Hoa Nguyen was born in Saigon, grew up in the DC area and earned an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. She is the author of 7 books and chapbooks, most recently Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey, 2009) and Kiss a Bomb Tattoo (Effing Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Black Dog Black Night (Milkweed, 2007) and Best of Fence (Fence Books, 2009). She is co-editor of the small press and poetry journal Skanky Possum from which Robert Creeley selected poems for inclusion in the Best American Poetry 2002. Based in Austin, Hoa curates a reading series and leads a creative writing workshop. The University of Iowa will publish an essay by Hoa in the forthcoming anthology Poets on Teaching. 

Buffalo Poets Theater is an ongoing collaborative project begun by David Hadbawnik and Michael Sikkema that taps into the long tradition of poets working with experimental drama, begun in New York in the 1950s by authors such as Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O’Hara, and which, under the auspices of Small Press Traffic and such figures as Kevin Killian, still thrives in San Francisco to this day. Last year, Poets Theater staged two events at the new Burchfield Penney Arts Center on Elmwood Avenue. In Spring 2009, the first evening’s performances included “Excerpts From Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal,” directed by Robert Dewhurst; “The Office” by Barbara Guest, directed by Margaret Konkol; and “The Origins of Old Son,” by Robert Duncan, directed by David Hadbawnik. The following month, Kevin Killian arrived from San Francisco to direct his play “Celebrity Hospital,” co-written with Karla Milosevich. Another event took place during Fall 2009 in collaboration with Just Buffalo’s Big Night series, when Poets Theater staged an excerpt from Eileen Myles’ libretto “Hell,” in honor of her visit and reading. Plans for this Spring include another Big Night collaboration, coinciding with the visit of Hoa Nguyen from Austin, TX, when an excerpt from Jack Spicer’s 1955 play “Troilus” will be staged. Also on tap is an evening of “neo-benshi” (live film narration) at Hallwalls Cinema in March, featuring filmmaker Konrad Steiner and poet Jen Hofer, along with local collaborators from UB Poetics and the Buffalo community. Spicer’s “Troilus” has rarely been seen, the text only recently appearing in 2004 in issue no. 3 of No. In typical Spicerian fashion, the play takes a comical, contrarian stance to issues of resistance and humans’ ability to effect change, or even understand the reality unfolding around them. As Zeus says in the prologue: “The Trojan War has been going on for the last 3,000 years and it hasn’t stopped yet. All the stories you’ve heard about the destruction of Troy are just daydreams Ulysses invented to keep himself sane. You’ve probably dreamed like that yourselves, waiting for a war to come to an end. One thing, though—the people in the play don’t seem to know how long the war has lasted. They have the idea that it’s only been going on for nine years or so. I don’t know why. Human beings don’t have a very good time sense.”

Formed in the doey eyed days of the late 00's, Gut Flora's Gabriel Gutierrez and Patrick Cain have met regularly to play towards no specific end. "The aim of our music is to be music. We sound out into sound. We birth the possible from cans and strings, metal and wood. The furnace of microbes which churns in the universal duodenum of time informs our improvisations." 

Geoffrey Gatza, a Gulf War veteran, is a poet and the publisher of Blazevox Books. A former sous-chef at the Mansion on Delaware Ave., he has a degree from the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.)