Breathe Owl Breathe is Micah Middaugh, Andréa Moreno-Beals, and Trevor Hobbs.  They live in a log cabin together in East Jordan, Michigan.

Dark Dark Dark is a six-piece chamber folk band whose members hail from Minneapolis, New Orleans, and New York. Their latest release is Bright Bright Bright, which was recorded in a converted church in Duluth, MN. The band will spend most of 2010 touring the United States and Europe.

Heather Derr-Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She has two books of poetry, Each End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2005) and The Bride Minaret (University of Akron Press, 2008).  Her poems have also appeared in Fence, CrazyHorse, Brink, and Diode.  Derr-Smith has been dividing her time between Los Angeles and Iowa.

Efterklang is a Danish band based out of Copenhagen.  Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen, and Rasmus Stolberg grew up on the Danish island of Als and later moved to Copenhagen where they formed the band with Thomas Husmer.  Rune Mølgaard occasionally joins them on piano and helps co-write songs.  Efterklang also runs the record label Rumraket.

The Farewell Drifters are a quintet (two acoustic guitars, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass) based in Nashville.  Their new album, Yellow Tag Mondays, is scheduled to be released this June by Heart Squeeze Records/Thirty Tigers. www.thefarewelldrifters.com

Paul Epp is an arranger and performer on trumpet and keyboards in Nashville.  His pieces have been performed and recorded by the Nashville Jazz Orchestra and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music Philharmonia Orchestra. www.pauleppmusic.com

Eric Garcia describes his artwork as “historically based, politically charged criticism, with the goal of creating dialogue about contemporary issues.”  Recently having finished his Masters of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Garcia is a versatile artist working in a wide variety of media.

Jeff Harms is a Chicago musician. He has two albums—The Myth of Heroics (2008 DRP records, with Emmett Kelly and Azita) and Big Amazing Songs (2005 Naivete Records, with Dominic Johnson and Spencer Matern)—and his third, produced by Leroy Bach, will be released this winter.

Yaul Perez-Stable Husni is an aspiring poet and brave young man. He is sixteen years old and is enrolled in the creative writing program at San Francisco School of the Arts. He has been published previous in Motif: Writing by Ear, A Celebration of Poets, online through the California Coastal Art and Poetry Contest, and in the school literary journal, umläut.

Tyler James’ debut full-length record It Took the Fire was released March 2 on Son of Geert Records. He’s also produced two EPs—An EP and Sweet Relief EP—and was one of the founding members of Ten Out of Tennessee.  James was born in the Pacific Northwest, raised in small-town Iowa, and lives in Nashville.

Peter Jurmu lives in Boston and attends Emerson College.  Between fits of writing for his MFA, he plays records, and has trouble staying in shape because he won’t run on overcast days.

Rickey Laurentiis studies at Sarah Lawrence College, north of New York City.  His work may be found published or forthcoming in several journals, including Knockout Literary Magazine, The Other Journal, Ganymede and The Indiana Review. Most recently, two of his poems were named first and third runner-up in the International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize, selected by Carl Phillips, and he has received a Cave Canem Fellowship.  He is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Sarah Maclay is the author of The White Bride (U of Tampa Press), Whore, which received the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, VerseDaily, The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present, and many other journals. A recipient of a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXI, she teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University, and serves as book review editor for Poetry International and as artistic director of THE T H I R D A R E A, a poetry reading series now in its new home at Frank Pictures Gallery, Bergamot Station, in Santa Monica.  About her poems from her HD Sequence in this issue, Maclay writes, “Like the poems selected here for Spring 2010, many of the shards in this work-in-progress take their titles from phrases at the center of HD’s Trilogy—her long, sectioned Tribute to the Angels. In that sense, and in response to both images that arise in HD’s work and in paintings, photos and films from across the centuries that use similar titles, images or themes, this work is a concordance, with a bit of ekphrastic highlighting.”

Pamela Main coordinates the writing center at Penn State Brandywine, where she also teaches creative writing and composition.  Her work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Clapboard House, Greensboro Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern California Anthology, and Louisiana Literature.  She is working on a novel set on an imaginary island off of New Jersey. She lives in Wilmington, DE.

John Minichillo teaches fiction writing at Middle Tennessee State University and lives in Nashville.

Keiler Roberts was born in 1978 in Wisconsin.  After studying art at the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University, she made paintings and drawings for ten years, and then happily switched to comics.  She now lives in Evanston, Illinois and teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. www.keilerroberts.com

Eric Sasson received his MFA from NYU, where he studied with Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, Ted Solatorof and E.L. Doctorow. In the past few years he’s received scholarships to the Sewanee, Key West, Squaw Valley and Southampton writers’ conferences, as well as being a finalist in the competition for and attending the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Crucible, Alligator Juniper, Limp Wrist, The Minetta Review, The Advocate, The Ledge and The 2^nd Hand, among others. He’s editing his first novel, entitled Valhalla.

Sufjan Stevens is a pioneer in the indie-folk renaissance, noted for his evocative songwriting, use of diverse instruments from across cultures, and the string and horn arrangements that lend his music their symphonic quality.   Stevens has an MFA in fiction from The New School.

Nora Jane Struthers grew up in New Jersey playing and singing bluegrass music with her father, Alan.  Now based out of Nashville, Tennessee, Struthers is performing her originals with her own band, an acoustic quartet comprised of fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and bass.  Her debut album is set for a June 22 release. www.norajanestruthers.com

Symbion Project is the electronic music endeavor of Kasson Crooker, formerly of the blippy synthop band Freezepop and electronic rock band Splashdown.  Symbion Project has had songs in a number of music videogames including tracks via RockBand Network for play in Rock Band 2 for the Xbox360. www.symbionproject.com/

JooHee Yoon was born in a foreign metropolis but spent most of her childhood in a pleasantly rainy region of the West Coast.  As a kid she swallowed some very strange things, including perfume, oil pastels and other unmentionables.  She is currently a junior in the illustration department at the Rhode Island School of Design and enjoys cooking obscure vegetables.