri Southern. "In all of his writing, Gary Gildner's voice is direct, unmannered, and intelligent about 'what we do.' How we watch our young toddler watch a deer, how we dream of death, or how we suddenly learn a fresh detail from a family story." 

Gildner has previously been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, as well as a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, and the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes.

Mr. Piziks is an English and teen heath teacher at Walled Lake High School. After publishing numerous short stories in science fiction magazines and anthologies, Steven Piziks sold his first book, In the Company of Mind, to Baen Books in 1998. Pizik's other novels include: Corporate Mentality (Baen Books, 1999) and The Tiny War (Star Trek: Voyager, to be published by Pocket Books in 2002). ROC Books will soon publish two novels (Dreamer: a Novel of the Silent Empire, 2001, and Nightmare: a Novel of the Silent Empire, 2002) penned by Piziks under his pseudonym, Steven Harper.
Read more about Mr. Piziks on his website: http://www.sff.net/people/spiziks/

"Steven Harper manages to consistently create compelling worlds and appealing characters. He is defiantly a writer to watch." -Sarah Zettel, author of Fool's War, commenting on Dreamer: a Novel of the Silent Empire.

Ms. Mills has written and spoken on ecology and social change since her Mills College commencement speech in 1969, in which she announced she would forego having children due to concerns about overpopulation and its effects on the environment. Her writings include: Whatever Happened to Ecology (Sierra Club Books, 1989) and In Service of the Wild (Beacon Press, 1995),a book about restoring and reinhabiting damaged land. Mills edited In Praise of Nature (Island Press, 1990), a compilation of reviews of excerpts of and excerpts from major works on environmental literature, as well as Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century (Sierra Club Books, 1997), which reflects her choice in life to be "willfully backward about technology".

Lorraine Anderson writes: "What is perhaps most impressive about Stephanie Mills is the insistence with which she keeps pointing out the relationship between our individual choices and the fate of our species and others with which we share this earth."

A University of Michigan Writing Instructor, Josie Kearns is the author of Life After the Line (Wayne State University Press, 1990), and New Numbers (Western Michigan University Press, 2000), and editor of New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry (Wayne State University Press, 2000).

Of New Numbers, Keith Taylor says: "The title poem begins with an epigraph apparently spoken by a scientist who was trying to explain the term overkill to a congressional committee: 'We need new numbers for this.' Kearns then begins looking for those new numbers, the ones that might fit situations that fall outside our usual patterns of quantification. She even gives these numbers names, and those names in her table of contents create their own weirdly beautiful catalog: Sping, Clazura, Quaro, Endearth, Eenum, Lumaroon, Leethum. And then she gives these numbers their situations. 'Sping,' for instance:"

                                "Is the straw
                                and the camel and its back
                                and the last haystack in which
                                the poison needle is found."

For more about Kearns, please go to:  http://detnews.com/VOICES/BERMAN/000427/000427.htm

A Central Michigan University English Professor, Dr. Root is the author of Wordsmithery: A Guide to Working at Writing (Macmillan, 1994), "Time by Moments Steals Away": The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass (with Ruth Douglass; Wayne State University Press, 1998), Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching: a Sourcebook (National Council of Teachers of English ; National Writing Project, University of California, 1996), and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman, 2001 ), and several other books.