In this second year of the Emerge – Surface – Be Fellowship, we were thrilled and honored to received over 100 applications. The range and depth of these applications illuminated how vibrant this moment is for poetry in New York City, and reaffirmed our commitment to encouraging its emerging poets. Choosing three fellows and six finalists was an extremely challenging task for our mentors, but they did it! Today it is our privilege to announce the 2014-2015 Emerge – Surface – Be Fellows!
Morgan Vo will be working with Brenda Coultas, Miriam Atkin will be working with David Henderson, and Maxe Crandall will be working with Mónica de la Torre. The finalists are Ali Power, Amanda Calderon, Caitie Moore, Diana Hamilton, Jeffrey Grunthaner, and Nabila Lovelace. Congratulations to everyone!
Morgan Vo was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1989, to a Vietnamese father and an American mother. He moved to New York in 2008 to attend the Cooper Union, where he studied in performance and design, graduating in 2012. He has published work in The Brooklyn Rail and Pelt. He puts out paper giveaways under New Pinky, www.newpinky.org and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Miriam Atkin is a writer and performance artist based in New York City. Her work has been largely concerned with the possibilities of poetry as an oral medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music and dance. Since 2010, she has collaborated with artist Kurt Ralske on various multimedia experiments combining poetry with the moving image. Their 2011 artists’ book, Rediscovering German Futurism: 1920-1929, accompanied a series of performative lectures which were presented in New York at The Poetry Project, Soloway Gallery and Spectrum Performance Space, as well as in Providence at the Empire Black Box Theater and the Granoff Center at Brown University. In 2013 the collaboration expanded to include improvising musicians Jonathan Wood Vincent and Daniel Carter, generating various performance pieces which were staged at Outpost Artists Resources and Spectrum Performance Space in New York. Miriam regularly contributes art criticism to Art in America and ArtCritical, and her poetry has been published in the Boog City Readerand This Image journal. She is pursuing a PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing and literature at Lehman College.
Maxe Crandall’s first chapbook, Together Men Make Paradigms, was published this summer by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The play premiered at the Hot! Festival at Dixon Place. A 2014 Poets House fellow, Maxe teaches in the undergraduate writing program at Columbia University and is at work on a critical biography called Gertrude Stein and Men.