Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian poet and text-based artist, writing in English and based in London since 1989. Her books include Eclat (Sound&Language, 1996), Goan Atom, 1: Doll (Krupskaya, 2001), and FIG (Goan Atom 2) (Salt, 2005). A CD of her poetry has recently been released by RockDrill/Carcanet. Her critical work is chiefly concerned with plurilingual poetics and context-led writing practices. She was Director of Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts from 1995 to 2000. She is currently Associate Research Fellow in Performance Writing at Dartington and is co-chair of the Bard College's MFA Writing Program (New York).

Vincent Broqua

Vincent Broqua is an associate professor at the University of Paris 12, where he teaches American literature. He has published articles on, among others, Cage, Cummings, Stephen Ratcliffe, and Stein. Also a translator, he is one of the founding members of the Franco-American reading series and journal Double Change (www.doublechange.com).

Redell Olsen

Redell Olsen's publications include Book of The Fur, Rem Press (Cambridge, 2000), Secure Portable Space, Reality Street (Hastings, 2004), Here Are My Instructions, Gefn Press (London, 2004). Punk Faun: a baroque pastel is forthcoming in 2007. She is a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London where she is the course director for the MA in Poetic Practice. She is the editor of How(2).

Maggie O’Sullivan

Maggie O’Sullivan was born in Lincolnshire to Irish parents. A poet-artist-editor-publisher, she lived and worked in London from 1970-1988 and now lives in the Pennines outside Hebden Bridge. She has been making and performing her work internationally since the late 1970s. She edited Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Reality Street, 1996). Body of Work, a major retrospective which brings together for the first time all of the long out of print bookworks from the 1980s, has recently been published (Reality Street, 2007). Full bibliographical information is available on her website www.maggieosullivan.co.uk.

Joan Retallack

Joan Retallack is currently at work on a poetic project titled The Reinvention of Truth from which the section read at Pressure to Experiment is taken. (In a slightly different version, it has appeared in the New York journal of the arts Soft Targets.) Retallack is the author of six volumes of poetry including Memnoir, How To Do Things with Words, AFTERRIMAGES, and Errata 5uite which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, co-edited with Juliana Spahr, came out from Palgrave MacMillan in January 2006. The Poethical Wager, essays on poethics, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press which will also bring out her forthcoming Gertrude Stein: Selections. Retallack received a Lannan Foundation Literary Grant for Poetry in 1998 and the 1996 America Award in Belles-Lettres for MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack. She is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.