William Minor was originally trained as a visual artist (Pratt Institute and U.C.-Berkeley), and exhibited woodcut prints and paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and other museums and galleries. His woodcut prints incorporated the text of Russian, Modern Greek, and Japanese poetry—which he also translated. He began to write poetry as a graduate student in Language Arts at San Francisco State, producing his first book, Pacific Grove, in 1974. Bill has, since that time, published five more books of poetry: For Women Missing or Dead, Goat Pan, Natural Counterpoint (with Paul Oehler), Poet Santa Cruz: Number 4, and Some Grand Dust (Chatoyant Press), for which he was a finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award. His short fiction has been selected for inclusion in Best Little Magazine Fiction (NYU Press) and The Colorado Quarterly Centennial Edition. A jazz writer with over 150 articles to his credit, Bill has also published three books on music: Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet Union (Temple University Press), Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years (Angel City Press; Bill served as scriptwriter for the Warner Bros. film documentary based on the latter, same title as book), and Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (University of Michigan Press. A professional musician since the age of sixteen, Bill set poems from For Women Missing or Dead to music and recorded a CD—Bill Minor & Friends (on which he plays piano and sings). A second CD, Mortality Suite, offers original poems and music. Bill was also commissioned by the Historic Sandusky Foundation to write a suite of original music and voice script based on a married couple’s exchange of letters throughout the Civil War: Love Letters of Lynchburg. More biographical information and links are available at www.bminor.org.