W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward he made the greater part of his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His many awards include the 2005 National Book Award in Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2005), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, the Bollingen Award, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of dozens of books of poetry and prose; his most recent volume of poems is Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2005). For the past thirty years he has lived in Hawaii.

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Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. She now lives in New York City, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her eight volumes of poetry include the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004). She is the editor of Indian Love Poems (2005). Her new volume of poems Quickly Changing River will appear in Fall 2007. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated. Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer's subjectivity, and with the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders.

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Farhad Shakely I was born in 1951 in the Garmiyan region, in the province of Kirkuk in Southern Kurdistan, as the second child to a middle-class family. I spent the years of my childhood in our village Shakel; the number of its inhabitants never ascended 150 persons.

The first language I was taught at home by my father was Kurdish. When I began going to school later I was taught in Arabic, which I didn’t understood at that age. In the summer of 1963, when the Iraqi regime declared war against the Kurdish people, we were obliged to evacuate our village and move to safer places, since the Iraqi planes were attacking our region almost every day. My father was at that time an active member in the Kurdish liberation movement. I missed that study year. The regime imposed an economic and administrative embargo on Kurdistan. A year later, I resumed my study, but this time in another village, since the school in our village was shut down.

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Joy Harjo is a multi-talented artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is an internationally known poet, performer, writer and musician. She has published seven books of acclaimed poetry. They include: She Had Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and her most recent, How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems from W.W. Norton. Her poetry awards include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 200; The American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library: the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award,: 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award: the 1997 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women’s writing: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, Native Women’s Writing of North America. It was pronounced one of the London Observer’s Best Books of 1997. And she wrote the award-winning children’s book from Harcourt, The Good Luck Cat. She also contributed poetic prose to photographs by Stephen Strom in Secrets from the Center of the World. Forthcoming is a book of stories from W.W. Norton.

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photo by Michael Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye Palestinian-American writer, lives in San Antonio, Texas. Her recent books include You & Yours, Going Going, A Maze Me, 19 Varieties of Gazelle; Poems of the Middle East , a National Book Award finalist in 2002, Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, Fuel, Red Suitcase and Habibi ,a novel for teens which won 6 Best Book awards. She has edited seven anthologies of poetry for young readers, including This Same Sky , The Tree is Older than You Are, The Space Between our Footsteps: Poems & Paintings from the Middle East, What Have You Lost? and Salting the Ocean. A visiting writer for many years all over the world, she has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow.

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Mahmoud Darwish is one of the most admired Arab poets of today. He was born in Birwe, a village in upper Galilee, in 1942. In 1948, he fled with his family to Lebanon when the Israeli Army destroyed his village. A former member of the PLO’s Executive Council, and the Poet Laureate of Palestine, he wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.

Darwish has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into 35 languages, influencing and innovating modern poetic forms. He received international recognition as a French Knight of Belle Arts and Letters, and in 2002, he was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom prize. In 2005, he received the prestigious Prins Claus award for poetic achievement from Holland.

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Sherman J. Alexie Jr. is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. Alexie was born in October 1966, with hydropcephalus, or water on the brain, and was not expected to survive. At six months, he came through a difficult brain surgery only to suffer seizures and other side-effects of the condition throughout his childhood. Despite these challenges, Alexie learned to read at age three and soon began reading literature voraciously, including The Grapes of Wrath.

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Maggy De Coster Journaliste de formation, détentrice d’un DE A de Sociologie du Droit et Relations sociales, membre de l’Association des Femmes Journaliste (AFJ), Maggy De Coster est correspondante du Journal de l’Ariège. Depuis 2000, elle a créé « LE MANOIR DES POETES », une revue semestrielle à vocation poétique, culturelle et littéraire . Elle est également, Sociétaire et membre du Comité Directeur de La Société des Poètes Français, rédactrice en chef de L’AGORA, et enfin responsable des grandes manifestations culturelles au sein de la Société, elle organise et donne des conférences aussi. Elle est également membre de la Société des Gens de Lettres. Elle organise des ateliers de poésie dans les écoles et participe activement à différentes associations littéraires et poétiques en France. Elle est membre de différents jurys de concours de poésie en France et en Italie. Par ailleurs, ses poèmes sont traduits en espagnol, en catalan, en italien et en arabe.

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His Holiness Ngawang Tenzin is a high reincarnation of the Drukpa Kagyu Lineage of Buddhism in Bhutan. He is regarded as one of the most revered teachers of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage in Bhutan. He is the reincarnation of Drubthop Chenpo Jinpa Gyeltshen Rinpoche who was alive in the 18th century. He started studying Buddhism and learning chanting at the age of 5. By age of 16 he was able memorize all chants, became a dance master and knew how to construct all the sand mandalas.

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Li Sen was born in 1966 in Tengchong County, Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China. He has been working at Yunnan University since he graduated from the Department of Chinese at Yunnan University in 1988. Currently, he is professor and Dean of the School of Arts and Design at Yunnan University. He has published more than 300 poems, essays, and academic papers in a number of domestic and international magazines and journals, including Hua Cheng (Flower City), Writers, People's Literature, and Reading. He has published six books, including Shadows on the Canvas (Dongfang Publishing House, 2000), Accounts of Animals (Huacheng Publishing House, 2002), Painters in My Heart (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2002), Birds' World (China Workers' Publishing House, 2004), Absurd but Attractive Games (Xuelin Publishing House, 2004), and Cangshan Night Talk (Xuelin Publishing House, 2006). In addition, he has edited three books and co-edited another two. He is one of the poets known as "They," an influential poetry group of China. A bilingual collection of his poetry, Chinese Windmill, is forthcoming from Virtual Artists Collective.

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Luciano Erba was born in Milan in 1922 where he has resided all his life, with the exception of stays in Switzerland, France, England, and The United States. A professor of French literature at the Università Cattolica of Milan and the United States, he has written numerous papers, translations, and an anthology of contemporary poetry in collaboration with Piero Chiara ("Quarta generazione" 1954). He is author of the papers: Magia e invenzione (1967), Huysman e la Liturgia, as well as studies on French contemporary literature and translations of French writers and poets both classic and contemporary.

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Ronnie Someck was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1951, and arrived in Israel two years later. He studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and drawing at the Avni Academy of Art. In addition to working as a counselor with street gangs, he teaches literature and holds writing workshops.

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Mererid Hopwood lives in Carmarthen with her husband Maritn and their three children. She was educated in Ysgol Gyfun Llanhari, University College Wales, Aberystwyth and University College London. Her subjects were Spanish and German and she has a PhD in German Literature. After a period of lecturing in London and Swansea she became head of the Mid and West Wales office for the Arts Council of Wales. Since 2001 she is self-employed – working mainly in the fields of Arts and Culture. She teaches part-time at the School of European Languages, at the University in Swansea. Her main interest is poetry (she became the first woman to win the National Eisteddfod Chair in 2001 and she won the Crown in 2003). She also enjoys playing the cello when nobody is listening!

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