Steven Hendricks, writer, educator (Evergreen professor) on his second novel, Now Beacon, Now Sea
“Now Beacon, Now Sea grew from my interest in writing about Samuel Beckett. The title comes from his novel Molloy: “Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.” I began with a conventional concept for a biographical novel, but I knew that form wouldn’t hold my interest in the long run, and more importantly, I knew that Beckett himself was squeamish about his life and work being overly connected. Ironically, he very much enjoyed knowing about the lives of the authors he admired, and he often made allusion to the idea that the keys to understanding his work lay in the works of others. Among those others, one of the foremost is Dante. So that’s where I began.”
Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (2024), a book of linked critical lyric essays; Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a poetry collection. Her writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, Best American Experimental Writing, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, Kitchen Table Translation, The Encyclopedia Project, Open Space (SFMOMA), NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards, Datableed, ecopoetics, and elsewhere. In recent years she has given talks on poetry and psychotherapy at the University of Plymouth; on poetics and experimental ethnography at the University of Texas, Austin; on “outsider writing” at the University of Chicago; and on translation and healing at the Paros Symposium in Greece. Stecopoulos holds a PhD in literature and an MFA in creative writing. She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor and mentor. From New York, she lives in Northern California.
Stefan Bird-Pollan is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. He is interested in ethical theories; his first book, Hegel, Freud and Fanon; the Dialectic of Emancipation shows how Fanon’s view of the subject preserves insights of enlightenment while steering clear of racial prejudices which are endemic in European and American society. He is currently working on a book in which he develops an account of Kant’s ethical theory. His second project concerns the metapsychological type of voters who are attracted to different kinds of authoritarian rule. In addition, Stefan is working on several articles on Hegel, both his aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. He has published articles in numerous journals, including Radical Philosophy, Critical Horizons, Philosophy and Social Criticism and Public Reason. Stefan earned his D.Phi from Oxford in 2003 and his PhD from Vanderbilt in 2008.
Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is an artist and scholar with transdisciplinary engagements informed by fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s work represents the liberatory potential (right to the city) and neoliberal revanchism (displacement, punitive laws) of urban experience. In artwork she has dwelled upon eviction (“How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933-1999,” 2016-17); cities destroyed by war (“The City in Her Desolation,” 2017) and natural disasters (“Cities of God” series 2021-22), and protests against injustices enacted in cities (“Washington D.C., 1939; Basel, 1957; Berkeley, 1969; Chicago, 1969; London, 1969; Windsor, 1982…,” 2015-2018). While often sculptural, her work increasingly cites the form and history of photography, especially photography’s role in constituting and deconstructing historical narratives online and in physical archives. Modigliani visual artworks are complemented and informed by her academic writing about photography and landscape (Engendering an avant garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, 2018), and public sculpture (Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action (in press with Routledge, 2023).
Modigliani’s visual work has been exhibited at many galleries and museums including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum (Philadelphia), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville, ME), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). Her critical writing can be found in academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Mapping Meaning the Journal, Anarchist Studies, Prefix Photo, Art Criticism and C Magazine.Her book, Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, was published by Manchester University Press’s Rethinking Art’s Histories series in 2018. Her second book, Counter-Revanchist Art in the Global City will be published by Routledge in 2023.
PLEASE NOTE: Malcolm requests that each audience participant come prepared with a phone or laptop device and headphones for an audio experience he will provide in the first half-hour of the lecture.
Malcolm Peacock is an artist living and working in New Orleans, LA. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines emotional and psychic spaces of Black subjects. Peacock is particularly interested in the intricacies of intimacy. “Malcolm Peacock’s art considers the affective landscape of interactive work and the powerful choreographies of small group interactions.” He has shown with Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York, Terrault Contemporary, Baltimore, and Rose Arcade, Baltimore. Select exhibits include Prospect 5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans; Doing Language: Word Work, Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. He has been a participant in residencies at The University of Pennsylvania, St. Roch Community Church, Denniston Hill, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, in 2016, and an MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2019.
Vuslat D. Katsanis is a scholar of comparative literature, film, and visual culture with a focus on Turkish and global migrant cultural productions and critical theory since 1989. Currently a professor in the Literary Arts and Studies path of study at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, Katsanis is also the cofounder of MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (MPAC), an independently-run curatorial project and research space in Zurich, Switzerland. She has published essays on the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin, translated a number of short fiction and poetry between Turkish and English, coedited a volume on teaching writing, and together with MPAC, curated several contemporary multimedia art exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California with upcoming programming in Switzerland and Türkiye. Katsanis holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine, with a certificate of emphasis in Critical Theory and a M.A. in Visual Studies.
In this panel, Katsanis will join artist and MPAC cofounder Ilknur Demirkoparan in conversation with Suriname-based filmmaker, Keoni K. Wright, and the American painter, Charles Edward Williams, with whom she is co-curating Play, a multimedia contemporary art exhibition opening on June 9, 2023, in Zurich. The panelists will discuss their individual art practices as well as their collective outlook toward the future through a shared interest in worldmaking and joy. The “play” theme is inspired by the historical role of artist-run initiatives for refugee artists during the first two world wars, and specifically, the playhouse that the Dadaists established in Zurich to sustain hope amidst a fury of political and social upheavals.
Mark Alice Durant is an artist, writer, and publisher living in Baltimore. He is author of Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History, and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal. His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs, monographs, and anthologies including Rania Matar: She, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, and Vik Muniz Seeing is Believing. He has served on the faculties of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University, and the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Currently he teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland and is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, recently out from Coffee House Press. Their other books include 〇 (Ugly Duckling Presse), Airport Novella(Troll Thread), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. In 2015, Royal Nonesuch Gallery installed these books in a multimedia exhibition containing drawings, video, vinyl window installation, and a sound poetry computer program. Comitta’s fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature,The Los Angeles Review of Books,The Kenyon Review, BOMB,Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and BAX:Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.
Elizabeth Chin is an anthropologist and ethnographer with a varied practice that includes performative scholarship, collaborative research, vernacular electronics, and experimental writing. Chin’s work interrogates race and racism with fieldwork in the US and Haiti. Currently Chin is Editor in Chief of American Anthropologist. Her work includes My Life With Things: The Consumer Diaries, published in 2016
Sean Negus is a writer and artist who works in the expanded field of poetics. In addition to a book of poems published bilingually in Portuguese and English, Hurricane Music, he has also published an artist book in limited edition, Congeries. Transmedia projects of his have explored forms of visuality, performativity, and collaboration. As a translator and editor of contemporary Brazilian and Portuguese poetry they have edited, Saccades as well as DUSIE 21. Professor in Writing and Literature and also Critical Studies at both California College of the Arts and Santa Clara University, their current work inquiring archival poetics has been recently exhibited in publications by the Goethe-Institute and Tasaworat Collective.
