Author Biographies:

Bennett Capers has published stories in several literary magazines, including Gettysburg Review, Poughkeepsie Review, Allegheny Review, South Carolina Review, and Fiction Magazine. He has received the First Book Award (Terry McMillan, Judge) and the Open voice Award (David Bradley, Judge). He lives in Brooklyn.

Jaime Manrique is a Colombian-born writer. His first volume of poetry received Columbia's National Poetry Award. His most recent novel is Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992) and the poetry collection My Night with Federico Garcia Lorca (1995). He has just completed Twilight at the Equator, a collection of novellas and short stories to be published by Faber and Faber. His young adult biography of Federico Garcia Lorca is forthcoming from Chelsea House.

Bil Wright, a recipient or a 1995 Millay Fellowship, is a fiction writer, playwright, and poet. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Men on Men 3, Art & Understanding, The Road Before Us, The James White Review, The Name of Love, and many other anthologies. His plays have been produced in the United States and Germany, and published in the anthology Tough Acts to Follow. As a 1994 Jerome Award Winner and Mabou Mines Resident Artist, he adapted and staged Audre Lorde's Zami, a New Spelling of My Name. He lives in New York City.

Reginald Shepherd has studied at Bennington College, Brown University, and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. His collection of poems, Some Are Drowning, won a 1993 Associated Writing Program's Award. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies including The Antioch Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, and In the Life.

L. Phillip Richardson has been a member of the Other Countries collective almost from its inception in 1986. His poetry and fiction has appeared in Other Countries' Black Gay Voices and The Road Before Us. He lives in New York City.

G. Winston James is Performance Coordinator for Other Countries: Black Gay Expression, Managing Editor for the organization's upcoming literary anthology, and former co-editor of Kuumba, the African-American Lesbian and Gay poetry journal. His poetry and prose has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction (1994), The Road Before Us (1991), Sojourner (1993), Milking Black Bulls (1995), and Words of Fire (1996).

K. Anthony Appiah was born to a Ghanaian father and a British mother, and raised in Kumasi, Ghana. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Clare College, Cambridge University, and is now a professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of a number of philosophical books-- most recently In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992)--and three novels, Avenging Angel (1990), Nobody Likes Letitia (1994), and Another Death in Venice (1995).

Darieck Scott is the author of the novel Traitor to the Race (1995). He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Stanford, after receiving a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from Yale and a J.D. from Yale Law School. His work has appeared in Ancestral House, Christopher Street and Callaloo. He lives in San Francisco.

Robert E. Penn is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Other Countries. His poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in a number of anthologies and periodicals including Sojourner (1993), The Road Before Us (1991), Essence, Thing, COLORLife, The Portable Lower East Side and Art & Understanding, to which he is also a contributing editor. His story "Uncle Eugene" was written in loving memory of his father Robert E. Penn, Sr., Th.D., 1916-1976.

Charles Wright was born in Franklin, Missouri, in 1932. Early on, he worked at his writing under the direction of Lowney Handy in Marshall, Illinois. His is the author of two novels, The Messenger (1963) and The Wig: A Mirror Image (1966); a nonfiction work, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About (1973); and a variety of uncollected short stories.

Larry Duplechan is the author of three novels, Eight Days a Week (1985), Blackbird (1986), and Tangled Up in Blue (1989).

Greg Henry was born in Antigua, West Indies, and raised in East Elmhurst, Queens. A 1993 graduate from the Utica campus of Syracuse University, he has written for Gannett newspapers.

John R. Keene, Jr. is the author of the novel Annotations (1995). His poetry, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Callaloo and the Kenyon Review. A graduate of Harvard College, he is a member of the Dark Room Collective. From 1993 to 1995, he was managing editor of Callaloo. He is currently studying at New York University.

Severo Sarduy (1936-1993), a writer of Afro-Cuban and Chinese heritage, left his native Cuba for France in 1960, never to return. He is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, several volumes of poetry, essays, and plays. A painter and radio host, he was an editor of Editions du Seuil, where he introduced contemporary Latin American fiction to European readers.

Melvin Dixon who died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of forty-two, was a professor of English at Queens College in New York. He is the author of two novels, Trouble the Water (1989) and Vanishing Rooms (1990), the poetry collection Change of Territory (1983, and a book of literary criticism, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in African-American Literature (1987). He translated from the French The Collected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor (1991).

James Earl Hardy is the author of B-Boy Blues (1994), the first Africentric gay hip-hop love story, which has become one of the best-selling titles ever published by a small press. He is also the author of a biography of filmmaker Spike Lee and of a portrait of the pop group Boyz II Men. An honors graduate of both St. John's University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, his byline has appeared in the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Essence, and The Advocate. He was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and lives in New York City.

Brian Keith Jackson is a graduate of Northeast Louisiana University and has received fellowships from Art Matters, Inc., and the Jerome Foundation for his play After Thoughts, and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Fellowship for Young African-American Fiction Writers. His first novel, The View from Here, is forthcoming from Pocket Books in 1997. He lives in New York City.

Randall Kenan is the author of the novel Visitation of Spirits (1989) and the short story collection Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Lambda Award for best gay men's fiction. For his exceptional promise as a fiction writer, he received one of the 1994 Whiting Writer's Awards.

Bruce Morrow is the recipient of the 1995 Frederick Douglass Fellowship for Young African-American Fiction Writers. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Callaloo, aRude, and the anthologies Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream and Ancestral House: Black Short Stories from the Americas and Europe. Morrow lives in New York City and can be reached via e-mail at bmorrow@panix.com.

Charles Harvey has published stories in The Ontario Review and Story. His story "When Dogs Bark" is included in Dispatches from the Front, which will be published in 1996. He lives in Houston and is finishing a novel, The Road to Astroland.

Samuel R. Delany is the author of more than thirty fiction and nonfiction books, including The Mad Man, Atlantis: Three Tales, and Silent Interviews: On Languages, Sex, Science Fiction, & Some Comics, a collections of essays. A four-time winner of the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, he is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Charles H. Rowell is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the founder and editor of Callaloo. His poetry, prose, and interviews have appeared in a variety of periodicals and anthologies including The Southern Review, The Harlem Renaissance Reexamined and Conversations with Ernest Gaines. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.