Pamela Ditchoff is the author of The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies: A Novel (Coffee House Press, 1995). A "semifictional" oral history of midgets, giants, conjoined twins, hermaphrodites, and other human oddities mixes fact and fiction to tell the tales of these people from their point of view. Like a nightmarish daydream or a hazy trip through a carnival freak show, Ditchoff's book suggests that its pages are mirrors and the reader should think again before deciding which images are truly monstrous. Well researched and well written, this engrossing novel is a truly stunning debut work... Kathleen Hughes.

Ditchoff has also published work in Slipstream Magazine (Issue #10 Protest Theme), a yearly anthology of some of the best poetry and fiction available today in the American small press.

In addition to three novels, a short story collection and six books of poetry, Dan Gerber's work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including: The New Yorker, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Outside, The Nation, The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Tricycle and Poetry. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for The Best American Poetry 1999, and received The Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001. His most recent collection of poems is Trying to Catch the Horses (Michigan State University Press, 1999) and his most recent book, a collection of biographical essays called, A Second Life; A Collected Nonfiction (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, 2001).

Novelist Jim Harrison, who coedited the literary journal Sumac with Gerber from 1968-72, provides the epigraph for one poem and a perfect summation of Gerber's gifts: "It's very difficult to look at the world and into your heart at the same time." Gerber's poems, imbued with a mystical Zen pantheism—a still and clarified center—instruct and console by their unadorned revelations in which the human, represented by Gerber, cohabit the natural world without dominating it.

He and his wife, Debbie, live in the Santa Ynez Valley of California and spend summers on the Idaho-Wyoming border.

Listen to his poem"Calm Spring Hours"

A short story writer and teacher of creative nonfiction, Sue William Silverman is author of the award winning and powerful work of nonfiction entitled Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press, 1996), a revealing and evoking look at a child's incestuous experiences. Silverman is the associate editor of Fourth Genre, Explorations in Nonfiction (Michigan State University Press), and is a professional speaker on the subjects of incest and child sexual abuse.

Sue William Silverman has had two short stories nominated for the Pushcart prize, and is a frequent judge for fiction and nonfiction writing awards. She also conducts creative writing and nonfiction work shops at various colleges, universities and writing conferences around the country.

For more information, visit her web site: http://www.suewilliamsilverman.com/authors/viewclob.asp?key=1&aid=2229

Walter Richard Knupfer's poetry has been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and other literary journals. He has served as the U.S. Editor for the journal Modern Poetry in Translation and as a guest editor for The Iowa Review. Knupfer is the Executive Director of the Michigan Humanities Council: http://michiganhumanities.org/.

Penn is a Native American novelist, essayist, editor and teacher. His first novel The Absence of Angels (Permanent Press, 1994), tells a fictional but autobiographical coming-of-age tale. The story's hero, Alley Hummingbird, adores his Nez Perce grandfather and has a less straightforward relationship with his own father who married an eccentric white woman.

William Penn is also the author of All My Sins are Relatives (University of Nebraska, 1995), a collection of 10 essays that was his first nonfiction book and was nominated for seven major prizes. As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity (1998, UC Press) is his most recent book. It is a collection of original non-fiction by writers of mixblood North and South American heritage, commissioned, edited and introduced by Penn. He also is the editor of The Telling of the World: Native American Stories and Art (1996, Tabori and Chang), an illustrated collection of contemporary Indian art and classic tales.

Penn is a writer and professor of English at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. For more information about Mr. Penn, please visit the following web sites:
http://www.cal.msu.edu/english/courses-faculty/Faculty/penn.htm
http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/gizmo/1998/penn.html