Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven collections of poetry, four chapbooks and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her, most recent books of poetry are A Day Like Today, (Negative Capability Press, forthcoming April 2015), A Swift Passage (Quale Press), Cities and Memory (Chax Press) and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists). She is also the editor of Looking Up Harryette Mullen and The Collected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches for writers.com and Long Island University.
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and Naturalism (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere–in 2014 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, she currently lives and teaches in New York City.
Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a therapist in Washington, DC, and is the author of distance decay (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), and would with and (Roof 2009). She is co-translating the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curated the In Your Ear Reading Series for several years. Her work has recently appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.
Ariel Goldberg‘s publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. Based in New York City, Goldberg has taught writing at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and The New School. They have been a curator at The Poetry Project, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the Jewish History Museum in Tucson, Arizona. Goldberg’s novel in progress, A Century, explores the intimate worlds of art critic Elizabeth McCausland and photographer Berenice Abbott in the context of the New York Photo League (1936-1951).
Édgar J. Ulloa is a transdisciplinary artist and post-transborder poet from Ciudad Juárez, México. He maintains a blog (mijuaritos.wordpress.com) of aural, visual, virtual and performance poetry, that serves as a border trauma and memory reflection of his native city when it was one of the most dangerous in the world according to the media. In his work, he emerges as an explorer, producer of the aesthetic-historical, word-sign, word-symbol. He feels compelled to speak out through poetic performance action. His performances negotiate imperialist border politics, cultural memory, trauma and violence in addition to instigating audience and public participation. Ulloa earned his undergraduate degree in Language and Literature in Texas, and his master’s degree in Creative Writing in New York City.
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Tupelo Quarterly,Winter Tangerine, The African American Review, Vinyl, Muzzle, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2014, she was the winner of The Feminist Wire’s inaugural poetry contest judged by Evie Shockley. She is currently a 2015 Center for Fiction Fellow and the winner of the 2015 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, how to get over is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. t’ai lives and loves in Brooklyn, but hangs out digitally at: shesaidword.com.
Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her other honors include the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The AmericanPoetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.
Poet, translator, essayist and anthologist Pierre Joris has published some 50 books, most recently, Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012; and Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 and 2: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. He lives and works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. They are currently at work on Talvera: A Millennium of Occitan Poetry (Poems for the Millennium, vol.6).
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. Recent books of poetry include A Field on Mars (in English and French), The President of Desolation, The Mystery of False Attachments, and Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader. He is currently assembling a transnational anthology of North and South American poetry “from origins to present.” He will be launching two titles at The Poetry Project on October 9: The President of Desolation (Black Widow Press) and The Mystery of False Attachments (Word Palace).
Poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from then. His translations include Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović. A 10th anniversary edition of from the warring factions, and new essays, a little history, came out in 2013 from re:public / UpSet. He is the General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry, and was the recipient of a 2017 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for this work.
“I was born in 1935. The real story is that I didn’t meet poetry till I was nineteen when my sculpture professor, Dave Hosteller, at Ohio University, played Dylan Thomas reading his poems on a Caedmon ‘LP’ record. He also gave me Under Milk Wood (Thomas’s radio play) to listen to.
During my early twenties, I made performances in New York with colleagues in the ‘downtown’ art world. My most elaborate work, called Car Crash, was a cacophony of sounds and words spoken by a great white Venus with animal grunts and howls by me. Five years later, I illustrated Ron Padgett’s translation of Apollinaire’s The Poet Assassinated. Meeting Ron introduced me to his work and the works of other poets he admired. At the same time, I met and fell in love with Robert Creeley. His was, to me, all about poetry. He was generous with his thoughts, but it was his Massachusetts-accented voice that was the poetry. I read Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets. It was 1966, and I started to write poetry full force around then.
I went to England in 1967 and met the poet-printers Asa Benveniste and Tom Raworth. Asa wanted to publish my poems. He did. The book was called Welcome Home Lovebirds. There were a lot of letters and postcards written between me and U.S. poets. In London, there was much talk around Asa about poetry and Asa’s history as a poet and publisher of poets. He was, I guess, ten years older than me.
I started to write every day and continued till about 1972 when I stopped. I’m not clear why, but I began again around 1990 when I met Diana Michener. She is a very inspirational character, and her eccentric big soul understands all I’ve written since. We have read together in public over the past twelve years with the New York poet, Vincent Katz, who has befriended my poems. I have learned from his personal vision. Many of my poems are written first on long sheets of paper tacked to the wall. Some are eight or nine feet long, and I write in charcoal or crayon and then “white out” when I want to change a word, with a mixture of white pigment mixed with shellac. I also can cut out a line with a box cutter and lose it or use it in another place in the poem by glueing it or stapling it to the paper on the wall. This technique is a lot like the way I draw. Correcting and erasing are important tools, for my poems and my drawings.” – Jim Dine, 2014
