Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB Poets, 2017) and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York City, most recently at The Poetry Project, Poets House and Columbia University.
Claudia La Rocco’s recent and ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations include projects with the performance company Findlay//Sandsmark, the sound artist Martijn Tellinga and the composer Phillip Greenlief. La Rocco founded thePerformanceClub.org, which won a 2011 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and focuses on criticism as a literary art form. She is a member of the Off the Park poetry press and contributes frequently to the New York Times and ARTFORUM. She is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts’ graduate program in Art Criticism and Writing, and teaches at such institutions as Princeton University, Arizona State University and Movement Research. La Rocco has had residencies at Stanford University, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Process Space on Governors Island. She has performed at such places as Danspace Project (NYC), the Center for New Music (SF), Counterpath Press (Denver) and the Mount Tremper Arts Festival (NY). Badlands Unlimited is publishing her selected writings in fall 2014.
Karinne Keithley Syers is an interdisciplinary artist, participant-historian of the NYC performance community, and creator of things that resemble plays from a distance, including Another Tree Dance (2013), Montgomery Park, or Opulence(2010). She founded and co-edits 53rd State Press, and leaves trails of audio, video, and ukulele covers via her website fancystitchmachine.org.
Nicolas Mugavero lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina. He co-curates orworse.net and orworsepress.net with Chris Sylvester and Shiv Kotecha. He has published books with Troll Thread Press and Gauss PDF. His poetic practice can best be described as one of diminishing returns.
Diana Hamilton is the author of three books—God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Awful Truth (Golias Books), and Okay, Okay (Truck Books)—and four chapbooks. She writes poetry, fiction, and criticism about style, crying, shit, kisses, dreams, fainting, writing, and re-reading. You can walk through audio recordings of her dreams in the first-person shooter by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford in Diana Hamilton’s Dreams (Gauss PDF). Her poetry and criticism have appeared in BOMB, Frieze, Art in America, Lambda Literary, and Social Text Journal, among others. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and she currently works as the Director of Baruch College’s Writing Center.
Jennifer Moxley (b. 1964) studied literature and writing at UC San Diego and the University of Rhode Island and received her M.F.A. from Brown University in 1994. She is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Open Secret (Flood Editions 2014), a book of essays, and a memoir. In addition, she has translated three books from the French. In 2005 she was granted the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly. Her poem “Behind the Orbits” was included by Robert Creeley in The Best American Poetry 2002. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Maine.
Steve Orth is a writer from Oakland, CA. He publishes the magazine, Where Eagles Dare. With his partner Lindsey Boldt, he co-edits Summer BF Press and writes, directs and performs plays in the style of “Oakland Poetic Realism”. Recent productions include “Dating by Consensus” and “The Reading”. Some of his books of poetry and prose include Slur The Point, The Collected Poems Of Steve Orth, and the forthcoming, My Side Of The Holy Mountain Volume 1.
Leslie Allison is a writer and performer. She composes choral music for performance collaborations with Francis Weiss Rabkin, and is writing a chapbook of poetry, Martha Stewart (Spring 2015, Ugly Duckling Press). Her dance and poetry criticism can be found in HTML Giant and The Brooklyn Rail, and her band Cross released its debut album, It’s Curtains, earlier this year.
Lyric Hunter lives in New York City. She graduated from the Cooper Union in 2012.
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a writer, musician, and scholar interested in sound, resonance, migration, family myths, and finding ways to use them to work through the constraints of the English language. Part of the editorial collective of Litmus Press, she is the author of two chapbooks: Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014) and As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016).
Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Through sculpture, installation, text and performance, she makes conceptually driven work with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. She received a BFA from the University of Michigan and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown at Magnan-Metz, Reverse, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, MOMA P.S.1 and the Center for Performance Research. She has been an artist in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the Physics Department at the University of Oregon. Her work has been featured in Time Out NY, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, PennSound, andthresholds (MIT Dept of Architecture). She holds teaching positions at Parsons, The New School for Design, SUNY Purchase, and Dia:Beacon.
Lewis Freedman lives in Madison where he co-organizes the reading series Oscar Presents with Anna Vitale, Andy Gricevich, and Jordan Dunn, and also prints and disseminates poetry chapbooks with a press he calls Anarchive. His most recent books are Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well Greased Press, 2013) and Solitude: The Complete Games (Troll Thread, 2013). Forthcoming are non-symbolic non-symbolic non-symbolic (Same Text) and Residual Synonyms for the Name of God(Ugly Duckling Presse).