Nicole J. Georges is a writer, illustrator, podcaster, and professor. Her Lambda Award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, was called “engrossing, lovable, smart and ultimately poignant” by Rachel Maddow, and was an Official Selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Nicole does a weekly queer feminist art podcast called Sagittarian Matters, and is currently on a dog-themed book tour in support of her new graphic memoir, Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home.
Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut and currently based in New York. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, video and performance, prose, and poetry. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is the founding editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art and the recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her writing appears in publications such as Guernica, BOMB, Prairie Schnooner, Bespoke, CURA, and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, among others. She has exhibited widely including in the Performa Biennal 2011, LIAF Biennal 2017, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, The Drawing Center, Dubai Art Projects, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Art In General. She is the co-founder of the Mutating Cities Institute and Associate Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing Department at the Pratt Institute.
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She holds an MA in Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and an MFA in Writing from Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace resident.
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, BOMB, East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She was a curator for the Segue Reading Series in 2015 and has presented projects at Judson Memorial Church, Lisa Cooley, Spectacle Theater, and elsewhere. Rachel is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit library and writing space in Brooklyn and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and currently teaches Art History at Hunter College.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator. He is editor, with Erik Bullot, of Expanded Translation – A Treason Treatise, a book of verbal and visual betrayals; and, with Yto Barrada, of Album – Cinémathèque de Tanger (Tenov Books). He recently edited The Africans (Kulte Editions), a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco. He has translated books by Jalal Toufic, Stanley Cavell, and Joan Retallack. His poetry was published in Wave Composition, Asymptote, Seedings, and the University of California Book of North African Literature, among others. In 2017 Omar was the guest curator of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and a co-editor of Sharjah Biennial’s web journal tamawuj.org. He is the Director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech, and lives in New York, where he teaches at The Cooper Union and co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.
Sophie Seita is a poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. Her most recent chapbook is Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015). She’s the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man (UDP, 2017) and the translator of Uljana Wolf’s i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (Wonder, 2015) and Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017), for which she received a 2015 PEN/Heim Award. Other writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bomb, Emergency Index, The White Review, Gauss PDF, Currently & Emotion, and PEN America. Her play Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers, will be performed at La MaMa Galleria in March 2017. She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, working on her first monograph, tentatively called, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital.
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book entitled Other Influences about feminist avant-garde poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.
Jess Arndt received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and was a 2013 Graywolf Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at New York Foundation for the Arts. Her action text “Collective Body Possum” performed with The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour and her writing has recently appeared in Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, Parkett, and Night Papers. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her debut collection of short stories, Large Animals, comes out this spring from Catapult Press.
Emji Spero is a performance artist and writer living in Oakland, California. They are an editor at Timeless, Infinite Light and the author of almost any shit will do. They are currently working on Exhaustion: A Retching, a dry lyric essay that documents the affective weight of the accumulated, subthreshold violences, which daily permeate a body in transition. Code-switching between poetry and essay, Spero explores Jose Muñoz’s notion that “utopia exists in the quotidian.”
Ana Božičević, born in Croatia in 1977, is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. She is the author of Joy of Missing Out (Birds, LLC, 2017), the Lambda Award-winning Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC, 2013) and Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009). She is the recipient of the 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award from the Feminist Press, and the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant for translating It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović, forthcoming from Phoneme Media. At the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York she studied New American poetics and alternative art schools and communities, and edited lectures by Diane di Prima for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Ana has read, taught and performed at Art Basel, Bowery Poetry Club, Harvard, Naropa University, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, the Sorbonne, Third Man Records, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and The Watermill Center. She works and teaches poetry at BHQFU, New York’s freest art school.
El Roy Red works in the space btwn hope & efficacy until they reach actualization. Galvanized in Black/Brown queer liberation, Red utilizes writing, movement, ritual & performance to facilitate healing, growth, & alternative futures. #postafrofuturism They have shared work in Chicago with Rec Room and in Brooklyn with On and Off & Group Huddle. In addition, they’ve read and performed in Berlin with Queeries into Collective Feminism, a residency challenging hierarchal structure and white feminist supremacy. Their work can be found in the 3rd issue of Hand Job Zine, “Femme Armor” and on their blog http://everydaydiscoveries.tumblr.com. Red is honored to launch their forthcoming chapbook, Negro Amigo: American Incantations at the Poetry Project during this reading. #transfemininemystique #cosmicthot #qtpoc #trans #black #feminist #poet #hoodwitch #warrior #lover #healer #mover #maker #connector IG/FB: El Roy Red SC/TW: great_lakes
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