Artists

Ted Roeder

Ted Roeder is a photographer who does portraits of poets, artists, musicians and performers. He has been documenting the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon Reading since 2012.

Paul Tran

Paul Tran is the 10th ranked slam poet in the world. His Pushcart-nominated work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Offing, The Cortland Review & RHINO, which gave him a 2015 Editor’s Prize. Paul has also received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary, Napa Valley, Home School Miami & The Vermont Studio Center. He’s the first Asian American poet to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam in almost 20 years, placing 9th overall. Paul lives in NYC, where he works at NYU and coaches the Barnard/Columbia slam team.

Photo: Anya Roz

Adeena Karasick

Adeena Karasick is a  poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.

Camel Collective

Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats have worked as Camel Collective since 2005. They draw on narrative theater and dramaturgy, combining them with research into marginal histories, critical pedagogy, and entertainment. These cross-disciplinary works involve collaboration from among a variety of participants. The collective writes theatricalized scenarios into exhibitions for the productive frictions generated when genres cross—discourse becomes a chorus, documents become a strike, a political impasse becomes an occasion for painting. Their projects are largely informed by the works and methods of Bertolt Brecht and the social portraiture of the Weimar avant-garde. Camel’s exhibitions and performances have been presented at Casa del Lago, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City; the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan Puerto, Puerto Rico; Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst and Aarhus Museum, in Denmark; and Artist’s Space, Art in General, Exit Art, and MassMoCA, in the US.

Photo: Scott Rudd

Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Her practice considers memory and trauma while enacting an undoing of language. She works from the archive of her own body creating a new syntax for knowing and not knowing, thereby marking the difference between witnessing and watching. To see is unbearable. She has performed at the New Museum, Eyebeam, Queens Museum, NY; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. She is currently a selected participant in the New Museums Seminars: (Temporary) Collection of Ideas, on the thematic PERSONA. Her work has been published in Radical Teacher, Studio Magazine and No Tofu Magazine and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received grants & fellowships from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.

Photo: Janna Ireland

Devin Kenny

Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician, and independent curator.

Hailing from the south side of Chicago, he relocated to New York to begin his studies at Cooper Union. He has since continued his practice through the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SOMA Mexico, and collaborations with DADDY, pooool, Studio Workout, Temporary Agency and various art and music venues in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere including: Recess, Het Roode Bioscoop, REDCAT, MoMa PS1, Freak City, and Santos Party House. He received his MFA in 2013 from the New Genres department at UCLA and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Amelia Bande

Amelia Bande is a writer. She works in performance, theater, film. Her writing talks about life and friendships in a high-tech mode, the possibilities and failures of a perpetual scroll down. Her plays ‘Chueca’ and ‘Partir y Renunciar’ were staged and published in Santiago, Chile. Working in the project space Kotti-Shop in Berlin, she organized the monthly event ´Get Done´ and the writing workshop series ‘Dancing with Words’ and ‘Write the Body Electric’. She is part of the Gels Collective, writing the scripts for the group´s experimental animations and film installations. She is co-founder of Publishing Puppies, an independent press for visual work, poetry and fiction. Her work, solo and collaborative, has recently been shown at MIX NYC, 41 Cooper Gallery, The Shandaken Project at Storm King Arts Center, NewBridge Project in Newcastle, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, KJCC at NYU, NGBK Berlin and Flutgraben Kunstfabrik Berlin. She lives in New York.

Photo: Max Freeman

Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin is author of three books of poetry, and three chapbooks. Of her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015), Fred Moten says, “Imagine Holiday singing a blind alley, or Brooks pricing hardpack dandelion, and then we’re seized and thrown into the festival of detonation we hope we’ve been waiting for.” Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin is a member of the three-person performance group, The Black Took Collective. She is also a member of the global artist collective, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, the group that withdrew its work from the 2014 Whitney Biennial to protest the museum’s biased curatorial practices. Martin is currently working on a hybrid memoir, a tiny bit of which appears as the essay, “The Long Road to Angela Davis’s Library,” published in the The New Yorker in December 2014.

Photo: Ian Douglas

James Hannaham

James Hannaham is the author of the novels Delicious Foods (Little, Brown 2015), a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book for 2015, and God Says No (McSweeney’s 2009), and has published stories in One Story, Fence, Story Quarterly, BOMB, and one in Gigantic for which he won a Pushcart Prize. He has exhibited text-based visual art at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 490 Atlantic, Kimberly-Klark Gallery, and James Cohan. He teaches in the Writing MFA program at the Pratt Institute.

Jennifer Falu

Jennifer Falu recently won first place in NBC-TV’s Amiri Baraka Poetry Slam and was ranked third internationally in the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She has been a member of the 2006, 2009 and 2012 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Slam Teams, won the national Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2006, and ranked 3rd in the WOWPS in both 2009 and 2012.  As a performer, Falu has shared the stage with Jennifer Holliday, Carl Thomas and Patti LaBelle. She recently made her film debut in “Mania Days”, alongside Katie Holmes.

Bishakh Som

Bishakh Som‘s work investigates the intersection between image and text, figure and architecture, architecture and landscape. They are inspired by the grammar of comics and graphic novels but seek to expand the vocabulary of the narratives traditionally presented in this medium by exploring themes of gender, sexuality, memory and urbanism.

Bishakh’s comics have previously appeared in Buzzfeed, Hi-horse, Blurred Vision, Pood, the academic journal Specs, The Brooklyn Rail, Volume 3 of the much-lauded Graphic Canon series and most recently in Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, the oversized tribute anthology to Winsor McCay. In 2003, they received a Xeric grant for their comics collection Angel. Their most recent book is The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History, published by McFarland Press. They have exhibited paintings in Animal Magic, a solo show at ArtLexis Gallery in 2010, Devotional Paintings, a solo show at Jaya Yoga Center in 2015, and in group shows at Rhode Island College and at Grady Alexis gallery in New York. Bishakh lives in Brooklyn, NY. You can see more of their paintings, comics and illustrations at www.bishakh.com.