Michael Bruner, founding member of the nationally recognized performance poetry troupes The Lost Tribe and the Carma Bums, is currently Assistant Professor of Communication at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He has published over thirty poems (most recently in Blue Satellite, Sic, and the forthcoming Outlaw Bible of American Poetry), as well as numerous scholarly articles in national and international communication journals.

After the Break In is the first long text collaboration between the authors whose friendship, performance & poetry exploration dates to pre-slam 1985. As founding members of two influential Los Angeles performance/poetry groups the Lost Tribe (1985 -1988) & the Carma Bums (1988-1996), they performed/ read in over 150 venues, toured the Southwest & West coast of the USA into Canada, & created a "Cyber Tour of Words" on the Net in 1996 which lived until their break-up. Carma Bums' adventures & writing is chronicled in Twisted Cadillac: A Spoken Work Odyssey (Sacred Beverage Press, 1996). A feature length documentary Luxurious Tigers of Obnoxious Agreement: The Carma Bums Film was released in 1998.

Michael Bruner can be reached at bruner@babson.edu.