Lynda Mapes is a newspaper reporter and author, an explorer and reveler in the natural world, native plants and species of every sort driven to go deep, look long, stay awhile. Mapes’ photos, journalism and books are the result of a lifelong fascination with the natural world and our connection to it. Mapes works from all five senses — and especially, the critical sixth: a sense of wonder.
Wednesday, October 20, Chris Martin is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Things to Do In Hell(Coffee House Press, 2020), and the recipient of grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He is the co-founder and executive director of Unrestricted Interest, an organization dedicated to helping neurodivergent learners transform their lives through writing. He lives in Minneapolis, where he professes at Hamline University and Carleton College. He will be joined by Sid Ghosh is a nonspeaking Autistic poet with Down Syndrome. He is a rebel in pursuit of other similar souls and he is interested in rescuing poets from the quiet clutches of rhyme. One of Sid’s essays has been published in the book Leaders Around Me. Sid’s first chapbook is forthcoming from Push Press.
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects, 2021); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex, 2016); The Quarry (Trafficker Press, 2013); The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2012); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007).
Her stories and essays have appeared in various publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Conjunctions, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to The Believer. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony. She was a co-founding editor of The Encyclopedia Project with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz and currently teaches at The Evergreen State College.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She currently lives and works in Thunder Bay, Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Her new book The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future is available from Pluto Press.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, “Someone’s Dead Already” was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His forthcoming book “Blood On The Fog” is being released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Simone Savannah is a writer, performer and teacher, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Uses of My Body (Barrow Street 2020) and Like Kansas (Big Lucks 2018). Simone earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas, her M.Ed. and B.A. from Ohio University.
Use this link to join Simone’s Zoom talk – https://zoom.us/j/92320967393
Anne de Marcken, former Greener! is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her credits include durational writing projects, hybrid narratives, short and feature-length films and site-specific installations. She approaches creative work as a process of critical inquiry, centering questions of impermanence, invisibility and the abject. She is author of the lyric novella The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and her writing has appeared in Best New American Voices, Ploughshares, Narrative, Entropy, on NPR’s Selected Shorts and elsewhere. Recent process-based installations include Hinterlands of Paris (2020), Paris Chopped & Screwed (2019), Invisible Ink: Homeless (2018), Invisible Ink: Reparations (2017) and The Redaction Project (2016). She is also known for the gender-queer experimental feature Group (2002). Anne is editor and publisher of The 3rd Thing, an independent press dedicated to intersectional, interdisciplinary work. You can see more about The 3rd Thing at https://the3rdthing.press.
Note: Anna Joy Springer will be rescheduled TBA
Anna Joy Springer is the author of “The Vicious Red Relic, Love” (Jaded Ibis, 2011), an illustrated fabulist memoir with soundscape by Rachel Carns and Tara Jane O’neil “Your Metaforest Guidebook”, as well as “The Birdwisher, A Murder Mystery for Very Old Young Adults” (Birds of Lace, 2009). Her work appears in zines, journals, anthologies, and recordings. An Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, Springer teaches experimental writing, feminist literature & graphic texts and also leads public meditation groups focusing on sensation, emotion, and imagination. She’s performed in punk and queercore bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow and toured the U.S. with the writers of Sister Spit.
Natasha Marin poses for a portrait on Friday, May 25, 2018, in Seattle. KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer
Natasha Marin is the curator of Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures (McSweeney’s, 2020). Marin is also a conceptual artist whose people-centered projects have circled the globe since 2012 and have been recognized and acknowledged by Art Forum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, NBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, PBS and others. In 2018, the City of Seattle and King County have backed BLACK IMAGINATION– a series of conceptual exhibitions—amplifying, centering, and holding sacred a diverse sample of voices including LGBTQIA+ black youth, incarcerated black women, black folks with disabilities, unsheltered black folks, and black children.
Her viral web-based project, Reparations, engaged a quarter of a million people worldwide in the practice of “leveraging privilege,” and earned Marin, a mother of two, death threats by the dozens. Find out more about her work online: Black-Imagination.com.
National Magazine Award finalist McKenzie Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. His first book, Windfall, won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon, and Amazon.com. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow and Open Society Fellow, he is a co-founder of the journalism cooperative Deca and a board member at Amplifier. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Lauren Levin is a poet, mixed-genre writer and art writer, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). With Emji Spero, they were developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zachary Ozma (Nightboat, 2019), and with Eric Sneathen, they are editing Camille Roy’s selected prose. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist, & the author of Agon, a forthcoming chapbook from EconoTextualObjects; The Easy Body, a love letter from hell that was published in 2017 by Timeless, Infinite Light; and PDF, a chapbook published by Solar Luxuriance in 2014. Their work, cutting across various materials and disciplines, has been shown & performed in the Los Angeles River, galleries, punk houses, plazas, and microcinemas across the U.S. They are currently working on a project interviewing activist Latinx youth in emergent Latinx communities across the United States; and an experimental documentary on the geography of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona in collaboration with their mother Vanessa Acosta. Born somewhere between here and Diriamba, Nicaragua, they were raised in the Huntington Park and Highland Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles and across the West Coast and Mexico; they’ve called California home for a significant part of their life. Tatiana now lives in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco.
