Doug Clifford is a retired Assistant Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College where he currently teaches part time. His published work includes essays and photography, but no poems. He doesn’t write them. He grew up listening to his mother read poetry aloud as well as recite it from memory, and later he read the poetry she wrote. This is his first public reading of his mother’s work nearly thirty five years after her death.

Carol Dine is the author of two books of poetry and is widely published in literary magazines, including The Bitter Oleander, Blue Mesa Review, Prairie Schooner and Salamander. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 and Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer, and in “The Boston Globe.” She is a public speaker on surviving breast cancer and has been a poet-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. She teaches at Suffolk University and lives in Boston MA.

Jennifer Barber lives in MA, and teaches at Suffolk University. Her poetry collection RIGGING THE WIND received the Kore Press First Book Award and was published in 2003. She has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and has published poems in journals such as AGNI, FIELD, FULCRUM, HARVARD REVIEW, POEMS AND PLAYS, and the GEORGIA REVIEW. She is founding and current editor of the literary journal SALAMANDER.

Amy Demas Grunder enjoys and practices politically and socially engaged writing. She was the recipient in her days at UMass-Boston of the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Lillian Lorraine Jones Fiction Prize. She lives and works in Cambridge MA. She has been deeply involved in social justice and human rights advocacy for many years, including political asylum work as a lawyer.

Elizabeth R. Bennett is the first woman to become a Grand Master of the shakuhachi, a vertical, end-blown bamboo flute, and has played for 25 years with Living National Treasure Aoki Reibo, the foremost traditional shakuhachi artist in Japan. She has recently released a CD of the shakuhachi called "Song of the True Hand"; she has performed frequently in Japan and worldwide (www.cdbaby.com/cd/erbennett)