Lydia Cortés

Lydia Cortés is Williamsburg born Puerto Rican and the author of two collections of poetry: Lust for Lust and Whose Place. Her work appears in The Anthology of Puerto Rican Poetry: From Aboriginal to Contemporary Times; Breaking Ground, Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012; Monologues From the Road (a play); Through the Kitchen Window; Teaching With Fire; In Praise of Our Teachers; and in Phati’tude Literary Magazine’s What’s Latin A Nombre? issue. Both her stories and poems have been published in online zines such as Press1. A story has been recently published in Shale, a collection of fiction. She was awarded fellowships at The Valparaiso Artists Retreat in Spain; Virginia Center for The Creative Arts; and at The MacDowell Colony. Lydia Cortés has also been published by Jessica Tannebaum, curator for the Journal of Upstreet, in two of their issues. Michael Broder of Indolent Press has published various poems in his online poetry venue, Rough Beast. Black Earth Institute, curated by Patricia Spears Jones in their series, 30 Days Hath September, selected a poem by Cortés. She’s also been published in the recent anthology, Resist Much Obey Little.

Jeffrey Pethybridge

Jeffrey Pethybridge is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press 2013). His work appears widely in journals such as Best American Experimental Writing, Chicago Review, Volt, The Iowa Review, New American Writing and others. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is the Managing Director of the Summer Writing Program. He’s currently at work on a documentary project centered on the recently released torture memos entitled “Force Drift, an Essay in the Epic.”

He lives in Denver with the poet Carolina Ebeid and their son Patrick; together they edit Visible Binary.

Ali Liebegott

Ali Liebegott is a writer and painter. She has published four books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, Cha-Ching!, and The Summer of Dead Birds. She is the recipient of a Peabody Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and a Ferro-Grumley Award. She has read and performed her work throughout the United States and Canada with the legendary queer literary tour Sister Spit. In collaboration with Michelle Tea and Elizabeth Pickens she created The RADAR LAB, a free queer writer’s retreat from 2009-2013. in 2010 she took a train trip across America to interview poets for a project called The Heart has many Doors–. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is the author of four poetry collections and the Obie-winning play “Telephone.” She has created performances and art projects for the Whitney Museum, Works+Process at the Guggenheim, Stuart Shave / Modern Art, and more, and has taught poetry at many institutions, including Columbia, Yale, NYU, and UC Berkeley, where she was the Holloway poet. Recently a Macdowell Fellow, a Dora Maar Fellow, and a poet in residence at the T.S. Eliot House, she performs frequently around the world. Her newest collection, A Sand Book, is now available from Tin House Books.

Jenn Pelly

Jenn Pelly is a contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of The Raincoats. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, NPR, and The Wire among other publications. She is from New York.

Bruce Benderson

Bruce Benderson is most known for his seventh book, a memoir called The Romanian: Story of an Obsession (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), which won France’s literary award, the Prix de Flore, in translation. He is also the author of the novel User (Dutton, 1994) and the story collection Pretending to Say No (Plume, 1990). His most recent English-language novel is Pacific Agony, published by Semiotext(e) (2009). A collection of his essays from the last ten years, Sex and Isolation, was published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2008. Benderson is bilingual, writes in both English and French, and all eight of his books have been republished in translation by Editions Payot & Rivages in France.

As a journalist, Benderson has written in English or French for The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, nest, French Vogue, Vogue Hommes, Beaux Arts Magazine, L’Humanité, Madame Figaro, Blackbook, and Libération, among others. For five years, he was the author of a monthly column for the French gay magazine Têtu.

Benderson is a literary translator from the French. In the last three years, his many published translations have included works by Grégoire Bouiller for Houghton-Miflin, Martin Page for Penguin, Tony Duvert for Semiotext(e), David Foenkinos for Harper, Philippe Djian for Simon & Schuster and Beatrix Preciado for The Feminist Press.

In 2007, Benderson published a personal encyclopedia of the American counterculture for a French audience, entitled Concentré de Counterculture (Scali). Four years ago, Benderson’s first book written directly in French, Transhumain, about the future interfacing of technology and biology, was published by Payot. A satirical essay, Against Marriage (Semiotexte, 2014), was published to become part of an installation at the Whitney Biennale.

Benderson has also worked closely with three Hollywood personalities: Leslie Caron, for her 2010 memoir Thank Heaven; Hill Harper, for his 2013 book Letters to an Incarcerated Brother; and Raquel Welch, for her book Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage. In 2014 he wrote the subtitles for the French film Race d’ep, to be released on DVD by Artists Space.

He has taught creative writing, urban culture and French literature during three separate terms at Deep Springs College in Dyer, Nevada. He has also lectured or taught workshops at Brown University, Evergreen College, and Sarah Lawrence.

Ethan Philbrick

Ethan Philbrick is a composer, cellist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He holds a Phd in Performance Studies from New York University and has performed in New York at Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, the Grey Art Gallery, the Kitchen, MoMA PS1, NYU Skirball, and SculptureCenter. His writing has been published in TDR, PAJ, Women and Performance, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Movement Research Performance Journal. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Muhlenberg College. Recent projects include a choral setting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto for the Communist Party and a series of participatory pieces for solo cello and audience members that engage with the legacy of cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman. ethanphilbrick.com

Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, and Ruin. Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, was published in September of 2018. The editor of a forthcoming anthology of contemporary Latina poetry, Other Musics: New Latina Poetry (2019), Disquieting:Essays on Silence is her first collection of essays. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

Don Yorty

Don Yorty is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He is the author of two previous poetry collections, A Few Swimmers Appear and Poet Laundromat (both from Philadelphia Eye & Ear), and he is included in Out of This World, An Anthology of the Poetry of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966– 1991. His novel What Night Forgets was published by Herodias Press in 2000. He blogs at donyorty.com: an archive of current art, his own writing, and work of other poets. A new book, Spring Sonnets, will be published by Indolent Books in April.

Keetje Kuipers

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, including, Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Poetry Foundation bestseller. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club pick for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her work has appeared in over a hundred journals, including Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Orion, and The Believer. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Kuipers has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, among other honors. She now teaches at Seattle’s Hugo House and serves as Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Norma Cole

Norma Cole is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News, Actualities, Where Shadows Will, and Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, the anthology Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, and Jean Daive’s White Decimal. She lives and works in San Francisco.

William Rowe

William Rowe’s Collected Poems was published in 2016 by Crater Press. He has translated a number of Latin American poets including Rodolfo Hinostroza, Juan L. Ortiz, Hugo Gola, Magdalena Chocano, Néstor Perlongher, and Mario Montalbetti. Three Lyric Poets, his study of Lee Harwood, Chris Torrance, and Barry MacSweeney, was published in 2009.

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