Aziza Barnesis blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry. You can find her work in PANK, pluck!, Muzzle, Callaloo, Union Station, and other journals. She is a poetry & non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics collective. She loves a good suit & anything to do with Motown.
Jes Tom (they/them) is a weird queer stand up comic with but one goal: To hurt the feelings of The Oppressor. Born & raised in San Francisco and now established in New York, Jes Tom is a fresh voice in stand up comedy, gleefully providing the nonbinary queer Asian American radical cyborg perspective that everyone never knew they wanted. Jes has performed in all five boroughs of New York City, as well as at colleges and conferences spanning the frigid American northeast. Jes tells jokes in venues of all sorts, from hipster bar basements to historic performance spaces such as Caroline’s on Broadway, Gotham Comedy Club, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Café, The Town Hall, and The Friar’s Club.
Back by local demand, Karen Davis has been tearing up backrooms and independent theaters for years, lost count. It’s been a wild ride. Short on rehab, long on self-doubt. Join Karen for her first abbreviated set since last Friday when she monologued at her latest roommate, Tina Slatter, on proper bathroom etiquette when you got a clogged drain and no wire hangers in sight. We’d attach her contact info, but Karen’s between e-mail addresses right now.
Cathy de la Cruz is a filmmaker, performer and writer born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She has an MFA in Visual Arts from UC-San Diego and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Currently she resides in New York City where she teaches Creative Writing to kids. She is also a Contributing Editor for Weird Sister, where she writes the column, “Funny Feminism.” Her first collection of poetry, Libido is forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend Press. In 2017, she will be joining Sister Spit on their 20th Anniversary tour. You can find her on Twitter @SadDiego
Mary Manning is a photographer living in New York City. Her solo debut was at Jackie Klempay Gallery in Brooklyn, and she has participated in exhibitions at 3 Days Awake in Los Angeles, Kijidome in Boston, Andrew Edlin in New York City, and more. Her first book, First Impressions of Greece was published by Peradam in 2014. An avid cinephile, she has programmed screenings of short films at Anthology Film Archives. Her work has been featured in Kutt, Girls Like Us, Inventory, and Apology. She has run the website Unchanging Window since 2006.
Amy Sillman is an artist known primarily for painting and drawing, though she has added zines and animated drawings to her practice over the past few years. She has exhibited widely, and her work is in numerous public and private collections, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, The San Francisco MoMA, and The Tate in London. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, was a Fellow at The Radcliffe Institute in 2010, and a Resident at The American Academy in Rome in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include the All-Over, at Portikus in Frankfurt (2016), Stuff Change (2015), at Sikkema Jenkins, NYC, and a major mid-career survey show “one lump or two,” curated by Helen Molesworth, which originated at the ICA Boston in 2013. Sillman currently spends several months a year in Germany where she is a Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. www.amysillman.com
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New York City. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the War he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949 the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York City, where they settled down in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Two months after his arrival in New York he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he began his legendary Movie Journal column in the Village Voice. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema, and a screening venue.
During all this time he continued writing poetry and making films. To this date he has published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now part of Lithuanian classic literature and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diaristic forms of cinema. Visit his site at jonasmekas.com/diary
Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker, and activist who lives and works in Chile and New York. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the military coup in the early 1970s. Combining ritual and assemblage, she creates multidimensional, ephemeral, participatory, and site-specific works and performance installations which she calls “lo precario” (the precarious), a bridge between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. In Chile she founded the legendary Tribu No in 1967, a group that created anonymous poetic actions. In 1974, exiled in London, she co-founded Artists for Democracy to oppose dictatorships in the Third World. Cecilia Vicuña is the author of twenty-two poetry books, including: About to Happen (Siglio, 2017); Read Thread, The Story of the Red Thread (Sternberg Press, 2017); New & Selected Poetry (Kelsey Press, 2018); and AMAzone Palabrarmas (Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, 2018).
Simone Forti is a dancer, artist, writer based in Los Angeles. She came of age artistically in the 1960s, a time of rich dialog between poets, musicians, dancers and visual artists. Her early Dance Constructions were influential to the reinventing of dance in New York that happened in the 60s and 70s, as well as in the art world. Since the early 1980s Forti has been doing News Animations, improvisational moving and speaking performance speculations on world events.
Forti’s book Handbook in Motion was published in 1974 by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. (Distributed by the Contact Editions www.contactquarterly.com) Her book Oh, Tongue was edited and published by Fred Dewey for Beyond Baroque Books, in 2003. Forti has performed internationally at venues including the Louvre Museum in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York that also feachers some of her work in its permanent collection. Forti is proud that in 2011 she received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts. She is represented by The Box LA Gallery.
C. S. Giscombe’s poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his book of linked essays (concerning Canada, race, and family) is Into and Out of Dislocation. Ohio Railroads (a poem in essay form) was published in 2014 and Border Towns (essays on poetry, color, nature, television, etc.) will appear in 2016. His recognitions include the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award (for Prairie Style) and the Carl Sandburg Prize (for Giscome Road). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Canadian Embassy to the United States, and other agencies; his work on Canada was acknowledged with a Fulbright Research Award by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars. Projects underway include a prose book titled Railroad Sense (having to do with trains and other forms of public transportation) and a poetry book titled Negro Mountain. C. S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is curator of the Mixed Blood readings, talks, and publication series. He is a long-distance cyclist.
Tara Hart is an archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. Hart currently works as the Archives Manager at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Prior to joining the Whitney, Hart performed archival work at the Guggenheim, the New Museum, and the Fales Library and Special Collections. Her writing recently appeared in Archive Journal (archivejournal.net).
Oraison Larmon specializes in archiving, curating, and exhibiting performance art collections. Larmon’s archive practice investigates the performativity of documentation; representations of the body in archival materials; and methods of processing performance art. At New York University, Larmon processes performance materials for the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) and the institute’s physical archive. Larmon is currently working with Martha Wilson on the forthcoming collection “Franklin Furnace: Performance and Politics” for HIDVL. It will feature performances engaging body politics selected from Franklin Furnace’s Event Archives. Larmon’s curatorial credits include the two-day event Performing the Archive (2013) with Professor Diana Taylor; the full-scale exhibition Desperate Archives (2014) with Split Britches; and the performance program for the Radical Archives Conference (2014) with Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani.
This is an older, archived version of The Poetry Project site. Information may have changed.
