JOHN ASHBERY was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York. His sixteen collections of poetry include Hotel Lautréamont, Flow Chart, April Galleons, and most recently And the Stars Were Shining (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). In 1975 his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also translated the works of several French poets, including The Landscape Is Behind The Door (Sheep Meadow, 1994) by Pierre Martory. Among Mr. Ashbery's other awards are the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at Bard College. In 1989-90 he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He has been a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets since 1988.

JORIE GRAHAM grew up in Italy and now lives in Iowa City. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including The End of Beauty (1987), and Region of Unlikeness (1991). Her most recent volume, The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, is forthcoming from The Ecco Press. Ms. Graham's many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Morton Dawen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is on the permanent faculty of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

CHARLES SIMIC was born in Yugoslavia in 1938. He is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry, including The World Doesn't End, for which he received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Hotel Insomnia (1992), and A Wedding in Hell (Harcourt Brace, 1994). He has also published several books of prose, most recently Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (The Ecco Press, 1992), and a collection of essays and memoirs entitled The Unemployed Fortune-Teller (University of Michigan, 1994). His translations include The Horse Has Six Legs (Graywolf, 1992), an anthology of Serbian poetry which received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets. Among his other awards are fellowships from he Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. He is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire.

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