Artists

Ariel Goldberg

Ariel Goldberg‘s publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. Based in New York City, Goldberg has taught writing at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and The New School. They have been a curator at The Poetry Project, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Jewish History Museum in Tucson, Arizona. Goldberg’s novel in progress, A Century, explores the intimate worlds of art critic Elizabeth McCausland and photographer Berenice Abbott in the context of the New York Photo League (1936-1951).

Édgar J. Ulloa

Édgar J. Ulloa is a transdisciplinary artist and post-transborder poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He maintains a blog (mijuaritos.wordpress.com) of aural, visual, virtual and performance poetry, that serves as a border trauma and memory reflection of his native city when it was one of the most dangerous in the world according to the media. In his work, he emerges as an explorer, producer of the aesthetic-historical, word-sign, word-symbol. He feels compelled to speak out through poetic performance action. His performances negotiate imperialist border politics, cultural memory, trauma and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa earned his undergraduate degree in Language and Literature in Texas, and his master’s degree in Creative Writing in New York City.

t’ai freedom ford

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken BoatTupelo Quarterly, Winter Tangerine, The African American Review, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shockley. She is currently a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at: shesaidword.com.

Nicole Sealey

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her other honors include the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Pierre Joris

Poet, translator, essayist and anthologist Pierre Joris has published some 50 books, most recently, Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012; and Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 and 2: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. He lives and works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. They are currently at work on Talvera: A Millennium of Occitan Poetry (Poems for the Millennium, vol.6).

Photo Credit: Dirk Skiba

Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. Recent books of poetry include A Field on Mars (in English and French), The President of Desolation, The Mystery of False Attachments, and Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader. He is currently assembling a transnational anthology of North and South American poetry “from origins to present.” He will be launching two titles at The Poetry Project on October 9: The President of Desolation (Black Widow Press) and The Mystery of False Attachments (Word Palace).

Jim Dine

“I was born in 1935. The real story is that I didn’t meet poetry till I was nineteen when my sculpture professor, Dave Hosteller, at Ohio University, played Dylan Thomas reading his poems on a Caedmon ‘LP’ record. He also gave me Under Milk Wood (Thomas’s radio play) to listen to.

During my early twenties, I made performances in New York with colleagues in the ‘downtown’ art world. My most elaborate work, called Car Crash, was a cacophony of sounds and words spoken by a great white Venus with animal grunts and howls by me. Five years later, I illustrated Ron Padgett’s translation of Apollinaire’s The Poet Assassinated. Meeting Ron introduced me to his work and the works of other poets he admired. At the same time, I met and fell in love with Robert Creeley. His was, to me, all about poetry. He was generous with his thoughts, but it was his Massachusetts-accented voice that was the poetry. I read Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets. It was 1966, and I started to write poetry full force around then.
I went to England in 1967 and met the poet-printers Asa Benveniste and Tom Raworth. Asa wanted to publish my poems. He did. The book was called Welcome Home Lovebirds. There were a lot of letters and postcards written between me and U.S. poets. In London, there was much talk around Asa about poetry and Asa’s history as a poet and publisher of poets. He was, I guess, ten years older than me.

I started to write every day and continued till about 1972 when I stopped. I’m not clear why, but I began again around 1990 when I met Diana Michener. She is a very inspirational character, and her eccentric big soul understands all I’ve written since. We have read together in public over the past twelve years with the New York poet, Vincent Katz, who has befriended my poems. I have learned from his personal vision. Many of my poems are written first on long sheets of paper tacked to the wall. Some are eight or nine feet long, and I write in charcoal or crayon and then “white out” when I want to change a word, with a mixture of white pigment mixed with shellac. I also can cut out a line with a box cutter and lose it or use it in another place in the poem by glueing it or stapling it to the paper on the wall. This technique is a lot like the way I draw. Correcting and erasing are important tools, for my poems and my drawings.” – Jim Dine, 2014

Steffani Jemison

Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Drawing Center, LAXART, the New Museum, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Laurel Gitlen, Team Gallery, and other venues. Her publishing project, Future Plan and Program, commissions literary work by artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and Harold Mendez, among others. She was a 2013 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Awardee and a 2014 Art Matters Grantee. Jemison holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). She is currently an artist-in-residence in the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program. She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design, the Cooper Union, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aldrin Valdez

Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They are the author of ESL or You Weren’t Here (Nightboat Books, 2018). Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship & Poets House. They currently curate the 2018/2019 winter season of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.

Aisha Sasha John

Aisha Sasha John is a dance improviser and poet. She was born in Montreal, but spent most of her childhood in Vancouver, and currently lives in Toronto. John has a BA in African Studies and Semiotics from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her first book, The Shining Material, was published by BookThug in 2011. Her latest book is THOU (BookThug 2014). You can follow John at http://aishasashajohn.tumblr.com

Jennifer Miller

Jennifer Miller is the founder and director and of Circus Amok, New York’s only free, one ring, no-animal, queer, circus spectacular. She is the author of Cracked Ice or The Jewels of the Forbidden Skates and The Golden Racket. She maintains an ongoing dance practice performing with Cathy Weiss, Jennifer Monson, and John Jaasperse. She is a Professor of Performance at Pratt Institute. She was awarded a “Bessie” (a New York Dance and Performance Award) in 1995 and an OBIE in 2000. She is the recipient of the 2008 Ethyl Eichelberger Award.