Lucy Ives is the author of five books of poetry and prose, including The Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016), a collection of aphorisms, lists, dreams, and games. In summer 2017, Penguin Press will publish her first full-length novel, Impossible Views of the World, about the travails of a young curator.
Che Chen plays guitar in the band 75 Dollar Bill and makes sound with various instruments/things in other spontaneous and ongoing configurations. He is based in Brooklyn and Stonybrook, NY, where he works for the family cancer diagnostics business. He used to be in another band called True Primes and made two issues of the zine, O Sirhan, O Sirhan. He currently runs the label, Black Pollen Press, which has published works by Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Yoshi Wada. The label will release composer Catherine Lamb’s shade/gradient on LP in early 2017.
Mary Walling Blackburn works in New York City. In 2016, the work handles and is handled by optics (the lazy eye), contaminated logics (diagrams), and politics (the Miscreant Class). All is amputated/shaped by the Capitalocene. Walling Blackburn’s work and writing have been featured in publications including Afterall, BOMB, Cabinet, e-flux journal, Pastelegram, and Grafter’s Quarterly. In lieu of a picture, has provided a diagram composed of the descriptors produced by anti-choice activists in personal messages sent to Walling Blackburn’s personal social media account
Isabel Sobral Campos’s poetry has appeared in Bone Bouquet, Gauss PDF, Horseless Press, and the Yalobusha Review, among others. In collaboration with Small Anchor Press, No, Dear recently published her debut chapbook—Material—a recording from which was featured at PEN America. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series and Assistant Professor of Literature at Montana Tech of the University of Montana.
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.