Steven Ratiner is a poet, educator, and freelance writer. His collection of interviews, Giving Their Word: Conversations With Contemporary Poets, will by published by the University of Massachusetts Press in fall 2002. He also has two new chapbooks of his own poems forthcoming: a retrospective collection in Pudding House Press’s Greatest Hits series, and Button, Button, an artist’s book in collaboration with Marty Cain. (2001)