Marcia Aldrich teaches creative writing at Michigan State University.
She is the author of Girl Rearing, a collection of linked essays,
published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. She has had essays appear in The Best American Essays, The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women and been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Last fall her essay "My Mother's Toenails" appeared in The Best of Brevity and most recently her essay "The Bed of Metamorphosis," originally published in The Fourth Genre, was selected as a Notable Essay of 2006. She is completing a second collection of essays tentatively titled The Mother Bed.

Robert Fanning is the author of Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry
Chapbook Award 2003) and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006). His
poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry,
Ploughshares, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, America, The Ledge, and Artword Quarterly. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, Fanning's writing awards include a Creative
Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the
Foley Poetry Award.

MSU students read from their award winning poetry and fiction.
Featured students: Lauren Linsalata, Karen O'Conner, Nicole Nguyen,
Randall Malcolm, Michael Langdon, Jason Wirtz, Lindsay Tigue,
Jeff Beachnau, Korey Kuhl.

Jack Ridl has published four collections of poetry, three chapbooks, two
literary texts, two anthologies, and more than 300 poems in various
literary magazines. His most recent collection, Broken Symmetry, was
published in 2006 along with a chapbook of circus poems, Outside the
Center Ring. Sharon Dolin and then Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected
his Against Elegies for the chapbook award from The Center for Book Arts
in New York City. Ridl was chosen in 1996 by The Carnegie Foundation as The Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 40 of his students in the past 15 years have gone on to MFA programs and to publish their work. For 36 years, Ridl has taught poetry writing at Hope College where he founded the Visiting Writers Series. This past fall he was invited to
read at The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Chris Dombrowski's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bloomsbury Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Mid-american Review, New Letters, Ninth Letter, Orion, Seneca Review, and other journals, and have been anthologized in Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry (Autumn House, 2006). His awards include the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, Alligator Juniper's National Poetry Prize, and a Poetry Fellowship from the University of Montana, where he received his MFA Born in Lansing, MI, Dombrowski works as a river-guide, poet-in-the-schools, and creative writing instructor at the University of Montana in Missoula, where he lives with his family. In spring 2007, he will serve as Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts.