Gail Scott is an experimental prose writer. Her goal is to write sentences which have the function of poetry. She is the author of the novels The Obituary (Coach House/Nightboat), and My Paris (Dalkey Archive), among others. She is completing a work called Furniture Music, in part an ode to the downtown Manhattan poetry scene. She has taught Creative Writing for a decade at Universite de Montreal and has also worked as a literary translator.
Anne Boyer is the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2018). Her most recent book is A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (UDP 2018), a collection of essays and fables. Boyer’s other books include The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House 2008), My Common Heart (Spooky Girlfriend 2011), and the 2016 CLMP Firecracker award-winning Garments Against Women (U.S., Ahsahta 2015; U.K, Mute 2016). Boyer is now in the final stages of a book called The Undying, forthcoming from FSG in August 2019. She lives in Kansas City, where she is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
April Gibson is a poet, essayist, and educator whose work has appeared in Pluck!, Valley Voices, Tidal Basin, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She is a fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat, and a VONA/Voices Writing Workshop alum. Her chapbook, Automation (2015), was published by Willow Books as part of their emerging writer series. Her current project is a full-length poetry collection titled The Black Woman Press Conference.
Marcella Durand‘s books include The Prospect, Rays of the Shadow, Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard, Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, AREA, and Traffic & Weather, written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her translation from French of Michèle Métail’s book-length piece, Earth’s Horizons/Les horizons du sol, was published this year by Black Square Edition
Michael Lally was born in Orange, NJ 1942. 1959 he began reading poems in coffee houses and bars; first published 1960; military 1962-66; ran for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa, for Peace and Freedom Party 1968 while at U. of Iowa on GI Bill; 30 books published since 1970; 92nd St. Y Poetry Center’s Discovery Award for The South Orange Sonnets 1972; NEA Poetry grants, 1974 & ’81 (denounced in Congress by Republicans who called the poem “My Life” “pornography” in first attempt to defund the NEA); PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature for Can’t Be Wrong 1997; American Book Award for It’s Not Nostalgia 2000; latest book Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017. Civil Rights, anti-war, feminist, and LGBT activist since 1966, also worked as jazz pianist, magazine editor, college teacher, book critic (for The Washington Post, The Village Voice, et. al.); political columnist, night guard, chauffeur, movie and TV actor (White Fang, Deadwood et. al.) screenwriter and script doctor (Drugstore Cowboy, Pump Up The Volume et. al.) Writes the blog “Lally’s Alley” and contributor to “The Best American Poetry Blog.”
Douglas Crase is the author of The Revisionist, named a 1981 Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and nominated that year for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award in poetry. His recent chapbook The Astropastorals was named a 2017 Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. A collection of his essays and lectures, Lines from London Terrace, was published in February by Pressed Wafer. He is a former MacArthur Fellow and the “Doug” in James Schuyler’s poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank.”
Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. Her first full length book, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory, is newly out from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2019. Other recent work has appeared in Peach Magazine and Vestiges. For more info visit annagw.com / @anna.as.metaphor
MC Hyland is a PhD candidate in English Literature at New York University, and holds MFAs in Poetry and Book Arts from the University of Alabama. From her research, she produces scholarly and poetic texts, artists’ books, and public art projects. She is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, as well as the author of several poetry chapbooks (most recently THE END PART ONE from Magic Helicopter Press) and the poetry collection Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010).
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit MI. Her writing and translations can be found in the anthologies Kitchen Table Translation, Walk Towards It, and Writing through the Visual and the Virtual. She has also guest-edited special issues of Aster(ix) and Obsidian and contributed to Small Axe, Art21, Two Lines, and Something on Paper. She has premiered almost fifty original solo and collaborative performance art works around the world, including a year-long investigation as a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico and a trilogy of diaspora grief works after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her memoir in performance art Swallow the Fish was named by Entropy as a “Best Non Fiction Book of 2017.” Her forthcoming book Experiments in Joy engages race, performance, and collaboration. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Robert Fitterman is the author of 14 books of poetry including Nevermind (Wonder Books, 2016), Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Press, forthcoming 2018), No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014), Holocaust Museum (Counterpath, 2013, and Veer [London] 2012), now we are friends (Truck Books, 2010), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof Books, 2009), war, the musical (Subpress, 2006), and Metropolis—a long poem in 4 separate volumes. He has collaborated with several visual artists, including: Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Fia Backström, Tim Davis, and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the artists and writers collective, Collective Task. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies. www.robertfitterman.com
Carley Moore is an essayist, novelist, and poet. 16 Pills, her debut collection of essays was published by Tinderbox Edition in 2018. Her debut novel, The Not Wives, is forthcoming from the Feminist Press in the fall of 2019. In 2017, she published her first poetry chapbook, Portal Poem (Dancing Girl Press) and in 2012, she published a young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Recent essays, interviews, and poems have appeared in Aster(ix), The American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The L.A. Review of Books, LitHub, and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcarts Prizes and a LAMBDA award. She teaches at NYU and Bard College.
Best known for How I Became Hettie Jones, her memoir of the Beat Scene, Hettie Jones has published 26 books for children and adults, the first in 1971 and the most recent in 2016. Drive, her first poetry collection, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber Award and was followed by All Told and Doing 70. Jones has also written memoirs for others, including Rita Marley (No Woman No Cry). She has taught poetry, fiction, and memoir in colleges and community settings, and from 1988 until 2002 ran a weekly writing workshop at New York State’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. Jones is the former Chair of PEN’s Prison Writing Committee, and currently teaches Activist Literature in the Graduate Writing Program at The New School, a memoir workshop at the 92nd Street Y, and a women’s writing group at the Lower Eastside Girls Club. She is currently finishing Full Tilt, new and selected poems, and Fiction at the Intersection, a story collection. Jones has lived in the East Village since before it was given that name, and has never wanted to move.