In this installment, Aaron Anstett reads “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Anstett is the author of Sustenance and No Accident, selected by Philip Levine for the 2004 Backwaters Press Prize. In his introduction, Levine wrote, "Aaron Anstett's No Accident is here for anyone who needs to replenish the belief that American poetry is as healthy and useful as it ever was." Anstett has held fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He currently lives in Colorado.

In this installment, Robert Thomas reads “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. Thomas’s Door to Door (Fordham University Press, 2002) was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as the winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize.  He received a 2003 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poem "Quarter Past Blue" appeared in the 2004 Pushcart Prize anthology.  His most recent book of poems, Dragging the Lake, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press.  He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He and his wife live in South San Francisco.  Learn more about Thomas's work here.

In this installment, Marie Harris reads “Song from Pippa Passes” by Robert Browning. Harris, New Hampshire Poet Laureate 1999-2004, is a writer, teacher, editor, and businesswoman. In 2003, she produced the first-ever gathering of state poets laureate. She has served as writer-in-residence at elementary and secondary schools throughout New England, and has written freelance articles for publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Hampshire Sunday News, and Corvette Fever. She is the author of four books of poetry--the most recent of which being Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir--and is the editor of several poetry anthologies. She has written two books for children: G is for Granite: A New Hampshire Alphabet, and Primary Numbers: A New Hampshire Number Book. In 2003, Harris was named Library Trustee of the Year by the New Hampshire Library Trustees Association. Currently, she is working on a project involving America's first woman composer, Amy Beach.

In this installment, Johanna Drucker reads “Stanzas to [Augusta]” by George Gordon, Lord Byron. Drucker is an artist and writer known for her experimental books of visual poetry and typography. She has written and published widely on topics related to the aesthetics of visual language, contemporary art, digital humanities, and the history of design and typography. Her creative publications are in special collections in libraries and museums in the United States and Europe. Her most recent titles include A Girl's Life (with Susan Bee, Granary), Quantum (Druckwerk), Emerging Sentience (with Brad Freeman), and From Now (Cuneiform Press, due in Fall 2005). She recently published Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press). She is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

In this installment, Bill Berkson reads “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Berkson is a poet, art critic, and professor of Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. His books of poetry include Serenade, Fugue State, a collection of his 1960s collaborations with Frank O'Hara entitled Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings, and Gloria (with etchings by Alex Katz). The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, a selection of his criticism, appeared from Qua Books in 2004.