Lydia Davis is the author of the story collections Samuel Johnson is Indignant; Break It Down; and Almost No Memory as well as the novel, The End of the Story. Her stories have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Persian, and Japanese and widely published in literary magazines, including Bomb, Granta, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Grand Street. She is a translator from the French of works by Maurice Blanchot among others, and has recently completed a new translation of Marcel Prousts's Swan's Way. Among her many honors, she has been awarded A Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Prize, and has recently been named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. She lives in upstate New York with her family.
Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age (Viet Nam Generation, 1994), Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (SUNY Press, 1997), and Under Virga (Chax Press, forthcoming 2004). His poetry, essays, reviews and digital art have been published here and abroad in such journals as Nineteenth Century Studies, Computers and Composition, Postmodern Culture, New American Writing, Jacket, Chain, electronic book review, Crayon, Writing on the Edge, Denver Quarterly, and Voices in Italian Americana. In a past life, Amato (a licensed professional engineer) spent seven years in a design capacity with two Fortune 500 factories in central New York. He currently teaches with the Department of English at Illinois State University in Normal, and often collaborates with his wife and partner, Kass Fleisher.
Debra Di Blasi is the author of the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, and the short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press). Her fiction, essays, art reviews and articles have appeared in many publications, and her short fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. Recent collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations. Screenwriting credits include The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition, and Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award. The short film directed by Lisa Moncure went on to win a host of national and international awards, and was only one of six films selected for the Universe Elle section at 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Debra is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., a transmedia production corporation, publishing the new innovative arts magazine smart a** ("smart asterisk"). She is the former art columnist at PitchWeekly and founder of Crosscut: Women Making Movies, a special section of Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee.
Stacey Levine lives in Seattle where she has been a mainstay of the alternative lit scene emerging from the northwest coast. Her books include My Horse and Other Stories (which won the Pen/West 1994 fiction award) and Dra-- (a novel), both published by Sun & Moon Press. Her second novel, Frances Johnson, will be published by Clear Cut Press of Oregon in 2004. She recorded one of the first spoken word 45s for Olympia, Washington's Kill Rock Stars record label, and wrote the libretto for a puppet opera that has been performed in and around the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction has been anthologized, and her work has also appeared in The Denver Quarterly, 3rd Bed, The Iowa Review, Witness, The Washington (D.C.) Review, the American Book Review, The Seattle Times, The Stranger, Nest Magazine, and other venues.