Brief Biographies for Summer 2000 Poets

Adi Heller	is a twelfth grader in Amherst, Mass. "I came to ghazals through an independent project I did in English last year. I met and discussed ghazals with my mother's good friends Agha Shahid Ali and his brother Iqbal, two of the best poets I've ever read and heard. The ghazal I wrote for that project was posted online at a site called la petite zine', but I'm not sure if it's still there.
Sabina C. Becker	lives in Cobourg, Ontario. This is her first published ghazal.
Alison Marshall	lives in Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a mystic who works part-time as a business writer and spends the rest of her time studying Sufism and the Baha'i Faith and writing poetry. She was a member of the Baha'i Faith for 20 years, before being expelled for heresy. Her principal influence and love is the prophet and mystic Mirza Husayn 'Ali (Baha'u'llah) (1817-1892). In her ghazal, Alison has been inspired by Baha'u'llah's "Tablet of the Vision", in which Baha'u'llah describes a vision of the feminine being who brought him his revelation. In the ghazal, Alison draws parallels between her own experience of her lord and Baha'u'llah's experience of his, by alluding to the fact that both realities originate in a transcendent scene in pre-eternity. The ghazal describes how divine love affects the daily life of the mystic, with the last line expressing its explosive intensity. The line is taken from Baha'u'llah's "Seven Valleys", in which he describes seven stages a wayfarer journeys through on the path to the Beloved. The relevant line is: "To merit the madness of love, man must abound in sanity; to merit the bonds of the Friend, he must be full of spirit."
Werner Reichhold	born 1925 in Berlin, Germany Studies in Berlin, Hamburg and Paris. He taught sculpture and drawing at the Art School in Hannover, Germany. He lived till 1981 in Germany, since 1982 exclusively in California, U.S.A. Werner Reichhold's poems appeared in the following magazines: Mirrors, Lynx, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Raw NerVZ, Luna Bisonte Prods, The American Tanka, (all USA) and The Tanka Journal (Japan), Haiku International (Japan), The Haiku Quarterly (England), Vierteljahresschrift der deutschen Haiku-Gesellschaft, Albatross (Romania), Sparrow (Croatia). Since 1993, Jane and Werner Reichhold have co-edited an International Journal for Linking Poets, published by AHA Books.
Christina-Marie Umscheid	born 1946 in Weiden, West Germany, was raised in Saint Louis, Missouri and has lived in Petoskey, Michigan since 1976.Publications include such magazines as Chicago Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Caliban, Odyssey, The Poetry Review, Negative Capability, The Old Red Kimono, Great Lakes Review, Huron Review, The Mac Guffin, Sou'wester, Great Midwestern Quarterly and Moonshade (e-zine and paper). Her debut on the Internet e-zine, World Poetry, was December 1996. This year she has been published in two anthologies, Voices of Michigan and At the Edge of Mirror Lake.