Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He releasedGo Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released by Tin House Books in September 2019.
Sara Larsen is a poet and writer living in Oakland, CA. Her newest book is a polyvocal exploration of punk and poetics, The Riot Grrrl Thing (Roof, 2019). Previous books include Merry Hell (Atelos, 2016), and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous (Printing Press, 2014). She is also the author of several chapbooks including Our Ladies, Riot Cops En Route To Troy, The Hallucinated, among others.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America”. The first volume of a planned trilogy on African-Americans and utopia (Harlem, Haiti and the Black Belt of the American south), it was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by BOOKFORUM as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Chimurenga, Bidoun, A Public Space, Creative Time Reports, Harper’s, Essence and Vogue, among many others. She has received grants and awards from Creative Capital, the Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. Her 2015 book for young readers “Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem” (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers) was named by Booklist among the year’s top books about art for children. Rhodes-Pitts organizes projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau, gathering collaborators across the fields of visual art, music, theater, film, and education to produce events at venues like Harlem Stage, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Museum, PS 1 / MoMA and public spaces in Harlem.
Though working through multiples forms Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter who uses distilled geometric abstraction to generate an idiosyncratic language that is diagrammatic and expressive. The works are deconstructions of natural and built environments that consider how individuals negotiate and negate various types of systems and systemic order. Dyson’s work has been exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, Kravets Wehby, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson has been awarded the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, Visiting Artist grant to the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center Fellowship, and the FSP/Jerome Fellowship. Dyson’s work has also been supported by the, Drawing Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, The Laundromat Projects, the Green Festival of New York, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, The Kitchen, and the Rebuild Foundation. In 2016 Dyson was elected to the board of the Architecture League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts. Torkwase is now based in Brooklyn, New York and is a visiting critic at Yale School of Art.
Luc Sante‘s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard.
Robert Glück is the author of eleven books, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist, a collection of stories, Denny Smith, prose poems with Kathleen Fraser, In Commemoration of the Visit, and, most recently, Communal Nude: Collected Essays. His work is included in anthologies such as The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker. He prefaced artist Frank Moore’s Between Life and Death, and edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, associate editor at Lapis Press, and director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, where he is an emeritus professor. He lives in Malmö, Sweden, and “high on a hill” in San Francisco.
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.
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.
Jasmine Gibson is a Philly jawn now living in Brooklyn and soon to be psychotherapist for all your gooey psychotic episodes that match the bipolar flows of capital. She spends her time thinking about sexy things like psychosis, desire and freedom. She has written for Mask Magazine and LIES Vol II: Journal of Materialist feminism, Queen Mobs, NON, The Capilano Review and has published a chapbook, Drapetomania (Commune Editions, 2015).
Evelyn Reilly is the author of Styrofoam, Apocalypso, and Echolocation, all published by Roof Books, as well as Hiatus (Barrow Street Press) and Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs). Her poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, among them The Arcadia Project: Postmodernism and the Pastoral, The & NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing, Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, and The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times. She lives in New York City and works as a writer for natural history and cultural museums.
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