David Abel is a poet, editor, and teacher, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop (passagesbookshop.com). His recent publications include the chapbooks Commonly (Airfoil) and Black Valentine (Chax), and the collaborative artist’s books While You Were In and Let Us Repair (disposable books, with Leo & Anna Daedalus); Float, a collection of collage texts, is forthcoming in spring 2012 from Chax, and new chapbooks of poems and visual work are due around the same time from Barebone books and c_L. With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series (airfoilchapbooks.blogspot.com), and since 2002 he has published the free broadside series Envelope, with 22 issues to date. As an interdisciplinary artist, he has devised numerous performance, film, theater, and intermedia projects, both solo and with a wide range of collaborators. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its tenth year (flim.com/spareroom), he also teaches writing, most recently at the Multnomah Arts Center, where he has since 2009 been the coordinator of the Literary Arts program. A Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (nevadaart.org/ae/center), he recently curated the exhibition Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery (23sandy.com/objectpoems/catalog.html), and is  co-administering 13 Hats, an ongoing platform for collaborative work by a dozen visual artists and writers. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Weiss has published seven collections of poetry, most recently As Landscape (Chax Press, 2010). Least Weasel published his chapbook Dark Season in 2011. Different Birds appeared as an ebook in 2004 (www.shearsman.com). He edited, with Harry Polkinhorn, Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction, 2002), and, with Marc Kaminsky, Stories as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Among his translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction, 2006) Cuaderno de San Antonio / The San Antonio Notebook, by Javier Manríquez (Editorial Praxis, 2004), Notas del país de Z, by Gaspar Orozco (Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, 2009), and the ebook La isla en peso/ The Whole Island, by Virgilio PiZera (www.shearsman.com 2010,). His bilingual anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry was published in 2009 by the University of California Press. He lives at the edge of Manhattan’s only forest.