Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, Four Way Review, The Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, her M.P.A. from the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy, and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Ms. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, under/class, which explores poverty. She currently lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water. He is the 2016–2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at The Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. A Cave Canem fellow, his work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, and New England Review. He’s a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is also a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His latest book of poems titled, Someone’s Dead Already,was nominated for a California Book Award. His next book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, is being published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series.
Rae Armantrout is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego. She has taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco State University. Armantrout’s latest book is Partly: 2001–2015, an anthology spanning some of her most salient works and containing never-before published poems. Her 2009 collection, Versed, received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout earned her MA at San Francisco State University in 1975. She lives in San Diego, CA.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, New York Magazine’s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, and PlatteForum. She writes a monthly column on food for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.
Ben Fama is the author of Fantasy (UDP 2015). His writing has appeared in The Believer, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Jubilat, Lit, Joyland and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. In 2016 he was a participating artist in MoMA ps1’s GreaterNY. He is the co-founder of Wonder, and lives in New York City.
Uljana Wolf is a poet and translator based in Brooklyn and Berlin. She published four books of poetry in German and translated numorous writers from English snd Polish into German, among them Yoko Ono, John Ashbery, Erin Moure, Cole Swensen, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Christian Hawkey, and Eugene Ostashevsky. Her most recent German publication is “Wandernde Errands,” an essay on the translingual poetics of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Wunderhorn 2016). English translations of her work appeared in several chapbooks, among them “i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where”, translated by Sophie Seita (Wonder Press, Brooklyn 2015). Forthcoming is “Subsisters. Selected poems,” edited and translated by Sophie Seita (Belladonna*, summer 2017). Uljana Wolf teaches German language and literary translation at New York University, the Pratt Institute, Humboldt University Berlin and the Institute für Sprachkunst, Vienna.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. This reading celebrates the release of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, his novel in poems about communication challenges affecting pirate-parrot relationships, from NYRB Poets. He is also the author of The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by UDP. Born in Russia, brought up in the US, and currently residing in Berlin while working in Paris, he writes about how languages do not match each other or themselves. He often puns.
Tom Comitta is the author of ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), SENT (Invisible Venue), First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF) and Airport Novella (forthcoming from Troll Thread). From 2011-12 he co-conducted SF Guerilla Opera, a roving sound poetry troupe that gave voice to texts at numerous locations around the Bay Area including the Civic Center BART and the Berkeley Art Museum. This summer his collaboration with the choreographer duo Fire Drill, Bill: The Musikill, will appear in Minneapolis’s Momentum dance festival. He lives in Los Angeles.
Kaveh Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry). The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.
Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013). She lives in Oakland where she is currently working on a book-length essay entitled SOCIALIST REALISM.
This is an older, archived version of The Poetry Project site. Information may have changed.
