Steve McCaffery was born January 24, 1947, in Sheffield, England. He came to Canada partly to work with bpNichol, and the two poets formed the Toronto Research Group. McCaffery and Nichol also combined talents with Paul Dutton and Rafael Barreto-Rivera as the Four Horsemen, creating and performing innovative sound poetry. During the seventies and eighties, he and Nichol were regular contributors to the poetic journal Open Letter. McCaffery's collection of critical writings, North of Intention, stands as one of the earliest and best collections of essays about experimental writing in Canada and the U.S., and it demonstrates and explores McCaffery's own affiliation with the practitioners of the so-called Language Poetry and poetics, often considered a uniquely American phenomenon. McCaffery recently completed his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and is now teaching at York University.

bpNICHOL (Barrie Phillip Nichol) was born September 30, 1944, in Vancouver, British Columbia. His writing is, by definition, engaged with what he called 'borderblur': in his lifetime he wrote (somewhere between) poetry, novels, short fiction, children's books, musical scores, comic book art, collage/assemblage, and computer texts. Nichol was also an inveterate collaborator, working with the sound poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen (whose members were Nichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery); Steve McCaffery as part of the Toronto Research Group (TRG); the visual artist Barbara Caruso; and, countless other writers. In the mid-1980s, bpNichol became a successful writer for the children's television show Fraggle Rock, produced by Jim Henson. His early work in sound was documented in Michael Ondaatje's film Sons of Captain Poetry. A second film has been made on Nichol, bp: pushing the boundaries, directed by Brian Nash; he also appears in Ron Mann's film Poetry in Motion. bpNichol died in Toronto, Ontario on September 25, 1988.