The Evergreen State College
Jasper Bernes is author of a scholarly book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017), and two books of poetry, Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015). Essays, poems and other writings can be found in Critical Inquiry, Modern Language Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Endnotes, Lana Turner, The American Reader, and elsewhere. Together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions. He lives in Berkeley with his family.
Andrew Cutrofello is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of several books, including All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity (MIT, 2014) and Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2005). His interests include the nature of antinomies — apparent contradictions — and how these play out both in professional philosophy and in everyday life. He is also deeply interested in what T. S. Eliot called the varieties of metaphysical poetry.
Eirik Steinhoff teaches and co-teaches interdisciplinary programs with titles like “How to do things with words,” “Imperialisms,” “Forensics,” “A New Middle East,” “Literary Arts Toolkit,” “Words/Woods,” and “Gateways for Incarcerated Youth” at The Evergreen State College, where he has been a Visiting Member of the Faculty since 2013.
He has also taught courses on Shakespeare, Early Modern Poetry, critical theory, rhetoric, poetry, and poetics at the University of Chicago (where he got his Ph.D. in English), Bard College (where he got his B.A.), and Mills College.
In the early 21st century he was the editor of Chicago Review, and in 2009 his translations from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse appeared as Fourteen Sonnets from Albion Books (San Francisco).
In 2010 he taught at Green Haven Correctional Facility in NY state under the auspices of the Bard Prison Initiative, and in 2014 he co-facilitated a seminar with faculty at Al-Quds University in Palestine.
He co-edits Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, and he works with students and teachers behind bars in Washington state under the auspices of the Black Prisoner Caucus’s T.E.A.C.H. program (“Taking Education and Creating History”).
The bulk of his study in the classroom and beyond revolves around two questions: “What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?,” and “How do we make our knowledge common?”
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter, writer and teacher who grew up in Olympia, Washington (attended TESC), and participated in Riot Grrl in her formative years (the 1990s.) Now she is working and grocery shopping and taking walks in Connecticut with her girlfriend and dog. She is an autodidact who is opening her attention to pattern and repetition, difference, learning, feedback loops, nostalgia, dolls, Victorian collage and textiles, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Gees Bend quilts, the effects of soul lag on humans, high theory, low theory, kitsch, Modernism, affect theory, coloring crayons, tissue paper, the parergon, tactility, Elizabeth Bishop, the color of the light in the bare woods, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends, colleagues and strangers alongside whom she lives.
Also, she is a full time Lecturer in Yale School of Art, Department of Painting and Printmaking. She has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Program at ReMap in Athens, Greece, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany and many many others. In 2013, she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past year, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Indiana at Bloomington, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University, She is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC.
Anca Cristofovici was born in Bucharest. In 1985, she defected to France, where she is cur rently a professor of American literature and art. Her novel, Stela, was published by Ninebark Press (2016), and she is the author of two books of nonfiction, Touching Surfaces (Rodopi, 2009) and John Hawkes: L’enfant & le cannibale (Belin, 1997). She also co-edited The Art of Collaboration: Artists, Poets, Books (Cuneiform Press, 2015). Her poetry, prose, and translations have been published in Romanian, English, and French in Europe and the United States.
Michael Mejia is the author of the novels TOKYO and Forgetfulness, and his writing has been published in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Mejia is editor-in-chief of Western Humanities Review , co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, and a professor of creative writing at the University of Utah.
Robert Rhee is a collector of accidents, a rubbernecker. He is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and organizer of collaborative artist projects. He teaches in the interdisciplinary Foundations Program at Cornish College of the Arts.
In his work he pursues situations which are on the precipice of formlessness, where a system is engaged but not controlled. His studio work and writing shape each other as parallel practices. He uses time (duration) to move ideas back and forth between modes: a sculpture conceived like a story, a poem worked on with power tools.
He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. A selected list includes the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul, the Ferdinand Van Dieten Gallery in the Netherlands, the Arario Gallery, Dorsky Gallery for Curatorial Projects, Fisher-Landau Center for the Arts, and White Columns in New York.
His blog, robottree.com, was shortlisted for Creative Capital’s Arts Writers Grant and his writing has been published in art magazines and literary journals such as Art in America, Arcade, Monday: The Journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Heck, and La Norda, and Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters.
Kaia Sand is a poet, artist, and community organizer. She is author of three books of poetry—interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year; Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010); and A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (Tinfish Press 2016); and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008).
Sand works across genres and media, dislodging poetry from the book into more unconventional contexts. From 2013-2015, she served with Garrick Imatani as artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, responding to historical surveillance files on local political activists; and then she created textile art with street vendor Marcia Rodrigues Braga during her Despina International Artist Residency in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Much of her work has focused on economic injustice and homelessness, from a magic show she created about the financial collapse to the Right 2 Survive Ambassador Program she co-founded for housed people to learn from people experiencing homelessness.
She is the executive director of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and poverty as means of earning an income.
Heide Hatry grew up on a pig farm in the south of Germany. She left home at the age of 15 to enroll in a sports school. She studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg. She taught at a private art school for 15 years while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions and has shown her own work at museums and galleries around the world. She has produced about 200 artist’s books and edited more than two dozen books and art catalogues. Her book Skin was published by Kehrer, Heidelberg, in 2005, Heads and Tales and Not a Rose by Charta, Milan/New York in 2009 and 2012 and Icons in Ash by Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY in 2017.
Heide Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.
Sarah Jaquette Ray is an associate professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where she also leads the BA program in Environmental Studies.
She is author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2013), which considers ways in which environmental ideas have been used for purposes of social control and oppression in the U.S. She has co-edited two collections: Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory (University of Alaska Press) and Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (University of Nebraska Press), both published this year.
Ray is working on two new scholarly projects: a co-edited volume titled Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial, and a book that argues that environmental studies and science instructors need to take students’ emotions about climate change and social injustice seriously in the classroom: Coming of Age in the Anthropocene: Climate Justice Pedagogies and Affective Resilience. Her talk for this lecture series, “What Do the Arts and Humanities Have to Do with Our Environmental Crisis?” will focus on the important role that the arts and humanities play in addressing environmental problems.
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