Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts. Her books include The Heat Bird (Burning Deck), Empathy (Station Hill), Sphericity and Four Year Old Girl (Kelsey Street). Her collaborations include artist books with Richard Tuttle and Kiki Smith, and theatre works with Frank Chin, Blondell Cummings, Tan Dun, Shi Zhen Chen and Alvin Lucier. She has received two NEA Fellowships, two American Book Awards, and book awards this year from the Asian-American Writers Workshop for Endocrinology and the Western States Art Foundation. She has been a contributing editor of Conjunctions Magazine since 1978, and has taught at Brown University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Having lived in rural New Mexico for twenty-five years, she now also lives in New York City, with artist Richard Tuttle and their daughter.

Ram Devineni is the publisher of Rattapallax Press and a film-maker who has had films shown at the Cairo International Film Festival, San Jose Film Festival, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, etc. and has appeared on television programs in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was an Eagleton Associate at the Eagleton Institute for Politics at Rutgers University where he studied political theory and campaign management. He has organized several state and federal elections. He also integrates new technologies (e.g networks, SANs,...) for Salomon Smith Barney and Citigroup.