TYRONE WILLIAMS (InkTank Board President) teaches literature, literary theory and creative writing at Xavier University in Cincinnati. For six years, he was the chair of the English department, a tenure that ended in August 2006. He has a book of poetry entitled c.c., and is writing another book of poetry commissioned by the innovative writing press Atelos. He is also putting the finishing touches on a scholarly monograph entitled Hip Hop and the Public. He has three chapbooks of poetry out—Convelescence, AAB and Futures, Elections— and a fourth chapbook, Musique Noir, has just been accepted for publication. He has published poetry in Hambone, Callaloo, First Intensity, xcp: cross cultural poetics, Chicago Review, mark(s), Cultural Society, The Denver Quarterly, River Styx, The Kenyon Review, Artful Dodge, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, and other national magazines. New work is forthcoming from Cincinnati Poetry Review and Hambone. 

JAMES CROSSET (InkTank Secretary/Treasurer) is a Certified Public Account and Director of Administration for Wood, Herron & Evans, L.L.P., Ohio’s largest intellectual property law firm, specializing in trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Though Jim does not read literature, he does have a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from Indiana University, and an MBA from the University of Cincinnati, as well as eight years of experience as the Vice President of Finance for the School Division of South-Western Publishing from 1989-1997. He is eager to increase his exposure to the city’s literary community and prove to his more liberal siblings that he is now hanging out with artist-types.

PAT CLIFFORD is the Director of the Drop Inn Center where he has worked since 1990. The Drop Inn Center provides Emergency Shelter, Meals, Recovery Programs and Permanent Supportive Housing to over 4,000 individuals each year. He was one of the founding editors of Streetvibes homeless newspaper in 1997. He was on the Board of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (GCCH) from 1998 to 2003, serving as Co-chair for the last two years. He was the recipient of the 2006 Buddy Gray Award for long-term commitment to fighting homelessness from the GCCH. He has been a supporter of the Drop Inn Center/InkTank Writing Group and participant in its Open Mic Series since it began in 2005. Check out the Drop Inn's Website: http://www.dropinn.org/

JANE DURRELL writes on the arts and on travel for a variety of publications including CityBeat, Sculpture magazine, Art Papers, Public Art Review, Cincinnati Enquirer travel section and the Erickson Tribune, a nationally distributed monthly. She was Press Officer for the Cincinnati Art Museum from 1974 to 1991, and has also served in that capacity on a temporary basis at the Taft Museum of Art. From 1971-73 she was art critic for the Cincinnati Post. She holds a BA in literature from Western College for Women (now closed), and has previously served on the board for the Institute for Learning in Retirement (now Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) at the University of Cincinnati.

RICHARD HAGUE, BS, MA (English), is a native of Steubenville, Ohio, a graduate of Xavier University in Cincinnati, and the author of more than a dozen books, most recently the multi-genre Lives of the Poem: Community & Connection in a Writing Life (Wind Publications, 2005). He has done post-graduate work on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant at Oxford University, England, and was a Scholar in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where he worked with Scott Russell Sanders. His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from A Life (Bottom Dog Press, l997) was nominated for a National Book Award; for his first full-length collection of poems Ripening (The Ohio State University Press, l984) he was named 1985 Co-Poet of the Year in Ohio by the Ohio Poetry Day Association, and his Alive in Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press, 2003) was named Appalachian Poetry Book of the Year in 2004 by the Appalachian Writers Association. He teaches literature at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati, where he built and manages one of The Civic Garden Center of Cincinnati's Neighborhood Gardens; he also teaches literature and creative writing in the Graduate Program of Education and Institute for Professional Development at Northeastern University in Boston. He has conducted workshops at the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, The Highlands Summer Institute at Radford University, Radford, Virginia, and the Midwest Writer's Conference at Kent State University. He has read his work at The Ohio State University, Kent State University, Marshall University, Xavier University, The University of Cincinnati, Ohio Northern University, The University of Kentucky, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and many other venues. He is the recipient of four Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist fellowships in two genres. During The Recent Extinctions: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Iris Press, and Public Hearings, a collection of political and satirical poems, is forthcoming from Word Press.