Alan Black is a self-taught photographer and computer operator. He has a passion for all kinds of photography, especially black and white. He edits his photographic images for dramatic effect. He was born in Scotland, but currently lives and works in England as a doorman at a gentleman’s club in the West End of London. His goal is to work as a full-time photographer. His work is featured in a new magazine in the U.K. called Ethnic Woman. His images appear on the web sites www.blackmailphotography.co.uk, www.blinkred.com, and www.eppingstudio.com.

Terri Brown-Davidson’s first novel, Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight, has been released by Lit Pot Press (www.litpotpress.com). Her first book of poetry, The Carrington Monologues, went into reprints in 2004. Her work has appeared in more than 800 journals/anthologies, including TriQuarterly New Writers, and she's received, among other honors, an AWP Intro Award, a Yaddo residency fellowship, and seven nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She’s on the fiction/poetry faculty at Gotham Writers’ Workshop (www.writingclasses.com).

Daphne Buter lives and works and makes the best of it in the Netherlands. She’s a writer of fiction and her books are published by the publishing house De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam. As a graphic designer she worked for Elsevier Science Publisher. She worked for eight years as a creative assistant at Joop Geesink’s Dollywood animation film studio, in the Netherlands. Currently she works as an illustrator for two small newspapers for annoying smart children in Holland, published by an organization called LICH. She is a painter who doesn’t paint anymore since she’s a writer. She hasn’t worked anywhere as a photographer—she just likes to shoot pictures, maybe because her father was a professional photographer. The Internet makes it possible for Daphne to work with FRiGG.

Michael Fowler worked for a year at a shelter for homeless men near Cincinnati. He quit due to his lack of enthusiasm for residential programs that stressed rehab over freedom of choice.

Dan Gallik has had poetry and short stories published by Hawaii Review, A.I.M. (America’s Intercultural Magazine), Parabola, Nimrod, Limestone (University of Kentucky), The Hiram Poetry Review, Aura (University of Alabama), and Whiskey Island (Cleveland State University). Currently, his agent, Andrew Hamilton, is working on selling his three novels.

Jennifer Gillespie is originally from Springfield, Illinois. She graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Texas. She has lived in Paris, Boston, Providence, Charlottesville, Austin, and currently resides in Chicago, where she works for the Illinois Humanities Council. She is also a singer-songwriter who recorded her first album in Austin this past summer.

Two-time Pushcart nominee Judd Hampton lives in northern Alberta, Canada, with his wife and two children. His fiction has appeared in Night Train, Vestal Review, The Paumanok Review, NFG, Spiked, and Danforth Review, among others.

Charles Lambert was born in Lichfield, England, in 1953. He now lives in a ruinously large house halfway between Rome and Naples, eighty-seven yards from the Appian Way. He’s been published in the gay fiction anthologies The Freezer Counter and Fabulous Tricks, and in the following print and web magazines: Paris Transcontinental, This is: The Poisoned Chalice (where an earlier version of “Nipples” appeared), Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Cadenza, In Posse Review, The Richmond Review, and East of the Web. He was also among the winners of the 1997 Independent on Sunday/Bloomsbury Short Story Competition, the winning story appearing in the anthology IOS ( Bloomsbury 1997). His novel A Winter's Child was shortlisted for the Lichfield Prize 2004.

Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz is a fiction writer and poet, though she is venturing out into writing nonfiction and memoir. She likes to try new things. She is currently at work on several chapbooks (Heat, a work of erotic poetry; What I Share With You, general poetry; Going To Hell With My Eyes Wide Open, Harlem Renaissance fiction; Where I’ll Be If I’m Not There, fiction about black life and culture; and Wicked Love & Other Distractions, erotic fiction). Her biography appears in the 2004–2005 edition of Who’s Who of American Women. She can be reached at gwendolynjoycemintz@yahoo.com.

Martin Scott teaches at Eastern Illinois University, and has earned Creative Writing degrees from the University of Iowa (MFA) and the University of Houston (Ph.D.). He’s published poems in such journals as Elixir, Southern Poetry Review, Rockhurst Review, American Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Willow Spring, Rhino, Gulf Coast, and Tampa Review, as well as essays in Fourth Genre, Profession 2001 (MLA), Puerto del Sol, Cimarron Review, Spectacle, RiverSedge, Blue Mesa Review, Poets and Writers Online, The King’s English, Under the Sun, Many Mountains Moving, and 4X4: The Newport Review. He won the 2000 Larry Levis Editors’ Award for Poetry at The Missouri Review, and a $3,000 fellowship in Creative Nonfiction from the Writers’ League of Texas in 2001. His book of creative nonfiction, Stealing Books: Personal Essays, is due out from Water Press in December 2004.

Kay Sexton has an overdeveloped work ethic and a fig tree in her garden. She finds it hard to reconcile the two. She is a Jerry Jazz Fiction Award winner, with a column at www.moondance.org and another at www.facsimilation.com. Her short-short story “Domestic Violence” made the final five of the Guardian fiction contest, “Beltane and Samhain” placed third in the Bookjobber.com Science Fiction Contest, and her work has appeared in five anthologies in 2004. Her web site www.charybdis.freeserve.co.uk gives details of her current and forthcoming publications. The fig tree is also flourishing.