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.
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.
