Sophie Seita is a poet, playwright, translator, and scholar. Her most recent chapbook is Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015). She’s the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man (UDP, 2017) and the translator of Uljana Wolf’s i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (Wonder, 2015) and Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017), for which she received a 2015 PEN/Heim Award. Other writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bomb, Emergency Index, The White Review, Gauss PDF, Currently & Emotion, and PEN America. Her play Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers, will be performed at La MaMa Galleria in March 2017. She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, working on her first monograph, tentatively called, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital.
Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse), Ten, (BlazeVOX [books]), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book entitled Other Influences about feminist avant-garde poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.
Emji Spero is a performance artist and writer living in Oakland, California. They are an editor at Timeless, Infinite Light and the author of almost any shit will do. They are currently working on Exhaustion: A Retching, a dry lyric essay that documents the affective weight of the accumulated, subthreshold violences, which daily permeate a body in transition. Code-switching between poetry and essay, Spero explores Jose Muñoz’s notion that “utopia exists in the quotidian.”
Ana Božičević, born in Croatia in 1977, is a poet, translator, teacher, and occasional singer. She is the author of Joy of Missing Out (Birds, LLC, 2017), the Lambda Award-winning Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC, 2013) and Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009). She is the recipient of the 40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism award from the Feminist Press, and the PEN American Center/NYSCA grant for translating It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović, forthcoming from Phoneme Media. At the PhD Program in English at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York she studied New American poetics and alternative art schools and communities, and edited lectures by Diane di Prima for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Ana has read, taught and performed at Art Basel, Bowery Poetry Club, Harvard, Naropa University, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, the Sorbonne, Third Man Records, University of Arizona Poetry Center, and The Watermill Center. She works and teaches poetry at BHQFU, New York’s freest art school.
El Roy Red works in the space btwn hope & efficacy until they reach actualization. Galvanized in Black/Brown queer liberation, Red utilizes writing, movement, ritual & performance to facilitate healing, growth, & alternative futures. #postafrofuturism They have shared work in Chicago with Rec Room and in Brooklyn with On and Off & Group Huddle. In addition, they’ve read and performed in Berlin with Queeries into Collective Feminism, a residency challenging hierarchal structure and white feminist supremacy. Their work can be found in the 3rd issue of Hand Job Zine, “Femme Armor” and on their blog http://everydaydiscoveries.tumblr.com. Red is honored to launch their forthcoming chapbook, Negro Amigo: American Incantations at the Poetry Project during this reading. #transfemininemystique #cosmicthot #qtpoc #trans #black #feminist #poet #hoodwitch #warrior #lover #healer #mover #maker #connector IG/FB: El Roy Red SC/TW: great_lakes
Kathleen Miller is a poet and psychotherapist in NYC. Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Jacket2, Stonecutter Journal, Matrix Magazine, Bay Poetics and The Poetry Project Newsletter.
Lauren Clark is a poet, classicist, and editor. Their first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where they were the recipient of a Zell Fellowship, several Hopwood Awards, and a Civitas Fellowship. They work as Program & Development Coordinator at Poets House in New York.
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, mother, professor and activist. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010); Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1999); Does your house have lions? (Beacon Press, 1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Homegirls & Handgrenades (White Pine Press, 1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (Third World Press, 1978); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (Broadside Press, 1973); Love Poems (Third Press, 1973); We a BaddDDD People (Broadside Press, 1970); and Homecoming (Broadside Press, 1969).
Among the many honors she has received are the Robert Creeley Award, the Frost Medal, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadelphia.
Diana Di Prima’s RevolutionaryLetters represent an ongoing record of writing from the struggle for radical and unlimited form of political, intellectual and poetic change. Di Prima’s book points a way forward through a set of interventions, adjustments, recommendations, and calls to action that demand that we see our liberation in writing as well as in the street. After all, Di Prima writes, “…the best thing to do with a mimeograph is to drop it / from a five story window, on the head of a cop.”
She founded, and curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry. Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina Gallery in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers on performance works engaging with sites ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct on Rome’s Janiculum Hill to New York’s Fresh Kills Landfill. In 2016, she shared a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship with Caroline Bergvall and Judd Morrissey to work on a project called The Data That We Breathe at Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Scappettone is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.
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