William Auten has a graduate degree in English. His poems have been published in or are forthcoming from Petroglyph, Touchstone, and Nimrod. He and his wife recently moved back to the Midwest from Virginia. This is his first submission to Literary Salt.

Gregg Chadwick is represented by the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco and the Lisa Coscino Gallery in Pacific Grove, CA. His paintings have been exhibited at the di Rosa Preserve's Off the Preserve, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Monterey Art Museum. His website is located at http://home.mindspring.com/~chadwick15.

Aaron Crippen is the recipient of the 2001 American Translators Association Student Award and the 2001 PEN Texas Literary Award for Poetry. His current work can be found in Mid-American Review, Texas Review, Arkansas Review, and Northwestern Review.

Caryn Drexl is a 23 year old self taught photographer living in Florida with her girlfriend, two cats, and a puppy. She works predominately with digital photography, but has a soft spot for vintage "junk" and toy cameras. I don't think I could feel complete and happy if I didn't have a camera of some kind in my hand. More traditional, digital, and manipulated photography can be viewed at www.theunderlining.com and contact can be made through caryn@theunderlining.com.

Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden's Ferry Review and Poetry. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a 2002 Artist Trust GAP grant to work on her first manuscript and a 2003 Artist Trust/WSAC Fellowship.

David Gravender has published widely, in such places as Poetry Review, The Seattle Review (forthcoming), Descant (forthcoming), The Tabla Book of New Verse, The Cortland Review, The Fiddlehead, and the buses of Seattle. He was recently awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; other awards include the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (U.K.) and the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award. His first chapbook, Rain Shadows, was published in 2003.

Chen Gu is seventeen years old and lives in Plano, Texas. She has been previously published in small online zines and Black Bear Review. At the present moment she is immersed in the glorious gifts of the public library and other bookish venues.

Gu Cheng (1956-1993) was a figurehead of the Obscure or "Misty" school of Chinese poetry. Associated with Bei Dao and Shu Ting at the underground Today magazine, he burst onto the Beijing literary scene during the Democracy Wall movement of 1979 and gained popularity until in the mid-80's he was literally being mobbed by fans at his readings. Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng will be published by George Braziller Inc. in Spring 2005.

Joanne Leow is a broadcast journalist in Singapore. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with degrees in Comparative Literature and International Relations. She is the recipient of the Casey Shearer Memorial Prize for Excellence in Creative Non-Fiction, and has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Apatride. Some of her other work can be found online at www.qlrs.com.

Martha Silano's book is What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade 1999). Her work also appears (or will soon appear) in Red, White, & Blues: Poetic Vistas on the Promise of America (University of Iowa 2004), Birds in the Hand (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2004), Food Poems (Bottom Dog 2003), Green Mountains Review, Paris Review, and on Poetry Daily. Her website is available at www.marthasilano.com.

Bruce Taylor's poetry has appeared in such places as The Chicago Review, The Exquisite Corpse, The Formalist, Light, The Literary Review, The Nation, The New York Quarterly, The Northwest Review, and Poetry. Taylor has won awards from the Wisconsin Arts Board, Fulbright-Hayes, the NEA, NEH and the Bush Artist Foundation.

William Thompson has been shooting assignments for National Geographic for over 10 years. He's looked for the unblinking truth of his subjects' lives - that gleam of light in the heart of darkness. And he brought it back alive. See more of his work at http://www.williamthompson.com.

Carol Yocom is a student and secretary at the University of Utah. She hopes to get her degree in Anthropology before she retires. She's had her digital art published in Literary Salt and in the IBPC Newswire. For 25 years, she's helped people find their ancestors.