Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004) and Disaster Suite (Vigilance Society 2006). Currently, he's co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, working on a collaborative project with Taylor Brady for Atticus / Finch, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which is forthcoming in Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.

Lauren Bender lives and works in Baltimore. Publications include The Dictionary Poems: Some Bees , Guide to the Dictionary (Furniture Press), and poems have been published in The Shattered Wig Review and Rock Heals online, among others. A Tinyside chap is forthcoming from Big Game Books. Recent performances and visual works include Sphere of Fear (SFEAR): The Phobic Purge as it Relates  to Phobias, Fears, Death and Dying, Through Sensory Input, Psychic Response,  and Text/Technological Output, Etc (with Bonnie Jones and Megan McShea), Human Pyramids (with the Lexie Mountain Boys), and an exhibition at SoWeBo Arts Gallery called Nostalgia For Almost. Lauren is the Editor for WORD@PEEKreview.net, an online-to-print venue for contemporary writing, whose second issue, CHIMERA: I Am My Own Twin , will appear in the early spring. She is a Curator for the upcoming Yockadot! Poetics Theater Festival, the Feminine Arbiter of Phrases for the Performance Thanatology Research Society, and is on the Board of Directors for Narrowhouse Recordings and Print.

Letterpress Broadsides of the poets (made in collaboration with printmaker Val Lucas of Pyramid Atlantic) will be available at the reading.