Contributors

Liz Acosta is a visual artist living in Boulder, CO. She holds a BFA in Drawing & Painting from Northern Illinois University and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College. She is currently the Senior Administrator for Naropa University’s School of the Arts and also serves as Adjunct Faculty in the Visual Arts Department. Her work has been exhibited in Boulder, Chicago, and New York where she also taught classes on Art as Meditation inspired by the writings of theologian, Matthew Fox.

Elena Berriolo is a New York based artist who has exhibited internationally. Since 2009, she has made a commitment of working exclusively in the book format and performing while producing books. Among her performances is her 2015 “A Book as a Bridge”, a performance producing a book with sewing machine in the New York City subway. Her work appears in a number of public collections, including La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Smith College, University of Delaware, Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Herzogh August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (Germany), and Museo Pecci, Prato (Italy) among others.

Teresa Carmody‘s books include Maison Femme: a fiction and the short story collection Requiem. Additional work has appeared in The Collagist, Two Serious Ladies, Faultline, Entropy, Anomalous 11, and more; her translation of a story by Gabriela Torres Olivares was recently published in Web Conjunctions. Carmody is co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles and a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Jill Darling is the author of a geography of syntax (forthcoming, Lavender Ink), Solve For (BlazeVOX, ebooks) and begin with may: a series of moments (Finishing Line Press). She’s also had work published in journals including  /NOR, Aufgabe, 580 Split, Quarter After Eight, Phoebe, factorial, Horse Less Review, Denver Quarterly, and Two Serious Ladies. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State and a Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture from Wayne State. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Dearborn. See more at jilldarling.com.

Richard Froude was born in London in 1979, grew up in Bristol, and came to the US in 2002. He has written three books: FABRIC (Horse Less Press, 2011), The Passenger (Skylight Press, 2012) and Tarnished Mirrors: Translations of Charles Baudelaire (Muffled Cry Editions, 2004). His writing has appeared in print and online in a wide variety of publications including Conjunctions, Witness, Diagram, Tarpaulin Sky, Bombay Gin, Birkensnake and many others. He has read and performed his work widely – including appearances on public radio in California, Oregon, and Colorado. Last year, his work was included in the Modern Masters exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. He holds an MFA from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School, a PhD in English from the University of Denver as the 2010-11 Evan Frankel Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2013 Wabash Prize for Nonfiction. He teaches MFA students in the Naropa Summer Writing Program as well as year-round classes in nonfiction and experimental forms at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife Rohini and their son Arjun, and is a medical student at the University of Colorado.

Lisa Jarnot has edited two small magazines (No Trees, 1987-1990, and Troubled Surfer, 1991-1992) as well as The Poetry Project Newsletter and An Anthology of New (American) Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 1997). She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003) and Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was published by the University of California Press in 2012 and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction, and received Honorable Mention in Literature from American Publishers Awards program. A Selected Poems was published by City Lights in May of 2013. She currently lives in Jackson Heights, New York with her husband and daughter. She works as a teacher, writer, and freelance gardener and is a founding member of the Central Park Forest Nursery.

Jan Johnson is an artist/academic who uses thread to make line and build embroidered surfaces of place and narrative.  She also uses thread as a material in interactive performances.  This year as a Fulbright Scholar at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee, she works with the MFA Art & Humanities students and is conducting practice-based research of Scottish embroidery’s historic roots and “subversive” past uses whilst also examining its material culture in her project On Stitching in Scotland: Stories, Schemes and Contingencies of a Gendered Material Practice. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and teaches drawing and printmaking at Clark University.  This summer in Scotland, she looks forward to organizing a group from the US to participate in a month-long creative intensive in the landscape and studios.

Kevin Killian, one of the original “New Narrative” writers, has written three novels, a book of memoirs, four books of stories, and three books of poetry.  For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written forty-five plays, and the anthology he compiled with David Brazil—The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985—is the standard book on the subject.  Recent projects include Tagged, Killian’s nude photographs of poets, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and intellectuals; and forthcoming, with Dodie Bellamy, The Nightboat Anthology of New Narrative Writing. 

Tyler Lyman is a writer hailing from the Hudson Valley, New York. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in writing and literature from the Jack Kerouac School in the Spring of 2015. Since graduation, he has edited the JKS 40^th anniversary Summer Writing Program magazine, written for the online journal Something on Paper, and worked as a teaching artist with the Boulder Writing Studio, local high schools and retirement homes. Tyler is also a founding editor and curator of The New Independents, a radically creative community aimed at mobilizing artistic youth by publishing magazines, hosting music events, and providing other outlets for new voices to emerge and be heard.

Jill Magi is an artist, writer, and educator working in text, image, and textile. She is the author of over five books, the most recent of which is LABOR (Nightboat 2014). In spring 2015 Jill wrote weekly for Jacket2 on “a textile poetics,” and other recent essays have appeared in The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-garde, The Racial Imaginary, and The Eco-Language Reader. She has held residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Textile Arts Center Brooklyn, and has exhibited visual work at apexart, Pace University, the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery, and Arcade Six Gallery Columbia College. The New York University Abu Dhabi Project Space gallery mounted a solo exhibition of her work in 2015. She teaches textiles, poetry, and art electives at NYUAD where she joined the faculty in 2013.

Rachel May is the author of The Experiments: A Legend in Pictures and Words (Dusie Press), The Benedictines (Braddock Avenue Press), and Quilting with a Modern Slant (Storey/Workman), a 2014 Library Journal and Amazon Best Book of the Year. She’s an Assistant Professor at Northern Michigan University.

Laura McCullough’s essays, memoirs, stories, and poetry have appeared widely in places such as in The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Chronicle, and others. Her recent books include Jersey Mercy (poems, spring 2016, Black Lawrence Press), an edited anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press, 2015), and Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP).  Her previous books include Panic (Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press), and the anthology The Room and the World: Essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poem, “There Were Only Dandelions” was selected by Sherman Alexi for Best American Poetry, 2015. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ, she is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA, and she has taught for Ramapo College and Stockton University. She teaches for the Stockton University Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway. Visit her at http://www.lauramccullough.org/.

Miranda Mellis was raised in San Francisco. She is the author of Demystifications (2016); The Quarry (2013); The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); Materialisms (2009); and The Revisionist (2007). Her stories and essays have appeared in various publications over the years, most recently Conjunctions and Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, Vol.1. Mellis co-founded and edits The Encyclopedia Project, now in its final volume. She has been awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael J. Harper Praxis Prize, and residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. An adjunct for a decade, she taught at nine different colleges, including Mills College and California College of the Arts, before acquiring her current full-time position at The Evergreen State College which has no requirements, no majors, no departments, and no grades. She is a member of the faculty union and team teaches in inquiry-driven classes that bring together scholars and practitioners in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Matthew Pincus earned an MFA from Naropa University and has written reviews for Bookslut, RainTaxi, Pank, and The Volta365 Blog. His writing has also appeared in Coldfront, and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in literary studies at UL Lafayette.

Jai Arun Ravine is writer, dancer, and graphic designer. As a mixed race, mixed gender, and mixed genre artist, their work arises from the simultaneity of text and body and takes the form of video, performance, comics, and handmade books. Jai’s first full-length book, แล้ว AND THEN ENTWINE: LESSON PLANS, POEMS, KNOTS, re-imagines immigration history and attempts to transform cultural inheritances of silence. Their short film TOM/TRANS/THAI approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity in the Thai context and has screened internationally. Their second book, THE ROMANCE OF SIAM, is forthcoming from Timeless, Infinite Light in 2016.

Andrea Rexilius’ publications include three books of poetry: New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Seance (Coconut Books, 2014), and To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010). A member of the Poets Theater group, GASP (Girls Assembling Something Perpetual), she has performed in plays by Gertrude Stein, Leslie Scalapino, and Alice Notley. With Eric Baus, she co-edits Marcel Press (formerly PARCEL journal & Minus House).   From 2013-2014 she was the Faculty Editor of the Bombay Gin literary journal, from 2008-2010 she was the Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly and from 2001-2002 she was the Poetry Editor of the literary magazine, Zaum. From 2012-2015 she was an Assistant Professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she was also the Faculty Director of the Summer Writing Program, the co-founder and co-curator of the biennial [Dis]Embodied Poetics Conference, and the co-curator of the What/Where Reading Series. She currently works as a Program Coordinator and Faculty Mentor for the Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing at Regis University.

Caroline Swanson is a poet and writer from Sacramento, CA where she did social media for the Sacramento Poetry Center and volunteered as a poetry mentor to at-risk youth for Real Poets. She moved to Boulder, CO in August 2014 to work on her MFA at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she is also an editor for Bombay Gin. She has edited literary magazines for ten years and has specific interest in eroticism, performance, translation, and mythopoesis. She is currently working on a poetry chapbook and a memoir centered around Iceland.

Cait Turner is in her final semester at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poetics, where she also teaches First Year Writing. She loves jazz and cats.

Jennifer van Alstyne has been published in the Eunoia Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, The Monmouth Review, The Foundling Review, Paper Nautilus, Poetry Quarterly, and Whiskey Traveler. Her collection, Scansioned Music: A Glenn Gould Collection, was published by Crossroads in 2013 for which she was the winner of the Jane Freed Grant. She holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School.

Dorothy Wang is the author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014), which won the Association for Asian American Studies’ award for best book of literary criticism published in 2014 and Honorable Mention in the first Pegasus Awards for Poetry Criticism given by the Poetry Foundation. Her book was an eponymous inspiration for the first conference on race and creative writing (held at the University of Montana), founded by the poet Prageeta Sharma. In March of 2015, Wang curated a widely read online symposium “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde” in Boston Review. Both Thinking Its Presence and the Boston Review symposium helped catalyze intense debates on race and poetry in the past year. Wang teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Matt Wedlock is a journeyman letterpress printer, adjunct professor, hedge witch, son of no man, father to Shae & partner of Kristen. He is the founder of the letterpress shop Salient Tooth Press. His publications have recently appeared in the anthology The Body Electric. Wedlock lives in Wickford, Rhode Island, and currently teaches Literature at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Karolina Zapal‘s writing interests include exploring the particulars of a childhood in Poland, which was, at the time, in the shadows of Soviet control, as well as digging into the nature/nurture debate. She has studied molecular and cellular biology and creative writing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she won grand prize in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards in 2015. She is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she was awarded the Anselm Hollo fellowship. Her writing has appeared in The Birds We Piled Loosely and her reviews in Galatea Resurrects.