Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, Fall 2015). His poems appear in Poetry, The New Republic, New York Times, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review, among other journals.
Tyrone Williams is the author of five books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Howell (Atelos Books, 2011). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011).
Ted Rees’ recent work has appeared in Asphodel, The Drunken Boat blog, Elderly, and Armed Cell, with work forthcoming in Tripwire and ON Contemporary Practice’s monograph on New Narrative. Chapbooks include The New Anchorage (Mondo Bummer, 2014) and Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought (Trafficker Press, 2013).
Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers. She has edited, with Stephanie Young, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine, American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan U P, 2002). Her most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came from Commune Editions.
r. erica doyle has taught community and university-based workshops to writers of all ages for over 20 years. Her debut collection, proxy (Belladonna* Books, 2013), won the 2014 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writers from the Antilles, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem fellow, she has received grants and awards from the Hurston/ Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a memoir, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). A new book of poems, More Gone, is forthcoming from City Lights in 2019. He edited Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010).
Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. The author of 5 chapbooks and artist books, her first full length collection of poetry, (guns & butter), is available from Argos Books. She’s also a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia University & the mom of Pokémon enthusiast, Amadeus.
Natalie Peart is a writer & sometimes arts organizer. Her Chaplet Sixty-One can be found at Belladonna*. She’s looking forward to sharing space with you.
Padgett grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett’s How Long was Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is also the translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages.
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, literary arts curator, and cultural activist. She is the author numerous collections of poetry, including the 1000 page feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House 2011) which was the winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Other recent books include Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen 2017), Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press 2016), Jaguar Harmonics (Post-Apollo Press 2014), Gossamurmur, (Penguin Poets 2013). She co-edited Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), an anthology of lectures from The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She received a long-life achievement award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2015. She has collaborated with numerous visual artists, including painter Pat Steir. Waldman has also worked on a collaboration with Meredith Monk performing at Danspace and ICA in Boston, which will also be presented Brown University in the spring of 2018. She founded Fast Speaking Music with musicians Ambrose Bye and Devin Brahja Waldman, with whom she also collaborates. Publishers Weekly has deemed Waldman “a counter cultural giant”. She co-founded the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics celebrated Summer Writing Program with Allen Ginsberg, a program she continues to curate in the summers. She has performed in recent years at festivals in Mexico City, Paris, Brussels, Calcutta, Jaipur, Marrakesh and Tangier. Trickster Feminism was released from Penguin in 2018. Website: annewaldman.org
Simone White is the author of Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, House Envy of All of the World and the chapbooks Unrest and Dolly (with the paintings of Kim Thomas). She teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, and arts administrator/organizer, and teacher. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where in 1999 she started working for Woodland Pattern Book Center. She founded and edited seven issues of GAM, a free magazine featuring the work of poets living in the upper midwest. In 2005, she moved to NYC to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where she served as Executive Director from 2007-2018. Szymaszek is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, and A Year From Today (2018 ). She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in poetry. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship.
Szymaszek is the 2018-19 Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana and was a Poet-in-Resident at Brown University in fall 2018.