SUZANNE DOYLE, a native of Missouri, graduated in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where for three years she enrolled in every course offered by Edgar Bowers. She received her M.A. from Stanford University’s creative writing program in 1977 and has published three books of poetry: Sweeter for the Dark (1982), Domestic Passions (1984), and Dangerous Beauties (1990).

KEVIN DURKIN was born in Ohio and grew up, for the most part, in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. A graduate of Princeton University, he taught English in Singapore, Japan, New York City and Washington, D.C., before becoming an associate director of communications at the University of Southern California. He has contributed poems to The New Criterion, Poetry, and The Yale Review.

KENNETH FIELDS has published five collections of poetry: The Other Walker, Sunbelly, Smoke, The Odysseus Manuscripts, and Anemographia: A Treatise on the Wind. He is currently writing a novel, Father of Mercies, and a collection of essays on several Stanford poets, including Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, and J.V. Cunningham. He teaches the advanced poetry writing workshop for the Stanford Writing Fellows.

GORDON HARVEY received his Ph.D. in English literature from Stanford University and currently directs the expository writing program at Harvard University. He is working on a book about Edgar Bowers’s poetry, What Time Provides.

JOSHUA MEHIGAN designs Web sites and teaches English in New York City. The Optimist, his first full-length collection of poems, is currently in circulation to publishers. His work has been printed in Poetry, The Chattahoochee Review, Verse, and other periodicals. A selection of his poems is forthcoming in Rising Phoenix, an anthology (Word Press, 2003).

ROBERT MEZEY was born in Philadelphia in 1935 and educated at Kenyon College, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. His first book of poetry, The Lovemaker, won the Lamont Award in 1961. His other books of poetry include White Blossoms, The Door Standing Open, Evening Wind, and Collected Poems. He has edited volumes of selected poems by Thomas Hardy and E.A. Robinson, and has translated, with R.G. Barnes, the collected poems of Jorge Luis Borges. He taught at Pomona College from 1976 until his retirement in 2000.

LESLIE MONSOUR was born in Hollywood, California, in 1948 but grew up in Mexico City and Chicago. Educated at Scripps College, the Canal Zone College in Panama, and the University of Colorado in Boulder, she has taught poetry in Los Angeles public schools and in the UCLA Extension writers program. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Formalist, and The Dark Horse, and have been anthologized in A Formal Feeling Comes and Visiting Emily. Collections of her poems have been published by Robert L. Barth and the Aralia Press.

JOSHUA ODELL is Edgar Bowers’s literary executor. A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, he has worked for several book publishers, including Alfred A. Knopf, Grove Press, and George Braziller. He also has served as an editor at Publishers Weekly.

DOUGLAS L. PETERSON received his doctorate from Stanford University and is currently professor emeritus at Michigan State University. He has published two books, English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles and Time Tide and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Romances. His third book, Jack Juggler to Shakespeare: Tudor Comedy as “Honest Recreation,” will be published in 2003. He also has published essays on the poetry of Yvor Winters, Louise Bogan, and Edgar Bowers.

DAVID SANDERS was born in northeastern Ohio. He received his B.F.A. from Bowling Green State University and his M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas. The author of two limited edition books of poetry, he is currently the director of Ohio University Press and the Swallow Press.

STEVEN SHANKMAN has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. He is currently a distinguished professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, where he is also director of the Oregon Humanities Center. His books include Pope’s Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (1983) and A Search of the Classic: Homer to Valéry and Beyond (1994), and he is co-author, with Stephen W. Durrant, of The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (2000). His book of poetry, Kindred Verses, appeared in 2000.

ROBERT B. SHAW was educated at Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald, and at Yale University, where he earned his Ph.D. in English literature. He has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, and Mount Holyoke College, where he is currently a professor of English. The author of a book on the poetry of Donne and Herbert, he has published numerous essays, reviews, and books of poetry, including Solving For X (Ohio University Press/Swallow Press).

KEVIN SMITH was born in Los Angeles. He studied French literature at California State Northridge, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1996. He has lived in Bordeaux, New York, Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and he currently resides in Monterey, California, where he is working on a novel.

TIMOTHY STEELE has published several collections of poetry, including The Color Wheel and Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986. He also has published two books of literary criticism, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification (Ohio University Press/ Swallow Press). A professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, he is the editor of The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (Ohio University Press/ Swallow Press).

HELEN PINKERTON TRIMPI was born in Montana. She received her master’s degree from Stanford University in 1948 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1966. She has published essays on the poetry of Edgar Bowers and other modern poets, and on the fiction of Herman Melville. She is currently a Civil War historian. Her four books of poetry include Taken in Faith (Ohio University Press/ Swallow Press).

WESLEY TRIMPI was born in 1928 in New York City. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1950 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1957. He returned to teach at Stanford in 1957 and is currently professor emeritus. His critical books include Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity and Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style. He also is the author of two collections of poetry, The Glass of Perseus and The Desert House.

THOMAS WORTHAM has been chair of the UCLA English Department since 1997. His scholarly interests include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, all of whose works he has edited. Since 1984, he has served as the editor of Nineteenth-Century Literature (University of California Press) and is currently working on a new critical edition of Emerson’s poems for Harvard University Press and editions of Howells’s early political writings and radical essays of the 1890s and early 20th century.

STEPHEN YENSER received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first volume of poems, The Fire in All Things. His critical work includes Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill, and A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large. Professor of English and director of creative writing at UCLA, he is the co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of James Merrill’s Collected Poems and Collected Fiction and Plays.

DAVID YEZZI is the author of The Hidden Model, a collection of poems forthcoming this fall from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. His poems and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. He is an associate editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review and director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City.