Dave Caserio received his M.A. in English and Creative Writing from New York University and his B.A. in English and Theatre from Goddard College. He has taught English and Literature at Rutgers, Yale, and New York Universities. Dave has worked with various writer's outreach programs such as the Dodge Poetry Festival and the Jersey State poets in the schools to workshops and oral history with Sharon Olds at Goldwater Memorial Hospitol for the Physically Disabled at Roosevelt Island, NYC. Dave was on the 1998 Slam Team that competed in Austin, TX National Competition.

Adrian Castro a Cuban-Dominican poet and Ifa priest from Miami, writes as if "Chano Pozo were hitting the keys of a typewriter instead of the skin of a drum." His debut collection of poems, Cantos to Blood & Honey, was an Academy of American Poets Eric Mathieu King winner and his poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including Renaming Ecstacy: Latino Writers on the Sacred and Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature.

Victor Hernandez Cruz is the author of Red Beans, Mainland, Tropicalization, By Lingual Wholes, and Rhythm, Content and Flavor. He was featured on Bill Moyers's "Language of Life" series, and has received numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the New York Poetry Foundation Award. In Granada, Spain, he gave a reading and talk at El Palicio de la Madraza, and in Madrid, stayed at La Residencia de Estudientes where he gave a reading of his poems and participated in a round table discussion sponsored by La Fundation Federico Garcia Lorca. He also read at the Universidad de Alcala at Henares in Cervantes' home town. He lives in Puerto Rico and writes in Spanish and English, and keeps a keen eye on avacados.

Todd Davis holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and is the author of three books of poetry. He has performed and toured nationally, representing Seattle twice on the 1995 and '96 teams that competed at the National Poetry Slam Championships. He also ran the Seattle Slam at the O.K. Hotel between 1996-98.

Danika Dinsmore - Danika Dinsmore is a Seattle poet, teacher, & editor. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disem bodied Poetics and is Co-Creator / Executive Director of the Northwest SPokenword LAB. She will be teaching a poetry writing course at North Seattle Community College this spring. Her first full-length book of poetry, TRAFFIC, was released in Fall of 1997 .traffic.

Diane di Prima Diane di Prima, a major American poet of the 2nd half of the 20th Century, reads at the Northwest SPokenword Lab in Auburn on November, 5, 1999 at 8PM. Diane is the author of 33 books of poetry and prose. Among her recent books are Pieces of a Song (City Lights), Seminary Poems (Floating Island) and a new edition of her epic poem Loba (Penguin).

"a few people like her get made every few thousand years, in order to highlight the dullness of the rest."
- Andrei Codrescu, The Baltimore Sun, 1983

...a prolific poet whose relative obscurity compared to the men with whom she is usually associated is something of a scandal today."
- Alix Kates Shulman, the Village Voice, 1989

Vicky Edmonds - writer and teacher who uses the written and spoken word as an inroad to healing and an alternative to acting out; published books include: Inside Voices, used to the dark, once drunk/opening; has taught at treatment centers, homeless shelters, late night programs and prisons.

Paul Hunter - Paul Hunter has been a poet, teacher, performer, playwright, musician, instrument -maker, artist, editor, publisher, and grassroots arts activist. For the past eleven years he has produced fine letterpress books under the imprint of Wood Works—currently including 22 books and 46 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Raven Chronicles and as well as in three full-length books and several chapbooks. Recipient of the 1998 Pym Cup and the 1999 Nelson Bentley Award, he lives and works in Seattle. His full-length collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, from Silverfish Review Press, has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Home News Tribune, the Small Farmer’s Journal, and the Raven Chronicles, and won the 2005 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems due in 2006 is entitled Ripening.

Hank Hyena - author of Miracles of th e Flesh. Recently raved about in ZINE WORLD magazine, "damn fine stories... written with brains and balls..." He is the editor of CUPID -- a journal of amatory expression, and a member of the San Francisco Poetry Slam scene. His CD, The Whole World Lives in my Bedroom, will be available soon --

Lisa Jarnot -was born in Buffalo, New York in 1967. Since the mid-1990s she has lived in New York City where she has been actively involved in the community of The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowerie. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003), and Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan is forthcoming from University of California Press. She teaches at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Bard College, and Brooklyn College and has given lectures and readings throughout the United States and Europe.

Clarice Keegan - performance poet, enthusiastic about poetry as magical interaction between poet & audience; finalist in the 1996 Seattle Grand Slam poetry competition; first chap book, Seat of Desire, presents vivid images of love, desire, and freedom; second book, Why I Was Adopted, explores tensions of family; co-hosts reading series at LUX Coffee Bar in Seattle.

Paul Nelson - Paul Nelson is a broadcast interview host, journalist, teacher, poet and father. He founded the non-profit organization Global Voices Radio (formerly It Plays in Peoria Productions) and co-founder of Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!). Paul has two chap books, a CD - Twisting Runes and a manuscript of an epic poem re-enacting Auburn history, entitled A Time Before Slaughter. A professional broadcaster since 1980, he has interviewed hundreds of authors, poets, activists and whole-system theorists for a regionally-syndicated public affairs radio program.

Chuck Pirtle - MFA from the Naropa Institute, PhD from the University of Iowa; taught at Iowa and Naropa & has led writing workshops in the Colorado State Prisons; chapbooks include Regarding the Landscape and Talaria.

Rebecca Pirtle - MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. Poetry has been featured in Bombay Gin, Exquisite Corpse, New Censorship, and Teachers and Writers Guide to Walt Whitman. She is currently the editor of the Kingston Community News.

Steve Potter - was born and raised on Long Island in New York state, went to Northland College in Wisconsin for two years ('82-'83) aiming towards an environmental science/outdoor education major, transferred to the State University of New York in Oneonta and finished up his B.A. in Liberal Arts (grad. '86). He went on to get a masters in creative writing in Queens College of the City University of New York where he took poetry workshops with Marie POnsot, an excellent poet and teacher who insisted on the discipline of practicing formal verse as well as open forms. She was one of the first poets published in City Lights Pocket Poets Series. Steve Potter's poems have appeared in Long Island Quarterly, Facets, and In Autumn: An Anthology of Long Island Poetry. He lives in Seattle and is editor of the Wandering Hermit Review.

Jerome Rothenberg - is the author of over fifty books of poetry including Poems for the Game of Silence, Poland/1931, A Seneca Journal, Vienna Blood, That Dada Strain, New Selected Poems 1970-1985, Khurbn & Other Poems, and most recently The Lorca Variations (all from New Directions). Describing his poetry career as "an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present," he has edited several major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry: Poems for The Millennium, Technicians of the Sacred (tribal and oral poetry from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania), Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), America a Prophecy (a radical revision of the poetries of the North American continent), Revolution of the Word (American experimental poetry between the two world wars), and A Big Jewish Book (subtitled "Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to the Present"). He has also been involved, since the late 1950s, with various aspects of poetry performance, including two radio soundplays written and performed for Westdeuttscher Rundfunk (Cologne).

Sean Sarringar - a veteran musician, producer, and performance artist -- winner in the finals of the Seattle Poetry Slam at the OK Hotel. Hosted the Seattle Experimental Performance Art Showcase in 1996.