Contributors

Joe Amato’s recent books are Big Man with a Shovel (Steerage Press, 2011) and Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City (SUNY Press, 2009). His novel Samuel Taylor’s Last Night is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. With Kass Fleisher, he’s completed several award-winning screenplays, including a new screenplay, The Adjunct.

Asalott is a poet, composer, producer and solo performer who focuses on melodies for hammer dulcimer, piano, and quarto.

Elyse Brownell is a performance poet originally from Marquette, MI. She currently lives in Gunbarrel, CO, where she is earning her MFA in Writing & Poetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She has been published in several print and online journals and curates the monthly performance series Bouldering Poets.

David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr, is forthcoming from City Lights. Publications, writing & performance samples, and further info available via davidbuuck.com.

Melissa Buzzeo is the author of three full length books: What Began Us (Leon Works, 2007), Face (Bookthug, 2009) and For Want and Sound (Les Figues, 2012). Her current work Chasm explores negation, the legacy of performance art, and the concept of the social body. She has taught at Brown, Iowa, and Naropa and currently teaches at Pratt Institute. She lives in Brooklyn.

Gabrielle Civil is a black woman poet and conceptual and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. In November 2012, she performed “Fugue,” a meditation on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in the Pillsbury House Theater Late Nite Series in Minneapolis. In 2013, she will launch In & Out of Place: Making Black Feminist Performance Art in Mexico, a catalogue of her Fulbright-Garcìa Robles fellowship project, and will show work at the Yari Yari Ntoaso symposium in Accra, Ghana. She is currently circulating Swallow the Fish, her critical/creative text on performance art. The aim of her work is to open up space.

Ryan Clark, a native Texan, is a doctoral candidate at Illinois State University and a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In his poetry and scholarship, he is largely concerned with homophonic translation, the reparative potential of appropriative writing, and how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic or otherwise. His work has appeared in Fact-Simile, Monkey Puzzle, and Seven Corners and is forthcoming from Tenderloin.

Barbara Dilley studied and performed dance in New York City from 1960–1975 with the Merce Cunningham Company and the Grand Union, a dance/theater collaboration that extended the definitions of the art of improvisation. After moving to Naropa, Barbara designed the Dance/Movement Studies Program. She served as President of Naropa University from 1985–1993. Her teaching emphasizes “embodied awareness” through dance/movement studies, creative compositional processes, and the disciplines of meditation. Her recent dance and performance art includes dEsoLAtedEliGHt Project: 2008-09 and skits for Lady Wabi Sabi.

Marc Devine is a performer, educator, director, researcher, and multi-media designer.  Marc serves as a guest lecturer for Naropa University’s graduate and undergraduate performance programs.  Marc is also currently designing a multi-media art gallery installation for Naropa as well as developing a video design for the new play “Moons Over Jupiter” in collaboration with Jessica Litwack from Theater Without Borders. Marc has taught classes and workshops at Naropa University, California State University Los Angeles, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and The Actor’s Academy of the Performing Arts. Marc received his MFA in Contemporary Performance from Naropa University, his BFA from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and has studied at the Ithaca College London Center.  Marc currently resides in Denver, Colorado, where he continues to generate original work, educate, design, and continue his research concerning science and the creative process for publication.  

Patrick K. Durgin is the author of PQRS (Kenning Editions, 2013), Imitation Poems (2006), and The Route (Atelos, 2008, with Jen Hofer). Durgin is also editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House and The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner. His criticism appears in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Jacket2, Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Culture, and elsewhere. He teaches critical theory, literature, and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Among Kass Fleisher’s recent books are Dead Woman Hollow (SUNY Press, 2012) and Talking out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008). With Joe Amato, she’s completed several award-winning screenplays, including a new screenplay, The Adjunct. Fleisher is the founder and publisher of Steerage Press.

Paul Fowler is a composer, vocalist, improvising pianist, and electronic musician. Described by the New York Times as “radiant, ghostly, and shimmering,” his concert works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the National Concert Hall of Taiwan, and Norway’s Borealis Festival, among others. As a pianist, vocalist, and sideman, he’s performed across the country as well as at New Orleans JazzFest, Ecuador’s AquaZero Festival, and on Japanese television. Recent projects include a site-specific orchestral collaboration for NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, several choral works recorded by The Crossing for Navona Records, and his portrayal of “Guy” in The Catamounts’ production of “God’s Ear.” In addition, Fowler teaches private lessons, produces recordings for local artists, and teaches several courses at Naropa University.

Sue Hammond West is a painter who explores consciousness and the phenomenology of being. Her exhibitions include Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Beacon Street Gallery, Chicago; and University of Notre Dame Isis Gallery. Her art has appeared in Surface Design Journal, Shambhala Times, not enough night, and in the collaborative poetry book She, A Blueprint. Recipient of an NEA grant, Hammond West has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Steamboat Springs Mixed Media Painting School. Currently, she is associate professor of visual arts and director of the School of the Arts at Naropa University. Her work frequency spectrum is featured as the cover art for the first issue of Something on Paper.

Emily K. Harrison is the founder and producing artistic director of award-winning, Boulder-based square product theatre. She holds an MFA in Performance from the Savannah College of Art & Design, a PhD in Theatre from the University of Colorado, and a Bachelor’s in Acting and Writing from Emerson College. She serves as a lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Dance at CU-Boulder as well as in Naropa University’s School of the Arts and Core. Emily was recognized by The Denver Post as a 2011 Pathmaker, one of only seven individuals working in an arts field to receive the honor. She is currently featured as part of Westword’s 100 Colorado Creatives Series.

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is also the author or co-author of several books of poetry, including The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012), Saga/Circus (2008), The Fatalist (2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003), and A Border Comedy (2001). Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, Holland, China, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hejinian serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Katie Ingegneri is a writer from New England. She received a BA in Anthropology from McGill University and an MFA in Prose from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is a former editor of Bombay Gin and plans to launch her own online magazine, Delusory, in the near future.

Peter Jaeger’s published work includes the poetry collections Power Lawn (Coach House Books, 1999), Eckhart Cars (Salt, 2004), Prop (Salt, 2007), Rapid Eye Movement (Reality Street Editions, 2009), and The Persons (Information as Material, 2011), as well as the critical study ABC of Reading TRG: Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, and the Toronto Research Group (Talonbooks, 2000). Writing by Jaeger has appeared in Performance Research, West Coast Line, Sulfur, the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and numerous other journals. A new book, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, is set to be published by Continuum Press in 2013.

Bhanu Kapil teaches writing through memory, prose, and the monster at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the author of four full-length works of experimental writing, most recently Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011) and Notes for a novel never written: Ban. Since 2011, she has been performing compound scenes from [for] Ban in venues within and beyond the U.S.

Brenna Lee is a feminist hybrid writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the co-director of transmedia outlet Blooming Plants and an Editor of Gesture: Press & Journal, where she curates the 666 Interview Series. Her work has recently appeared in Bombay Gin, The Body Electric Anthology, and Jupiter 88 and is forthcoming in Upstairs at Duroc. Her book, The Scout of Sleep, was a semi finalist for the 2013 Gatewood Prize.

Diana K. McLean earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University in 2009 and is the founder and editor of Poetic Justice, a forum for writing on social justice topics. She writes everything from poems to a parenting column (in its ninth year) to sermons. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies, small journals, and not enough night. She has also written book reviews for Inquiring Mind and Bombay Gin. She is currently a Master of Divinity student at Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

Rachel Newlon is an alumnus of Naropa University.  She received her MFA in Creative Writing in July 2013.  Rachel holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Metropolitan State University (2010) and an Associate of Applied Science Degree in Early Childhood Education from Front Range Community College (1998). She has been published online (Thirteen Myna Birds, Big River Poetry Review, Horse Less Press, Cactus Heart, Foliate Oak Literary Journal, OVS) as well as in print (A Poet’s View of Being, Erasure, Bombay Gin, Volta, OVS, Up The River). She interviewed Richard Froude on Fabric and Suzanne Scanlon on Promising Young Women. For the past 18 years she has had the pleasure of being married to her best friend/husband, Mike, and raising three teenage boys.  Rachel currently works as an Adjunct English Faculty member at the Community College of Aurora teaching English Composition I and College Composition and Reading.  She hopes to eventually teach Early Childhood Courses at CCA as well.

Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Culture of One and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many prizes and awards, including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

JH Phrydas is an MFA candidate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He was the recipient of the first annual Anne Waldman Fellowship and Endeavor Foundation for the Arts Scholarship in 2012. Jason grew up in Atlanta and spent the last ten years living, writing, and bartending in the Bay Area. He is the founder of Fair Warning! Press and co-founder and editor of TRACT / TRACE: an investigative journal. Phrydas has been published in Gesture Literary Journal and Bombay Gin and has forthcoming work in Berkeley Poetry Review.

Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of eight titles, including Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham, 2012), awarded the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. Pierce is an associate professor and the director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Kyle Pivarnik is a multi-media artist, musician, and writer. His film collaborations with Michelle Naka Pierce have been shown at the Co-Kisser Film Festival at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Lex-ICON conference in Mulhouse, France. His writing has been featured in Boston Literary Magazine and Bombay Gin. He is the founder of Literary Libations, a multi-media press.

A migratory mammal, Janna Plant currently resides on the island of Manhattan, although she has been known to forage on the plains east of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. For many years, she secured shelter by sharing her days with horses in Kahuku, Hawaii. She was born in Santa Monica and, after her 18th year, spent 11 moons breathing in Tucson and learning how to starve. Recent work:  The Refinery (Blazevox) and selections in Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawaii (Tinfish). She received her MFA from the Jack Kerouac School.

Chris Pusateri is the author of ten books of poetry, including Common Time (Steerage Press, 2012), Molecularity (Dusie, 2011) and Anon (BlazeVOX, 2008). His poetry and reviews have appeared in many periodicals in the US and abroad, including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Poetry Wales, Verse, and others. A librarian by trade, he works in Denver, Colorado.

Joan Retallack’s Procedural Elegies  / Western Civ Cont’d /(Roof) was an ARTFORUM best book of 2010. Other poetry includes Memnoir, MONGRELISME, How To Do Things With Words, and Afterrimages. Retallack wrote the introduction for the new (2012) Yale edition of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. Her book on ethics and aesthetics, The Poethical Wager, and her Gertrude Stein: Selections are both from University of California Press. She is the author of MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, which received the 1996 America Award in Belles-Lettres. Currently at work on a volume of prose poetics entitled “The Bosch Bookshelf,” Retallack is The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College and lives in the Hudson River Valley in New York.

Andrea Rexilius is the author of Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012) and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011). For three years she was an editor of the Denver Quarterly. She has worked with elementary and high school students as a program coordinator and poetry instructor for Writers in the Schools, America Scores, and After School Matters, and has taught literature and creative writing at Regis University and University of Denver. She currently teaches BA & MFA courses at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she also coordinates the JKS Summer Writing Program. She is a member of the Poets’ Theater group, GASP (Girls Assembling Something Perpetual). With Eric Baus, she co-edits Marcel Press.

A Colorado native, Sarah Richards Graba has been living, writing, and teaching in the Boulder area all her life; despite falling in love with many locales while traveling, she never plans on living anywhere than under the shade of the Rockies. She graduated with a BA in English creative writing from CU-Boulder and spent five years teaching language arts, creative writing, and journalism on the high school level. Now an MFA candidate in the Writing and Poetics program at the Jack Kerouac School, she is currently investigating identity through hybridity, memoir/anti-memoir, territory, and body writing.

After living in New York City for a number of years dancing, taking class, and performing with amazing artists from the downtown dance scene, Joanna Rotkin moved back to her native state of Colorado to form TinHOUSE Experimental Dance Theatre (TEDT), where she is currently collaborating with Laura Ann Samuelson. TEDT’s most recent work, Let Them Eat Cake, was performed at the Boulder Fringe Festival and received the Encore Award. Joanna teaches contemporary dance, improvisation, and composition at Naropa University and the University of Colorado in the Libby Residential Academic Program. She also coordinates and teaches intergenerational dance programs at local schools and community centers. She holds an MFA in Contemporary Performance from Bennington College and a BFA in Dance and Improvisation from Prescott College.

Joanna Ruocco co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn. She is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press), and Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2). Toni Jones, her more athletic alter ego, just released her first novel, No Secrets in Spandex, from Crimson Romance.

Ariella Ruth is a poet from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA in Poetry from The New School and her MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She is the co-founder of Roots + Limbs Press and writes story-poems on the blog Mountain Lost in the Palm. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Other Rooms Press, Epiphany, The Pulchritudinous Review, Bombay Gin, Esque Magazine, CA Conrad’s video journal Jupiter 88, and Eleven and a Half Journal.

Robert Spellman is a working artist and teacher currently living in Boulder, Colorado. He is on the Visual Arts, Religious Studies, and Graduate Performance Studies faculty of Naropa University, teaching studio classes, meditation, and the vast overlap between the two. He has twice been invited to the Cill Rialaig artists’ retreat in Co. Kerry, Ireland, where in June of 2007 he participated in the Art Lecturers at Cill Rialaig program. During a recent sabbatical, he was in India to give drawing lessons to the Tibetan meditation master and filmmaker Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu. Earlier this year, he had solo exhibitions at both the Garrison Institute in New York and at the Denver Botanic Gardens. See more of his work at Art + Soul Gallery in Boulder or visit his web site www.robertspellman.com.

Kirstin Wagner has an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington. When she is not voraciously reading rhetorical theory, writing creative ethnography, or teaching Public Oral Communication to enthused undergraduates, she prefers to spend her time in the kitchen trying out new dessert recipes or on the bike trails getting as muddy as possible.

Amy Wright is the Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press and Zone 3 journal. Her work appears in Drunken Boat, Brevity, Quarterly West, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV: Tennessee.

Kate Zipse comes from rainy Portland, Oregon. She recently completed her MA in Religious Studies from Naropa University and is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.