Michael McClure and Elizabeth Marie Young

Michael McClure is a Bay Area countercultural icon whose numerous works include Dark Brown, Ghost Tantras (which he famously read to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo), the play The Beard, albums with Ray Manzarek, one-time pianist with the Doors, and with Terry Riley, a republication of The Boobus and the Bunnyduck, a 1957 childrens book made with the artist JessRain Mirror.

This summer, Elizabeth Marie Youngs full-length book, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books (it will come out in 2009), and Omahrahu Press published a chapbook of her Sonnets. She is finishing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, and will join the Classical Studies Department at Wellesley College in January.