Authors

Brandon Shimoda

Brandon Shimoda‘s recent books are The Desert (poetry and prose; The Song Cave), Dept. of Posthumous Letters (drawings; text by Dot Devota and Caitie Moore; Argos Books), and The Grave on the Wall (an ancestral memoir, forthcoming from City Lights). He is currently researching/writing a book on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, passages from which have appeared in/on The Asian American Literary Review, Densho Blog, Hyperallergic, The Margins, and The New Inquiry. He lives in the desert.

Denise Jarrott

Denise Jarrott is the author of NYMPH (vegetarian alcoholic press) and a chapbook, Nine Elegies (dancing girl press). She grew up in Iowa and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Louisa Khettab

Stella Corso

Stella Corso is a writer and performer currently living in Brooklyn. She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets’ Theater and graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at UMass-Amherst. Her first book of poems, TANTRUM, was selected by Douglas Kearney as winner of the 2016 Black Box Prize for Poetry from Rescue Press.

Photo: Ashwini Bhat

Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. Among his most recent books are the novel The Trace, the poems Eiko & Koma, and Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo. Be With, Gander’s first full book of poems since Core Samples from the World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, is just out from New Directions. Gander lives in Petaluma, California.

Photo Credit: A.L. Nielsen

Lorenzo Thomas

Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama in 1944, but his family relocated to New York in 1948, and it was there that he was schooled and began his life as a poet. Already publishing as a teenager, Thomas formed lifelong friendships with such New York poets as Ted Greenwald, and was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, that crucial predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. Following a tour of duty in the Navy, Thomas moved to Houston, where he became an intimate part of the cultural life of that region, while continuing his national and international literary associations. A critic as well as a poet, Thomas published two volumes of scholarship as well as numerous essays, including several histories of the Umbra group. He died on July 4, 2005.

Phoebe Glick

Phoebe Glick is a writer and editor concerned with preserving queer intimacy under the carceral State. She is a graduate of the Pratt MFA in Writing and Social Practice, and has received support from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the co-founder and co-editor of The Felt. Her creative and critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in her chapbook Period Appropriate (dancing girl press, 2016) as well as in Jacket 2, No Dear Magazine, Apogee Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Phoebe’s prose and poetry explore queer monstrosity and eroticism, attempting to forge a new reality in which validation by capital is not a necessary condition for joy.

Stephon Lawrence

Stephon Lawrence is a Brooklyn born & based writer, and artist. She is an editor of The Felt, a journal of otherworldly poetics. Her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, GlitterMOB, Fanzine & other places. Her microchap //GERMZ is available from Ghost City Press. Her chapbook //EVIL TWIN is available from Resolving Host. Stephon spends her free time watching anime, yelling about white supremacy, and being cute for the ‘gram. You can find her on twitter @nnohpetss & instagram @alphaheaux

Farzaneh Milani

Farzaneh Milani is Raymond J. Nelson Professor and Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Former Director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia, she has published several books, most recently The Literary Biography of Forugh Farrokhzad with Unpublished Letters (in Persian) and Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement; as well as over one hundred articles, epilogues, forewords, and afterwords in both Persian and English. She has served as the guest editor for special issues of Nimeye-Digar, IranNameh and Iranian Studies. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Reader’s Digest, USA Today, among others, and contributed to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She has presented 240 lectures nationally and internationally. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies in America and a Carnegie Fellow, Milani was the recipient of the All University Teaching Award as well as the Zintl Leadership Award (2015).

Photo Credit: Iryna Federovska

Rosamond S. King

Rosamond S. King is a creative and critical writer and performer. Poetry publications include the Lambda Award-winning collection Rock | Salt | Stone and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, such as The Feminist Wire, Drunken Boat, Harriet, The Caribbean Writer and the award-winning Kindergarde: Experimental Writing for Children. Her scholarly book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the Caribbean Studies Association best book award. King’s movement- and text-based performance art has been curated around the world. She is the creative editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform and associate professor at Brooklyn College. www.rosamondking.com

Bill Kushner

Bill Kushner (1931-2015) authored eight collections of poetry and co-authored a volume of collaborative poems with Tom Savage. His work has been anthologized in Up Late (4 Walls & Windows, 1987), In Our Time: The Gay and Lesbian Anthology (St. Martin’s, 1989), Out of This World (Crown, 1991), Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribners, 2002), and Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Melville House Publishing, 2003). He was a 1999 and 2005 Fellow of the New York Foundation of the Arts.

Marianne Shaneen

Marianne Shaneen is a Lebanese/Mexican-­American writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, who also works in documentary video. Shaneen received her MFA in writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and at Yaddo, and received a NYSCA Individual Artist grant for her documentary video essay—a poetic, playful, provocative exploration of fluid identity and trans-species possibility. Her work has appeared in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Manchester University Press, Vanitas, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-­Yo Labs. She is currently finishing her first novel, Homing—a speculative fiction work that experiments with what she calls “writing in the first non-human-person,” from the ‘perspective’ of various animals, plants, a stone, plastic. Amidst eco-destruction and military and corporate control of technologies and bodies, its female protagonist asks, Where does self end and other begin? As she realizes that everywhere home might be is becoming uninhabitable, personal trauma becomes increasingly entwined with ecological trauma. She lives in Brooklyn and in upstate New York, with her partner and their dog Rupert Pupkin.

Caitlin Berrigan

Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture, text, and choreographies to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics, and capitalism. Her artist’s book Imaginary Explosions (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) was the subject of solo exhibitions this year in Berlin and Schloss Solitude, and her book Unfinished State is forthcoming from Archive Books with support from the Graham Foundation. Her current body of work, Imaginary Explosions, is a cosmology of pseudo-science fiction videos that follows an affiliation of transfeminist geologists as they operate in communication with the desires of the mineral earth for radical, planetary transformation. The next exhibition of this work will open in October at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. She has created commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Carpenter Center, and the deCordova Museum. Her work has shown at Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, Anthology Film Archives, LACMA, Goldsmith’s London, Homeworks Beirut, among others. She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College. She is a PhD candidate at the Vienna Academy of Art, and a research affiliate of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Technology, Culture and Society.