Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher and anti-prison activist. Much of her creative work attempts to investigate state regimes of force and power, as well as individual and collective resistance strategies to the same. Her poetry book, ]Exclosures[, was just released from AEmily AbendrothPress this May. Her works are often published in limited edition, handcrafted chapbooks by small and micropresses such as Belladonna (New York), Horse Less Press (Denver), Little Red Leaves (Texas), Albion Press (Philadelphia), and Zumbar Press (San Francisco). She is an active organizer with Decarcerate PA (a grassroots campaign working to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania) and is co-founder of Address This! (an education and empowerment project that provides innovative, social justice correspondence courses to individuals incarcerated in Pennsylvania).
CAConrad is the author of seven books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of fiction-essays focused on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art. Archival research, montage and collage and various forms of retelling and reenactment feature prominently in both her creative and critical practice. She is co-editor and publisher of the cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, and nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. She recently completed a year-long reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Black Clock, Bombay Gin, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, The Reanimation Library’s Word Processor Series, and Viz, as well as in the catalogues and exhibits for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Cauleen Smith. A board member for the newly inaugurated Thinking Its Presence: Race & Creative Writing annual conference, Tisa Bryant fiction and hybrid forms in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, where she also serves as Interim Co-Director of Equity & Diversity. She lives in Los Angeles.
Juliana Spahr is a poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response. Her most recent book is the novel, An Army of Lovers, written with David Buuck and published by City Lights. Her many titles include,Well Then There Now, The Transformation,This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, and Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. With Jena Osman, Spahr edits the book series Chain Links, and with nineteen other poets she edits the collectively funded Subpress. The editor of numerous critical anthologies, she teaches at Mills College.
David Buuck is a writer and teacher who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. From 2003-08 he was associate editor at Artweek, and from 2007-11, the President of the Board of Directors of Small Press Traffic, a literary nonprofit in San Francisco, where he also co-curated the annual Poets Theater festival. The Shunt, a book of poetry about the Bush years, was published in 2009 by Palm Press and was named on several year-end top tens lists at Attention Span. Site Cite City, a collection of cross-genre prose works about the Bay Area, will be published by Futurepoem in 2014. His site-specific, multi-media art project BARGE was featured in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “Bay Area Now” biennial in 2008, and he was awarded the first ever Visual and Cultural Criticism Residency at Mission 17 Gallery in San Francisco. He is also an occasional performer, musician, and dancer, having performed in several venues in the US and more recently as part of Abby Crain’s LOOK dance and performance company.
Autumn Womack received her PhD from Columbia University where her research focused on 19th and early twentieth century African American literary culture. At Columbia she developed a rich interest in archival practices, visual studies, black print culture, and social science. As an Assistant Professor in The University of Pittsburgh’s English Department, Autumn continues to explore these topics in her current book project, Social Document Fictions, which uncovers a small genre of literature published between 1890 and 1928, looking in particular at writers deployed formally experimental and generically hybrid texts to advance social scientific epistemologies that uncover archives and social bodies that remain opaque to normative visual techniques. Her lecture today is drawn from the final chapter of this book in which she reads Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic films as articulating an epistemology of black inaccessibility, which comes to define her late 1920s writing.
Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to digital humanities and aesthetics, visual forms of knowledge production, book history and future designs, graphic design, historiography of the alphabet and writing, and contemporary art.
Her most recent titles include the jointly authored Digital_Humanities (MIT, 2012) with Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp; Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson Prentice Hall) with Emily McVarish, and SpecLab: Projects in Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009).
A collection of her essays, What Is? is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press and Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production is in production with Harvard University Press as part of their new MetaLab series on the impact of digital humanities and design.
Evergreen is honored to host Selected Druckworks, January through March at the Evergreen Gallery, which surveys Drucker’s books, graphic art and visual projects, revealing key insights into the artist’s development over the course of four decades. It is a smaller version of Drucker’s 40-year retrospective exhibition, Druckworks, which is currently touring the country.
In addition to her academic work, Drucker has produced artists books and projects that are the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, that began at Columbia College in Chicago and has been travelling. Her artist’s books are represented in museum and library collections throughout the United States and Europe.
Naima Lowe is a 34 year old Queer, African-American artist and educator based in Olympia, WA. Her films, videos, performances and writings have been seen at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, The Knitting Factory, The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific Islander Experience, The Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, The International Toy Theater Exhibition, and Judson Memorial Church.
Her first film “Birthmarks” was a Student Academy Awards Finalist, won Best Experimental Film at the Newark Black Film Festival and was honored for Best Sound Design in the NextFrame International Student Film Festival. Her collaborative performance and installation Mary and Sarah and You and Me made its New York debut at the historic Judson Memorial Church.
Naima has been recently working with letterpress printing, hand made 16mm film, and other forms of archaic producible visual media. Her 40 page, limited edition, looseleaf book Thirty-Nine (39) Questions for WHITE PEOPLE was shown at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle from May-November 2013.
A former NEA Fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of four books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda Award-winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses. He’s also published seven chapbooks, most recently Helplessness, [ black sun crown ], and SORE EROS. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Ashley Hunt is an artist and activist who uses video, photography, mapping and writing to engage social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. Among his interests are structures that allow people to accumulate power and those which keep others from getting power, while learning from the ways people come to know, respond to and conceive of themselves within these structures. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as complimentary, drawing upon the ideas of social movements and cultural theory alike — the theorizing and practices of each informing the other. This has included investigations into the prison, the demise of welfare state institutions, war and disaster capitalism, documentary representations and political activism. His recent performance, Notes on the Emptying of a City, explores the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera in the months following Hurricane Katrina, when he engaged with community activists to research the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison. Other projects include a number of works included under the umbrella of The Corrections Documentary Project (www.correctionsproject.com), which centers around the contemporary growth of prisons and their centrality to today’s economic restructuring and the politics of race; 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, a collaboration with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sanderand David Thorne, and an ongoing collaboration wtih Taisha Paggett, On Movement, Thought and Politics.
Hunt’s work has been screened and exhibited at the P.S.1/MOMA, Project Row Houses, Documenta 12,the Gallery at REDCAT, Nottingham Contemporary, the 3rd Bucharest Bienial, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, as well as numerous grassroots and community based venues throughout the U.S.
Writings and publication include, Printed Project 12 (’09), the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (‘08, ‘07& ‘05), On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader (BAK ’08), Art Journal (‘07), Chto Delat (‘07), Rethinking Marxism (‘06), and at Artwurl.org (‘03–‘05), and Sandbox Magazine (‘02) .
For more than a decade, solo performer Stokley Towles has been studying us. He examines the mundane aspects of life in Seattle like an anthropologist from another planet–our libraries, our trash system, our police force, the history of a single city block–and delivers his findings in rich, understated monologues full of bizarre, colorful trivia and bittersweet observations about how people navigate the world and each other. His latest study, Stormwater, is about the rivers that run beneath our feet. — Brendan Kiley, The Stranger Weekly
