The Guild of Literary Outsiders is managed and directed by a non-heirachichal council.

JD Finch's first publication was in 2nd grade with a Jungle Book type story: "How The Girrafes Got their Necks". Many years later he moved to Brattleboro Vermont, where Kipling wrote and published "The Jungle Book", which he had conceived years ealier in India. In between those two life events Finch worked for northern New Jersey newspapers as a columnist/reporter/photographer; wrote articles on film for Cinefantastique, Fangoria, and Filmfax; wrote on collectibles for many publications; had humorous fiction on eyeshot.net, somewhat.org, nealpollack.com, mcsweeneys.net and redfez.net. He's also had fiction published nationally and has done and continues to do the zine thing.

Leopold McGinnis is an independent Canadian author/poet and literary activist. He is the founding editor of www.redfez.net, an online digizine devoted to publishing under-recognized and under-published authors, as well as the author of a novel, Game Quest, and two novellas, The Red Fez and Bad Attitude (coming Fall 2007). His first word ever was 'no' and he grew his first full beard in grade 10.

Marissa Ranello  A wife, stepmother, daughter, and poet, Marissa is also a professional headcase. She enjoys butchering the English language from the comfort of her wooden octagon teepee. Since moving to Canada in 2004, Ranello has learned how to set a weedwacker on fire and fuck up cake that comes in a box. Her best friend is a 10" plastic bendable straw named Sinatra.

Victor Schwartzman is 61 and lives in Winnipeg, though he was born in Brooklyn, just like pretty much everyone else.  Victor majored in creative writing at Queens College of the City University of New York, and was accepted into the MFA programme at the University of California, though first he had to agree go kill strangers in Vietnam for the US government.  He did not want to kill people he knew, much less strangers.  After serious, thoughtful struggle, he ended up going to Canada instead where the only thing he had to kill was the occasional rabid beaver.
 
His current day job (for the last 19 years) is Human Rights Officer.  He investigates complaints of discrimation, failure to accommodate people (the biggest single block of complaints are disability-related), and general bad behaviour, human-to-human.  He's been on the Boards of "straight" writers' organizations, the local social planning council, and was Head of Administration for ConAdian, the World Science Fiction Convention of 1994.  Since 1995 he has run the Video Room at the local science fiction convention, KeyCon. 
 
Victor writes short fables, very clunky poetry, and a graphic novel he has been working on for about ten years, real time, which is approximately equal to three Hungarian yogurt eaters lifetimes, Internet time.  Victor hates yogurt, by the way.  Also strawberries, which are the only fruit he knows of that is covered with acne.  You can find his writing at his personal website, http://victorhypertension.blogspot.com/, which also contains useful information about high blood pressure.

(Victor's bio is long because he is old.  He hopes for it to get longer....)

Charles P. Ries  lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and sixty print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing, and most recently read his poetry on National Public Radio’s Theme and Variations, a program that is broadcast over seventy NPR affiliates.  He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org), Pass Port Journal (www.passportjournal.org) and ESC! (www.escmagazine.com). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Most recently he has been appointed to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

To contact Dave visit A. Hello Whiskey  

Karl Koweski, Originally from Chicago, now lives on top of a mountain in Alabama for reasons that involve a woman. Once the lead singer/banjo player of the disco/punk/country band The Screaming Shits, he now spends his time writing articles for porn magazines.

BRIAN FUGETT: I sit in my pad all day consuming more oxygen than I’m worth. I’ve been doing it for nearly 35 years now & have become quite efficient at it. Eating & voiding are the only things I really know how to do. Between meals & trips to the shitter, I covertly milk “West Nile Virus” from the tits of pregnant mosquitoes & use it to butter the toast of local politicians. And when I’m sufficiently liquored up, I like to spend my time editing, printing & binding Zygote in my Coffee & other TAINTED COFFEE PRESS publications.

John G. Hall: Manchester poet,editor and publisher.Founding owner of Citizen32, a radical poetry & art magazine.His work has appeared in most of the Uk's small press publications & Left Curve & Square Lake in the USA. Performs his poetry throughout the North West of England , mixing militant politics & biting humour with touching visions of childhood, love and football.

Regards himself as a lapsed Buddhist Trotskyist, willing to change anything to change everything. His first collection of poetry was published by Bewrite Books titled "The Drowning Fish" & is available from amazon.com and his second collection "See No Evil" is available from lulu.com

What the poets say about his books......

"John Hall’s poetry has the gritty edge of a contemporary visionary in active development. He’s not afraid to let the poem happen to him as experience & he’s not imprisoned by form but open to its changing demands. Whether writing of broken heartedness or dealing with experiences of a more directly political nature, his poems are always directed towards the future. So that outrage is never far from rage, nor affirmation from bitter actuality. This is an important book by one of England’s most important younger poets."

-Jack Hirschman – author of “Front Line-Selected Poems” City Lights Books & Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

John G. Hall fuses several key ways of being a poet in the early 21'st century: the lyric,  and the experimental.  His work has a spiky immediacy, and an articulate ache, that reminds me of Lawrence and sometimes the American Beats: he lets the moment speak its fire and its cold."

- Todd Swift, Canadian poet & editor of 100 Poets Against the War (Salt, Cambridge, 2003).

Paul Corman-Roberts: Paul Corman-Roberts is the poetry editor for Cherry Bleeds magazine and his first book of poems and flash fiction "Coming WorldGone World" was published by Howling Dog Press in 2006. Otherwise he has been rejected by the New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, Zygote In My Coffee, the Hell's Angels, The Black Panthers, the Communist Party, the Good Sam Club, and Up With People.

Melissa Hansen lives in San Francisco with her husband, where she writes poems and stories and works at 26 libraries. She has published and forthcoming work in various literary zines. Currently she is into her graphic novel and sometimes dissecting her previously written poems, resulting in built poems and forced poems, as well as writing in her sleep poems and cutting up poems while writing new poems. She also likes poems. You can visit her at www.myspace.com/quicksecret.

Aleathia Drehmer is living the single mother life in Painted Post and liking it just fine.  She spends her time writing various formations of words and entertaining a 6 yr old.  She is most recently presiding over the Outsider of the Month section of this website but also co-edits in Lit Circus where the Featured Poets are concerned.  She also calls Zygote in My Coffee another home in which she hangs a hat.  Her work can be visualized at www.myabdication.blogspot.com ,or heard at www.myspace.com/throughtwochords .

Joe Smith  is the founder of Manual Publishing. He  currently lives in Maryland.