Diamond Stingily is a writer and artist from Chicago, Illinois living in Brooklyn. Her journal from when she was eight years old was published through Dominica Publishing titled Love, Diamond. Her second solo exhibition “Elephant Memory” was at Ramiken Crucible (NY) September 18- October 16 on the Lower East Side.
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has written for Mosaic Literary Magazine, The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio Blog, Lambda Literary, and ARTS.BLACK among others. Since 2015 he has been performing in artist niv Acosta’s episodic work DISCOTROPIC for such occasions as PS122’s COIL live performance festival in New York City and Tanz Im August performance festival in Berlin, Germany. In May of 2016 he presented at the International James Baldwin Conference at the American University of Paris. He lives in New York City.
Alan Felsenthal cofounded The Song Cave, a small press. With Ben Estes, he edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton. His writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and Harper’s. His first collection of poems is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Mike Lala was born in 1987 and lives in New York. He is the author of Exit Theater (2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry) and the chapbooks In the Gun Cabinet (The Atlas Review ’16) and Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama(Present Tense Pamphlets ’16). www.mikelala.com
Originally from Argentina, Cecilia Gentili worked at the LGBT Center, Apicha CHC and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Public Affairs at GMHC. She was a contributor to Trans Bodies Trans Selves and is a board member at Translatina Network. That’s for work. For fun, she acts sometimes and loves doing storytelling events where she talks about her life experiences and she cooks amazing brunches for her friends on the weekends. She is very passionate about advocating for her community, and mostly for transgender women with a Latino background, sex work history, drug use and incarceration history.
Grace Dunham is a writer and prison abolition activist from New York City. They have written about abolition, trans justice, and histories of trans resistance for The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and anthologies published by The New Museum, MIT Press, ONE Archives, and Vienna Secession, among others. Their first chapbook of poetry is available at thefool.us. Their current project, Support.FM, is a crowdfunding platform to help trans and gender nonconforming people in jail and detention raise money for bail and bond. They live in Los Angeles, where they are developing Support.FM with Jodie.
Kaia Sand is the author of the newly released A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016) as well as Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010), and interval (Edge Books), a Small Press Traffic book of the year in 2004; and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press, 2008). With Garrick Imatani, she was an artist-in-residence from 2013-2015 at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, responding to historical surveillance files on local political activists. This past spring she exhibited Moth, Flame, Desire, at the Portland Community College Cascade Gallery, after serving in the Despina Artist Residency at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts; she documents work at kaiasand.net.
Mare Liberum is a collective of visual artists, designers, and writers who formed around a shared engagement with New York’s waterways in 2007. ML’s work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis. ML’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics. The collective is currently led by Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Dylan Gauthier, Sunita Prasad, Kendra Sullivan, and Stephan von Muehlen. More information at: http://www.thefreeseas.org.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America”. The first volume of a planned trilogy on African-Americans and utopia (Harlem, Haiti and the Black Belt of the American south), it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by BOOKFORUM as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Chimurenga, Bidoun, A Public Space, Creative Time Reports, Harper’s, Essence and Vogue, among many others. She has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, the Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. Her 2015 book for young readers “Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem” (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers) was named by Booklist among the year’s top books about art for children. Rhodes-Pitts organizes projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau, gathering collaborators across the fields of visual art, music, theater, film, and education to produce events at venues like Harlem Stage, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Museum, PS 1 / MoMA and public spaces in Harlem.
Though working through multiples forms Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter who uses distilled geometric abstraction to generate an idiosyncratic language that is diagrammatic and expressive. The works are deconstructions of natural and built environments that consider how individuals negotiate and negate various types of systems and systemic order. Dyson’s work has been exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, Kravets Wehby, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson has been awarded the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, Visiting Artist grant to the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center Fellowship, and the FSP/Jerome Fellowship. Dyson’s work has also been supported by the, Drawing Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, The Laundromat Projects, the Green Festival of New York, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, The Kitchen, and the Rebuild Foundation. In 2016 Dyson was elected to the board of the Architecture League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts. Torkwase is now based in Brooklyn, New York and is a visiting critic at Yale School of Art.
Luc Sante‘s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard.
Robert Glück is the author of eleven books, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist, a collection of stories, Denny Smith, prose poems with Kathleen Fraser, In Commemoration of the Visit, and, most recently, Communal Nude: Collected Essays. His work is included in anthologies such as The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker. He prefaced artist Frank Moore’s Between Life and Death, and edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, associate editor at Lapis Press, and director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, where he is an emeritus professor. He lives in Malmö, Sweden, and “high on a hill” in San Francisco.