Tiffany Atkinson is a poet and critic, and a lecturer in English and creative writing at Aberystwyth University. She won the BBC Radio Young Poet of the Year Competition in 1993-4, the Faber Poetry Competition in 2000, and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2001. Her collection Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006) won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award in 2007, and her second collection, Catulla et al (Bloodaxe, 2011) is shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2012.

E-mail: tiffanyatkinson@aber.co.uk

Peter Barry is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University. His books include Contemporary British Poetry and the City (2000), Beginning Theory (1995, 2002, 2009), English in Practice (2003), Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (2006) and Literature in Contexts (2007). His next books are Reading Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2012), which contains an expanded version of the article printed in this issue, and Contemporary Poetry for the Continuum Companions Series.

E-mail: ptb@aber.ac.uk

Matthew Jarvis is the Anthony Dyson Fellow in Poetry in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is the author of numerous essays and reviews, and his book Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry was published in 2008, and his monograph Ruth Bidgood appears in the University of Wales Press ‘Writers of Wales’ series in 2012. He is a member of investigating team for the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Devolved Voices: Poetry in Wales since Devolution’ which runs from 2012 to 2015.

E-mail: matthewjarvis@aber.co.uk

Ovidiu Matiu is a Teaching Assistant with the Department of Anglo-American and German Studies at “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. His research focuses on modern and postmodern American literature, religion and literature, and translation studies.

E-mail: ovidiu.matiu@ulbsibiu.ro

Raluca Moldovan is an historian specialising in the history and representation of the Holocaust in cinema, among other subjects. She has been teaching in the American Studies programme at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca, since 2004. Her courses and seminars include American History, American Film and American Popular Culture. She is currently preparing for publication the manuscript of her doctoral thesis, The Representation of the Holocaust in Film, and is also working on a series of studies examining the relationship between history and cinema. She is a member of the Romanian Association for American Studies and of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (Columbia University, New York).

E-mail: raluca@euro.ubbcluj.ro

Adriana Neagu is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She is the author of Sublimating the Postmodern Discourse: toward a Post-Postmodern Fiction in the Writings of Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd (2001), In the Future Perfect: the Rise and Fall of Postmodernism (2001), and of numerous critical and cultural theory articles. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining literary and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialism is in the poetics of modernist and postmodernist discourse, postcolonial theory and the literatures of identity, and translation theory and practice. Since 1999, Dr Neagu has been Advisory Editor and, since 2004, Editor-in-Chief of American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania.

E-mail: adriananeagu@lett.ubbcluj.ro

Christopher oscar peña is a playwright from California currently splitting his time between New York City and Chicago.  He received his B.A. in Dramatic Arts from UC Santa Barbara where he studied with Naomi Iizuka and holds an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.  His plays include maelstrom, l(y)re, however long the night, i wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever? or things i found on craigs list, icarus burns, the suicide tapes, alone above a raging sea and a cautionary tail.  His work has been developed or seen at the Public Theater, ARS NOVA, NYU Grad, INTAR, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater,  The Flea, the Ontological Hysteric Incubator, Rising Circle, Pavement Group (Chicago), Son of Semele (LA) and the New York Theatre Workshop.  With Vayu O’Donnell, he is the creator of 80/20, a new series for the web launching this fall in which he will also be co-starring.  An alumni of INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights Lab, he has also been an Emerging Artist Fellow at NYTW, a Writing Fellow with the Playwrights Realm, and was a recipient of both the Corwin Award for Playwriting, and the Latino Playwrights Award from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  He has been a visiting fellow at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conference in Tennessee and most recently was in residence at the Orchard Project.  In 2011, christopher traveled to London as part of the t.s. eliot US/UK Exchange with the Old Vic New Voices where his play however long the night premiered on the Old Vic stage.  This year his play icarus burns will be featured as part of the Crossing Borders Festival at Two Rivers Theater, and he will be developing a new piece currently titled THE HOST at New York Stage and Film.  He is the Lark Play Development Centers 2012 Van Lier Fellow and is represented by Kate Navin at Gersh.

E-mail: pointofreference@gmail.com

David E. Thomas grew up on the Hi-Line in North-central Montana. He graduated from the University of Montana then found himself on the streets of San Francisco where he began his literary education. Economic realities drove him to work on railroad gangs, big construction projects like Libby Dam and other labor intensive jobs.  He has traveled in the United States, Mexico and Central America. He has published three books of poems, Fossil Fuel, Buck’s Last Wreck and The Hellgate Wind and a new book of poems Waterworks Hill has been newly released from Foothills Publishing. He has poems in the anthologies The Last Best Place and Poems across the Big Sky and most recently New Poets of the American West.  He currently lives in Missoula, Montana.

E-mail: montanahoochie@live.com

L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion, winner of the 2012 Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, which will be published in early 2013. Individual poems from this debut collection have been published in jubilat, Vinyl, Callaloo and The 100 Best African-American Poems. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Blyden and Roberta Jackson Fund. He is a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, was the winner of the 2011 Beau Boudreaux Poetry Prize and was twice a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Prize. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and is a doctoral fellow in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying African-American and Caribbean poetics.

E-mail: llamarwilson@gmail.com