SANDRA BLOW was born in  1925 and studied at St Martin's School of Art from 1941 to 1946, at the Royal Academy Schools from 1946 to 1947, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome.  Blow's first solo exhibition was at Gimpel Fils in 1951, where she continued to exhibit regularly until the mid-sixties. A retrospective of her work was held in the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy in 1994. Blow's awards include joint-winner of the International Guggenheim Award (The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1960), Second Prize Winner in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition (1961) and the Korn Ferry Picture of the Year Award, Royal Academy (1998). She was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1973, and currently lives and works in St Ives, Cornwall. Her work is in many public collections.

IAIN BRITTON is Director of Maori Studies at King’s School, Auckland, NZ.  His poems have appeared in many magazines and ezines internationally, including Poetry NZ, Jaam, Takahe, Slope, The Drunken Boat and Jacket.

MAIRÉAD BYRNE is the author of two plays, a short book on James Joyce, two books of interviews with Irish painters, and a collection of poetry, Nelson & the Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press 2003).  She was a journalist for eight years, in Ireland and the United States.  Her poem The Pillar was published by Wild Honey Press in 2000.  She earned a PhD in Theory & Cultural Studies from Purdue University in 2001 and is now an Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island School of Design.  Her current work includes a mixed-genre work on Frederick Douglass's lecture tour of Ireland, 1845-1846, and a new book of poetry, Broken.

JASMINE CHAN is a Melbourne playwright. She has been involved in a number of local independent media projects, including The Paper, and studied at the School of Creative Arts, the University of Melbourne.

CRIS CHEEK is a poet-pedagogue, writer-critic, book artist-publisher, new media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer, cris cheek's writing has been commissioned and shown widely, often in multiple versions using diverse media for production and circulation. His work is increasingly site-responsive and frequently created in full collaboration with other artists.

DAVID FALCONER is Director of New Millennium Gallery, St Ives.

JAMES GRAHAM and Lenara Verle's Photographs and Other Fictions website (www.donkeyraver.com) won the Jean Giono Prize at the Gremone Digital Conference at the same time that Verle's film Gridcosm won first prize at the VAD festival in Gerona, Spain. Three Odd Jobs is from Graham's book of fiction, Spice Factory. His Delirium Tremens New York, which first appeared in Masthead, will be published in France this year. With a bit of luck, he's unpacking in Argentina as you read this.

MARK GOODWIN has received various awards, including an Eric Gregory Award in 1998. His work has been published in a wide range of British little magazines. His first colletion to be published is due out this spring from Skrev Press, who are based in Wales. Mark works as a community poet in England's East Midlands. 

STEVE HALFYARD is a performer specializing in music theatre and extended vocal technique. She studied music at City University before going on to complete a PhD thesis on Music Theatre at the University of Birmingham. Due to the largely fortuitous fact that both these music departments also specialize in electroacoustic composition, she got to know and has subsequently worked with several electroacoustic composers, in particular Joseph Hyde, Simon Emmerson, and Simon Hall. She has performed in Joseph Hyde and Alaric Sumner's Nekyia (1999) in Bath, London, Rotterdam, Yorkshire, East Anglia and Belfast, and has collaborated over the last four years with composer, Ed Bennett, most recently as a founding member of the dB Ensemble. She is currently a lecturer at Birmingham Conservatoire, where she teaches courses in twentieth century music and film music. 

JOHN HALL is a poet and teacher. He was a colleague of Alaric Sumner's on the team that taught Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. His selected poems were published by Etruscan Books in 1999 under the title of else here. An exhibition of his visual poems can be found at Shearsman.

JEFF HARRISON'S poetry has appeared in Nerve Lantern, Sentence, XStream, Moria, Poethia, VeRT, M.A.G., BlazeVox, Word for Word, Xerography, Side Reality, canwehaveourballback, XPress(ed), Generator, Tin Lustre Mobile, Znine, A Chide's Alphabet,The Dream People, Aught  Blackboard Project, and Great Works. His poetry is forthcoming from 5_Trope and Nerve Lantern.

JOSEPH HYDE uses digital media to make sound and multimedia works, installations and performances. Particular features of his work are the complex interaction of abstract sound and image, and the integration of interactive technology into live performance. His background in music is apparent through an emphasis on sound and time-based structures

TREVOR JOYCE was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1947. He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin with Michael Smith, and his first book was NWP's initial publication in 1967. Joyce was also a founding editor of NWP's influential journal, The Lace Curtain. He has published nine volumes of poetry, including The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), his working of the middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, and stone floods (1995), which was nominated for the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. His most recent publications are with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966-2000 (NWP & Shearsman Books, 2001) and the audio CD Red Noise of Bones (Coelocanth & Wild Honey Press, 2001). Founder and director of the Cork International Poetry Festival since 1997, he served as Writer in Residence, NUIG, 2001-2002. For the past four years he has served as co-list owner of the British and Irish Poets listserv and he is currently facilitating Offsets, an original web-based collaborative composition by members of that list.  Awarded a Literary Bursary by the Irish Arts Council (2001), Joyce was a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002-2003. Two chapbooks, Take Over and Undone, Say, were published by The Gig,Toronto,Canada, in an edition of 150 copies in late 2003. 

SUSAN LAMB is Education Officer of Tate St Ives.

JENNIFER LEY is editor of Riding the Meridian.

TOM LOWENSTEIN'S earlier poetry, including, Booster, La Tempesta's X-Ray and Filibustering in Samsara, was published by The Many Press, London.  Since 1973 he has been working on cultural and historical  materials from Point Hope Alaska.  Deriving from this work are a study of sea-ice hunting published by the North Slope Borough and, for Inuit schools, a social history of Point Hope. The Things that were Said of Them (University of California Press 1991) is a volume of traditional Point Hope shaman stories. Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (Harvill Press) is an evocation of hunting rituals in linked prose and poetry.  Parts of his Alaskan narrative sequence have been published in The London Review of Books, Skanky Possum (Austin), First Intensity (Lawrence, Kansas), Shearsman 44 and Great Works.  He is currently working on a study of Inuit-white contact in the late 19th century.

ERIN MAGUIRE worked at Dartington College of Arts when Alaric Sumner lectured there. She is now studying film in Edinburgh.

RORY MCDERMOTT is a live artist who collaborated with Alaric Sumner on a number of projects including The Unspeakable Rooms, presented at the Tate, St Ives, Cornwall and The Cleveland Performing Arts Festival, Ohio, USA. He lives and works in West Cornwall where he administrates Penwith Artist Led Projects and is currently creating new multi-media work for the forthcoming Alaric Sumner Festival 04. 

BRIGID MCLEER is an Irish artist based in London. She trained in Fine Art at University of Ulster, Belfast and the Slade School of Art, London.  Her work is generally image/text based and is cross-disciplinary moving between the practices of visual art, writing, architecture, performance and critical theory.  Recent work has been shown and published in Britain, USA and Ireland. She is currently hosting an online project in collaboration with Katie Lloyd Thomas titled In Place of the Page, which can be viewed at www.inplaceofthepage.co.uk. Brigid Mc Leer was a lecturer on Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, Devon from 1995 - 2000 and currently is visiting lecturer on a number of arts courses in Britain, as well as teaching history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.

CHRIS PAUL now lives writes and works in London.  He has been published in a number of small press anthologies and is part of the London Under Construction performative poetry collective and a regular attendee of the WFWorkshops. Mantras for the City from the City is due from Writers Forum.

COLIN ROBINSON is a writer and social commentator currently based in London.  Colin's poetry and prose have appeared in a number of Australian journals and he has also been involved in producing works for the theatre, radio and cinema. Most recently he was Executive Producer of Hometime, a documentary film about an innovative education program for homeless men in Sydney. His regular social justice statements on behalf of the St Vincent de Paul Society in NSW have been influential in public debate on a variety of social issues including poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and unemployment.

REBECCA SEIFERLE'S third new poetry collection, Bitters (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) won the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow, 1999), poems from which won the Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Her first collection, The Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award and the Writer's Exchange Award. Her new translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Black Heralds was published by Copper Canyon Press in late 2003. She is the founding editor of The Drunken Boat, an online magazine of international poetry and poetry-in-translation.  Her work has previously appeared in Masthead in Issue 6.

DAN SPIELMAN is a Melbourne-based writer and performer.  His theatre work includes over a dozen seasons with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project, an award winning collaboration between playwright Daniel Keene and director Ariette Taylor.  He has performed with the Sydney Theatre company in Attempts on Her Life and The Cripple of Inishmaan and with the Melbourne Theatre Company in The Seagull. His tv and film work includes The Secret Life of Us through 2003, the lead role in the recently premiered feature film One Perfect Day and a role in Tom White, directed by Alkinos Tsilimidos, to be released later this year.  He was awarded a Churchill Fellowship (2002/03) to continue his translations of Rimbaud in Paris and further explore European stage, radio, and poetry. His work has previously appeared in Masthead in Issue 3 and Issue 7.

ALARIC SUMNER was until his untimely death in 2000 a writer/performer/artist and Lecturer in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, Devon. He was previously Artist in Residence at the Tate Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall. His work has been presented at the Royal Court in London, The Flea Theatre, New York and the Performance Art Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as many other UK and international venues. He edited a section of PAJ 61 (Johns Hopkins University, January 1999) on Writing and Performance; he edited the text / sound feature of Riding the Meridian (Issue 2, Vol 1); and his work has been published in books and journals and on the internet. He collaborated with composers (Michael Finnissy, John Levack Drever), performers, writers and artists. Poems from Waves on Porthmeor Beach (words worth books 1995), his collaboration with Sandra Blow RA, were exhibited on the walls of the Tate St Ives in 1996 and again in 2002. 

KEN TURNER is a visual artist, a painter, a video artist and - centrally - a performance artist. His work is grounded in readings of philosophy and in technology. Throughout a long and distinguished career, he has been a generator of innovative artistic ideas.

LAWRENCE UPTON has been making poetry for nearly four decades, working in a variety of writing genres. He divides his time between London, where he was born, and the west of Cornwall and Scilly, where his family originates. Wire Sculptures was published by Reality Street Editions in 2003. Pictures, Cartoon Strips is due from Sound & Language. Upton's work has previously appeared in Masthead in the American Terror special, Issue 4 and Issue 6.