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John Brandi is a native of southern California. He studied art and anthropology at California State University, Northridge, and graduated in 1965; while there, he met poets Jack Hirschman and Eric Barker, as well as singer Pete Seeger, who encouraged him toward social work. From 1966 to 1968 he lived in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, working with Quechua-speaking farmers in their struggle for land rights. In the Andes he began publishing his poems in hand-sewn mimeograph editions, a trend that preceded the alternative press movement. After his travels in South America, he returned to the United States, protested the war in Vietnam, moved to Alaska, then to Mexico, and finally to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. He met Beat Generation poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and a key member of the San Francisco Renaissance, David Meltzer, who published his first collection of prose poems, Desde Alla. In 1971 Brandi moved to New Mexico, built a hand-hewn cabin in a remote canyon, and founded Tooth of Time Books, which published the first books of several poets who would become internationally recognized.

During his early years in southwestern United States, Brandi traveled with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, compiled That Back Road In, and earned a living by teaching as an itinerant poet. In 1980 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He has remained a resident of New Mexico, and continues to teach as an itinerant poet, supported by numerous grants from state arts councils, the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and the Just Buffalo World of Voices.

As a poet, Brandi owes much to the Beat tradition, and to poets as diverse as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Matsuo Basho. As a painter, Brandi cites the influence of Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen,who both excelled as visual artists as well as being notable writers ^[2] . Brandi's paintings are specifically informed, as is much of his writing, by his world journeys. He was introduced to the art of traveling by his parents, who drove him through California's diverse landscapes, gave him a box of paints, and encouraged him to sketch and write what he saw and experienced.^[3]

John Brandi's numerous publications include poetry, travel essays, limited-edition letterpress books, hand-colored broadsides, and modern American haiku. He has lectured at the Palace of the Governors Museum, Santa Fe, at Idyllwild Arts, California, and has been a guide and lecturer for university students studying in Bali and in Mexico.

Marilyn Stablein has exhibited her collage journals, assemblages and artist books internationally.  Recently assemblages have been exhibited at the Albuquerque Museum, the Harwood Museum in Taos for the Originals 2007 show, and in a traveling show, "Shelter" at the Pyramid Arts Center, the Rhode Island School of Design and four other national venues.   This year her artist books and assemblages have been exhibited in New Mexico, Florida, Massachusetts, Oregon, Colorado, and California.
Her artist books are in the collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Washington State Library; Amherst College, and Special Collections, Book Arts, at the University of Washington.  A small catalog was published in conjunction with her recent 2007 solo show of collage journals and assemblages: Microcosm at The Outpost Artspace, in Albuquerque.  
Marilyn is also author of the award-winning: The Census Taker: Tales of a Traveler in India and Nepal (Black Heron Press), the memoir Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir, a collection of personal essays Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagaination (Black Heron Press), an ongoing dream sequence Night Travels to Tibet, (Shivastan Publishers), and other works.