Ima Lyttel Blackbyrd (“Two Views from the Trenches”) is the award-winning poetess associated with the movement called “dematerialism,” a rage during the late 1970s.  She worked with punk-rock wizard Lotta O’Toole of the Sphincters and with reclusive underground film master Lyle Ortiz Wertenbummer, acting as producer for his 8 mm. cult favorite, Angels over Akron (1981).  She now lives with an even dozen Burmese cats on a rehabbed houseboat anchored in Lake Erie.

Digby O. Dell (“Mourning Blues”) has retired from his post as vice-chancellor at Himmelfarb Technical Institute, in Dynamite, West Virginia.  With his freed time, he has returned to writing genteel essays, tending an extensive garden and catching smallish catfish on the New River.  He is best remembered as author of the best-selling Morbidity and Merriment in Colonial New England (University of Plattsburgh Press, 1967).

Anna Pest Distich (“American Gothic”) teaches in the University of Maryland’s email extension program, specializing in the Literature of Liminal Fatigue, as expressed in the poetry of Uruguay, Paraguay and Patagonia. Her most recent book was Under the Sign of the Speculum (Norbert Press, 1998).

Fortescue “Kid Spats” Deepelum (“In the Beginning Was the Word”) is a world-renowned jazz and blues collector, commentator and curmudgeon, known for his running feuds with European savants and champions of esoteric theory.  His best-known rebuttal to the French maestro M. Jacques Despondant was “go jump on a grape!”  He makes his winter home in Savannah, GA, in an eighteenth-century tinsmith’s shop.

Professor Loose ("The Primal Scream and the Falling of Snow," Frosty Mug Lecture 006): If you've been plugged in, you know Professor Loose. He has become like the "Special Guest Star" of old TV programs who's there every episode. This time, over red ale he continues revealing to ye damned how Genesis (the opening of a religious compilation called The Holy Bible), which was explained best by ancient science now lost, is still pretty tight with such science as we can string together. Underlying all his ranging theses, we believe, is a true lust for peace.

Mike ("Mindfully Revolving") Mike is this guy, ya know?

Skeeze McMultiplex (“AdWorld”) is the writer of Rootin’ Tootin’ Rasputin—The Case of the Felonious Monk (Showtime, M-Th 9-10, fall 1999) and designer of such modern reality-TV landmarks as Garbage Man (NBC, 2007) and Island of Gross Animals (HGTV, 2008-09).  He is currently working on a comprehensive encyclopedia of radio advertisement jingles from the Golden Age, to be published by Go4It Press in 2011.