Contributors

Charles Alexander is an artist, poet, bookmaker, professor, and founder/director of Chax Press. Author of 6 full-length books of poetry and 13 brief chapbooks of poetry, editor of one critical work on the state of the book arts in America, author of multiple essays, articles, and reviews. Most recent books of poetry are AT the Edge OF the Sea: Pushing Water II (Singing Horse Press), Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press), and the chapbooks Some Sentences Look for Some Periods, and Two Pushing Waters, both from Little Red Leaves Textile Series. Pushing Water III is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press. Has taught literature and writing at Naropa University, University of Arizona, and elsewhere, including the University of Houston-Victoria, where he directed the MFA Creative Writing Program and managed the UHV Center for the Arts from 2014 through 2018. He is a past recipient of the Arizona Arts Award, and has participated in the TAMAAS Poetry Translation Project in Paris, the US Poets in Mexico program, and the 7th and 8th International Chinese/American Poetry & Poetics Conferences in Wuhan and Hangzhou, China. In April 2019 he was a keynote speaker and lecturer in the Swan Shakespeare Lecture series sponsored by Southwest University in Chongqing, China. In the works is a Selected Poems, translated into Mandarin Chinese by Chen Du, to be published in China. During the pandemic year he has developed and participated in various projects (reading series, poetry videos, YouTube poetry channels, virtual conferences, virtual poetry marathons, etc.) for our more and more virtual participation in poetry & poetics, and he would love nothing better than to simply go to a live poetry reading again, somewhere in this loved world. In June 2021 he received the the Lord Nose Award for outstanding lifetime achievement in literary publishing. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, the painter Cynthia Miller. 

Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022), according to David Woo (Writing for the Poetry Foundation), “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Her other books with Wesleyan include Partly: New and Selected Poems, Just Saying, Money Shot and Versed. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics, Armantrout is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A new book, Go Figure, will appear from Wesleyan in September,2024.  Notice, a chapbook focused on the effects of climate change, has just come out from Wesleyan in February 2024.

Jane Augustine is a poet, critic, short story writer, visual/sound poetry performance artist and scholar of women in modernity. She has written five books of poetry, most recently High Desert (Dos Madres Press, 2019) and Krazy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2015). She is also the editor of The Mystery by H.D. (University Press of Florida, 2009) and The Gift: The Complete Text by H.D. (University Press of Florida, 1998), as well as numerous essays on H.D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker and contemporary women poets. She has twice been awarded fellowships in poetry from the New York State Council on the Arts and has held the H.D. Fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She has taught at Pratt Institute, New York University, The New School, and Naropa University. She lives in Manhattan and Westcliffe, Colorado.

Chris Barras is a poet living in Cumbria, experimenting with different poetic forms and styles. With a loose approach to grammatical structure and punctuation, he allows words to find unexpected, fresh resonance in his poetic texts. His work has been published in Hope is a Group Project (Wee Sparrow Press), Littoral Magazine (Spring & Autumn Equinox editions, Littoral Press UK), and his poetry in response to the exhibitions Heart of Glass and Home Coming: Cumbrian Artists and Makers has been exhibited at the Florence Arts Centre (Cumbria UK). Currently, he is exploring new hybrid poetic work in word, text and image in collaboration with small groups of other poets.

Doris Bloom is a Danish multi-media artist born in South Africa in 1954. She has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries, and is represented in public collections. Conceptually, her work often focuses on interactive collaboration with other artists. In 2003/04 she curated the exhibition “Sted/Place” at three significant museums in Denmark and South Africa. She represented Denmark at the International Cairo Biennale 1993 and the Johannesburg Africus Biennale 1995 with "Memory & Geography" in collaboration with William Kentridge. More recently, in 2015, her multi-media video performance "Macguffin" with Cuban sound artist Lazara Rosell Albear was shown at the London Tate Modern; and in 2019/20 she exhibited with Grzegorz Wroblewski at the Muzeum Literatury in Warsaw. Bloom's oeuvre encompasses painting, performance, video art and print making, where she explores mapped intersections of language and memory with overlapping boundaries between biology and technology. Her focus is on those inherent structures of cultural identities and on the body as a bio-semiotic reader and recorder. She works with Studio Stefania Miscetti, Hishult Konsthal and Galerie Asbæk. She has received several awards including the Danish National Arts Council’s Lifetime Achievement.

Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York city, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest collection, Before The Drought, is from Glass Lyre Press, (a finalist for the National Poetry Series.) It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Recipient of 2022 Grand Prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, her other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken “Over Tea and Tears” for Ukraine, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, Under the Radar. She has read from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and at literary festivals. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online, for example: https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/letter-from-paris-in-march-2019-from-margo-berdeshevsky/  For more information, go to her website at: http://margoberdeshevsky.com

Steve Benson has written under the sign of poetry, most often orally and textually, since 1966. He has lived in downeast Maine since 1996, where he’s worked as a small-town clinical psychologist. His recent books include a collaboration with Suzanne Stein (DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY, gauss.PDF), a collaboration with The Spatter Trio that includes a CD recording (It's a Stool Pigeon Universe, Rastacan Records), and the self-published AS IT HAPPENS. What This Is is forthcoming from Chax Press. Benson shares links to work products accessible on-line through http://www.stevebensonasis.com/. 

Dudgrick Bevins is an interdisciplinary artist, publisher, and educator. Vigil, his third book from bd studios nyc, was released July 2021, and publication of his anthology, We Make Our Own Light: Queer Southern Artist, is slated for August 2021 from Kintsugi Books. His new album, Odr, will be released in late July 2021 from Default Standard. See more of his multimedia work at www.dudgrickbevins.com

Emma Bolland is an artist-writer who works with translation, and with performative modes of writing, reading, and speaking. They publish across genres, and their hybrid novella/poem Instructions from Light, turning on a translation of a 1920s French screenplay, came out from JOAN Publishing (2022). They are an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and a tutor for the Poetry School's international programme. See: @emma_bolland and https://emmabolland.net

Karen Brennan is a poet, prose writer and visual artist. She is the author of nine books, including Television, a Memoir, a collection of micro and flash hybrid pieces (2022), and the forthcoming (2024) Rabbit in the Moon, a collection ofstories.  She is Professor Emerita from the University of Utah and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Andrea Carter Brown is the author of September 12 (The Word Works, 2021), The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Domestic Karma (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Brook & Rainbow (Winner of the 2000 Sow's Ear Press Chapbook Award). Her poems have won the Five Points James Dickey Prize, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and the PSA Gustav Davidson Memorial Prize, among many others. Since 2017, she has been Series Editor of The Word Works Washington Prize. An avid birder, she lives in Los Angeles, where she grows lemons, limes, oranges, and tangerines in her backyard.

Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is author of fourteen collections of poems and four books of fiction. Recent publications include: a book of poems, In Garments Worn by Lindens, a novel, Periodic Companions, and a book of short fiction, The Book of Moments. Her work has appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, The Brooklyn Rail, and in anthologies including: The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, UK), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (W.W. Norton). Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2013) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (forthcoming from Nightboat in 2020). Honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.  She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.

Madeleine Campbell is based in Scotland and teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in Jacket 2, and translations of French/Occitan Aurélia Lassaque in Poems from the Edge of Extinction and Asymptote. Collaborative intersemiotic works include Wozu Image, Haجar and the Anجel, Spinning Walks, and Knowing Anna Blume. See: https://edinburgh.academia.edu/MadeleineCampbell

Azure Carter is a singer/songwriter living in Providence, RI. She is a frequent collaborator on music, video, and performance with her partner, Alan Sondheim.  Before moving to Providence, Carter lived in New York City and performed at numerous venues there, as well as venues in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Providence, Limassol, London, and Toronto. She has recorded seven albums with Alan Sondheim and others.

Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and recent professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is now based in Southwest France. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked in that capital until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space and for much of that decade he worked alongside musicians from the London Musicians Collective, choreographers and live artists to make interdisciplinary works. Between 1994-2005 he was based in the most easterly English town of Lowestoft, before emigrating to the United States. His musical collaborations include Slant (a trio with Phillip Jeck and Sianed Jones). A large body of interdisciplinary performance writing was produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers under the author function Things Not Worth Keeping. He is the featured artists in this journal’s third issue, with his “No War” multimedia image series.

Abigail Child has completed more than 50 film/video works and installations, and written 7 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to create political work that’s attentive to form. Her major projects include Is This What You Were Born For?: a 7-part work; B/Side: a film that negotiates the politics of internal colonialism; 8 Million: a collaboration with avant-percussionist Ikue Mori that re-defines "music video"; The Suburban Trilogy: a modular digi-film that prismatically examines a politics of placeand identity; and MirrorWorlds: a multi-screen installation that incorporates parts of Child's "foreign film" series toexplore narrative excess. Her most recent work is a trilogy of feature films, including UNBOUND, an imaginary 'home movie' of the life of Mary Shelley; ACTS & INTERMISSIONS, on the life of anarchist Emma Goldman in America; and ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES which explores human-machine interactions and gender roles in the 21stcentury. Child’s books include 6 of poetry (A Motive for Mayhem, Scatter Matrix and Mouth To Mouth, among them) and one of her critical writings: THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005). As a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999-2016), Child has been instrumental in building an interdisciplinarymedia/film program. Child’s work is featured in the second issue of CDLS.

Brenda Coultas is the author of The Tatters (Wesleyan Univerity Press). Her poetry also can be found in Bomb and Brooklyn Rail and the anthologies Readings in Contemporary Poetry, published by the  DIA art foundation; What is Poetry (Just Kidding, I Know You Know) Interviews from the Poetry Project newsletter (1983-2009); and Symmetries: Three years of Art and Poetry at Dominque Levy. This past spring she completed an artist residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida.  

Giacomo Cuttone is a Sicilian visual artist and writer, born in Marsala, Italy. He completed his studies at the Art School and the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo. He has participated in artistic life since 1972, exhibiting, upon invitation, in numerous group exhibitions, with has several personal exhibitions to his credit held throughout his native Italy. In the 1980s he founded, together with other Sicilian artists, the Visual Arts Cultural Center of Marsala. Together with the poet Antonino Contiliano, he created a Contemporary Art Exhibition and a Poetry Prize in Petrosino. In 1984, he moved to the province of Brescia to become a teacher of art and image in secondary schools. In 1986, he held a solo show at the Municipal Palace of Racalmuto, as well as participating in other group art shows. For decades, he also published articles of political satire and of historical-artistic-literary interest, as well as art criticism in various Italian newspapers. He has illustrated several books and literary magazines, including transnational ones. He is also the co-author of some texts of collective poetry with intersemiotic editing (including Marcha hacker-risata cyberfreak, Compagni di strada caminando, and Elmotell blues.) In 2021 he became artistic director and editor of Spiragli nuova serie (an art, literature and science magazine). In 2023, his drawing was chosen for the poster of “Parasite,” the film directed by Tapas K Ray. He was also awarded the 2022 “Lauro d'oro delle belle arti” prize  from the “Michelangelo” Academy of Fine Arts in Agrigento. He currently lives and works in Mazara del Vallo in Sicily.

Jesper Dalmose is a video artist, photographer and multi-media artist based in Denmark. His work has been shown in Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Berlin, Athens. His show entitled Video Collage appeared in the Renata Maiblum Gallery in Copenhagen, in collaboration with the late poet Lennox Raphael (whose work also has appeared in Gadens Gallery and the Hotel Bertram in Copenhagen). Dalmose also has released two DVD projects, Walkings & Sittings, with the artist Lars Høeg, a DVD which is sold as Artmoney; and Letters from Berlin with the late Raphael.

Dalmose began collaborating with Raphael on a multi-media project, as well as others, beginning in 2012. Along with Raphael, he is a founder and curators of the Berlin Soup International Festival of The Arts. Dalmose also started the project, entitled, “Five to Twelve” (photography and video) in 2022, with a show in Gallopperiet, Christiania. In the summer of 2024, “Five to Twelve” will show at the festival Experyment, in Poland. Much of Dalmose’s video and photography work is set on Amager Beach—also called Studio 7—beginning in 2014 with co-artist friends including Raphael, the conceptual artist Doris Bloom, and others. Dalmose also specializes in portraits of artists.

Maria Damon teaches at Pratt Institute of Art. She has written two books of scholarship on modern American poetry and has co-written several books of poetry with mIEKAL aND, Alan Sondheim, and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. She has published widely on twentieth-century cultural figures like Gertrude Stein, Lenny Bruce, Bob Kaufman and others. She also has published two chapbooks of cross-stitch visual poetry.

Vladislav Davidzon is a political and cultural critic; co-founder and editor of The Odessa Review; fellow of the Atlantic Council; and author of From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays from Post-Soviet Ukraine. He writes for numerous print-based and online journals and has provided political perspectives and witness

testimony to global media, including CNN and France 24. As Mark Galeotti (University College London) writes, “Born in Tashkent, raised in Moscow and New York City, an editor in Odessa, a correspondent in Paris, there seems nowhere Davidzon hasn’t been and no one he hasn’t met. The result is a distinctive voice and eye, an eclectic mix of the cultural critic, the political analyst, and the liberal cosmopolitan, evident from the first page of this delightful book.”

Shira Dentz is the author of five books—SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021, the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink), how do I net thee (Salmon Poetry), door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), and black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman Books)--and two chapbooks including FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Diagram, Idaho Review, New American Writing, Brooklyn Rail, Apartment, Annulet, Lana Turner, Nat. Brut, Lit, Academy of American Poets" Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetrysociety.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Utah, and currently works as a senior education specialist at The Research Foundation at SUNY,  and teaches in Goddard College's M.F.A. Creative Writing program. More at www.shiradentz.com

Marcella Durand’s recent books include To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021); The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020); and a translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Earth's Horizons/Les Horizons du sol (Black Square Editions, 2020). She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York City, where she has been active in the fight to save East River Park.

Dan Eltringham is a writer, researcher, editor and translator based in Bristol, UK, where he is one of the organisers of the reading series “Tottering State: Poetry for Unsteady Times.” He is interested in landscape and ecology, and these days mostly thinking about poetry and translation. Dan’s monograph, Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure (2022), is out with Liverpool University Press and won the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize. Recent poetry and translations have appeared in Works & Days, Pamenar, Firmament, Ludd Gang, Revista Kokoro, Protean, Folder, and Cambridge Literary Review, as well as in two anthologies of poetry in translation: Poetry’s Geographies(Eulalia/Shearsman, 2022) and Temporary Archives (Arc, 2022). A chapbook of his translation of Alonso Quesada’s Scattered Ways was published by Free Poetry (Boise, 2019) and his poetry collection Cairn Almanac was published by Hesterglock Press (Bristol, 2017). With Leire Barrera-Medrano, he co-edits Girasol Press, a small publisher that explores handmade poetics and experimental translation. 

Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Soto Zen Buddhist priest. He has written and published steadily since the late 1970’s. His latest poetry collections are two serial poems: On a Train at Night (PURH in France) and Untitled Series: Life As It Is (Talisman). His latest poetry titles include The Museum of Capitalism, Nature, There Was a Clattering as…, and Selected Poems: 1980-2013. His Experience: On Thinking, Writing, Language and Religion was published in the Poetics Series by the University of Alabama Press in 2016. His latest Buddhist title is When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen. His forthcoming poetry book Through a Window (from which CDLS prints selected excerpts) is forthcoming 2024 from Roof Press. Fischer lives in Muir Beach, California with his wife Kathie, who is also a Zen Buddhist priest.

H.E. Fisher is the author of the hybrid collection Sterile Field (Free Lines Press, 2022) and a chapbook, Jane Almost Always Smiles (Moonstone Arts Center Press, 2022). H.E.’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DMQ Review, Ligeia Magazine, Broadsided Press, Tupelo Quarterly, and Whale Road Review, among other publications. H.E. was awarded City College of New York’s 2019 Stark Poetry Prize and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. H.E. is also a recipient of the Poets Afloat residency. H.E. is a writing coach and co-editor of (Re) An Ideas Journal, and co-founder of Say Ah!, a health-literacy advocacy organization. H.E. lives in the Hudson River Valley. See https://www.hefisher.com and @h.e._fisher; Bluesky: @hefisher.bsky.social.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2016), and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She is a former poetry editor for Ping Pong and Boog City and served as the Monday-night coordinator for the poetry readings at The Poetry Project from 2001 to 2003 and the Wednesday-night coordinator from 2010 to 2011. Her video poems have appeared in Posit, Triquarterly, Moving Poems and her own vimeo channel. She currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and coordinates the Introduction to Creative Writing Classes and the faculty and alumni readings. For more information go to www.joannafuhrman.com

Michael Golston is the author of Rhythm and Race in Twentieth Century Poetics and Science (Columbia UP, 2008); Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form (Columbia UP, 2015); and The Science Fiction of Poetics: Scifi and the Poetic Avant-Garde (upcoming from University of Alabama Press, Spring 2023), as well as numerous articles and reviews. He also co-edited, with Matthew Hofer, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters: Selected 1970’s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman (2019); Legend: The Complete Facsimile in Context (2020); and Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Complete Facsimile (2020) (all from the University of New Mexico Press). He was a Fellow at The Dorothy and Louis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library during 2009-2010. Presently in the process of retiring from Columbia University, where he has taught 20th century poetry and poetics in the Department of English and Comparative Literature since 2003, he currently resides in New Mexico. The child of a German war bride and an American army officer, his first language was German.

Nada Gordon consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs. Since reaching adulthood, her body has consisted of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life. These cells are organized biologically to form her whole body. She is the author of Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, Swoon, Scented Rushes, and Vile Lilt.  She received no MFA, no fellowships, and has won only a few minor awards. FWIW, however, her work has been translated into Hebrew, Dutch, Japanese, Romanian, and Burmese.

Anne Gorrick is a writer and visual artist.  She is the author of eight books of poetry including most recently: Beauty, Money, Luck, etc. for Beginners (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019), An Absence So Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light (the Operating System, 2018);  and The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, "“Swans, the ice,” she said," funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She also co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016).  From 2005 - 2019, she served on the Board of Trustees at Century House Historical Society, home of the Widow Jane Mine. CHHS is an all-volunteer organization (www.century house.org) devoted to the historic preservation and investigation through the arts of the now defunct cement industry in Rosendale, NY. Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.

David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London (UK), and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick. He wrote A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019) and is co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of the forthcoming Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan UP), and, with TonyaFoster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux, The Umbra Galaxy. He is a member of UCU

Carla Harryman (Detroit & Ypsilanti, MI) is the author of twenty-five books and chapbooks of poetry, prose, and performance writings. Recent publications include the first two works of a dialogue trilogy Cloud Cantata (Pamenar, 2022) and Good Morning (in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2022);  A Voice to Perform: One Opera/Two Plays (SplitLevel Texts, 2020); a two volume French and English edition of poetry and performance writing Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin, translated by Sabine Huynh (PURH 2017-2018), and Impromptu de Hanna, translated by Abigail Lang (joca seria, 2018). Her contributions to literature and performance were the focus of Poet’s and Critics 2018, a two-day symposium held at Universités Paris Est Marnes-la-Vallée, Paris 7&8 and L’Institut Universitaire de France. Her awards include the  Foundation for Contemporary Art Grants for Artists in poetry and the Ronald C. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award in Creative Activity at Eastern Michigan University, where she teaches in the Department of English. Her website can be found here.

Larkin Higgins is a poet/artist/professor whose poetic & hybrid works can be found in Diagram, Notre Dame Review, Visio-Textual Selectricity (Runaway Spoon Press), Otoliths, The L.A. Telephone Book, Vol. 1, &Vol. 2 & elsewhere. Mindmade Books published Of Traverse and Template (poems and logographic drawings) & with Dusie Kollektiv she has two chapbooks, Of Materials, Implements and c o m b - i n g  m i n e - i n g s, plus the broadside “Soil Culture, Frankenstein--Grafted.” Higgins’ visual poetry is included in the Avant Writing Collection/The Ohio State University Libraries & also exhibited at Counterpath Gallery (Denver), Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH), Otis College of Art & Design, others. She created text-driven performance art for venues such as Highways Performance Space, Counterpath Gallery (Denver), BC Space (Laguna Beach), & The World Stage.

Joseph Harrington is the author of Disapparitions (BlazeVOX Books 2023) Of Some Sky (BlazeVOX Books 2018); Goodnight Whoever’s Listening (Essay Press 2015);  Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan UP 2011); and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan UP 2002). His creative work has appeared in BAX: The Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Colorado Review,The Rumpus, Hotel America, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. From 2019-2023, he maintained a real-time verse-chronicle of the climate crisis, at The Poem of Our Climate and Writing Out of Time. He teaches at the University of Kansas (Lawrence).

Lyn Hejinian taught for 20 years,in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work was addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is the author of over 25 volumes of poetry and critical prose, including Tribunal (Omnidawn Books, 2019) and Positions of the Sun (Belladonna, 2019). The Proposition, a critical edition of Hejinian’s uncollected early work, has been published by the University of Edinburgh Press 2022). Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, a collection of essays, came out from Wesleyan University Press in 2023. Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, and Finland. She was a founding editor of Tuumba Press, co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. Residing in Berkeley, Hejinian passed away recently in 2024, and we honor her person and great legacy on the Introduction page to CDLS Issue 4.

Duriel E. Harris is a writer, performer, artist, and scholar. She is author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003), and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include the one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, the video collaboration Speleology (2011), and the sound+image project “Blood Labyrinth.” Recent appearances include performances at the Black Midwest Initiative, Lake Forest College Allan L. Carr Theatre, Naropa, the Chicago Jazz Festival (with Douglas Ewart & Inventions), Poet’s House, the Greenhouse Theater, The Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), the Art Institute of Chicago, and Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana (Cuba). Cofounder of The Black Took Collective, Harris has been a MacDowell and Millay Colony fellow and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, The Poetry Foundation, BAX, PEN America, &Now Awards, Of Poetry & Protest, Troubling the Line, Poets.org, and Letters to the Future; and her compositions have been translated into Polish, German, and Spanish. Harris is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Illinois State University and Editor in Chief of the award-winning publishing platform Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

Laura Hinton is a multi-media poet, literary critic, editor and photographer. She is the author of two multi-media poetry books, Ubermutter’s Death Dance and Sisyphus My Love (both from Blaze Vox), as well as multiple poetry videos. Her critical books and collections include The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (SUNY Press), We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (co-editor with Cynthia Hogue), and Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero: Voice, Vision, Politics and Performance in the U.S. Contemporary Women’s Poetics (editor). She is a Professor of English Emeritus at the City College of New York, where she taught over three decades feminist and poetic theory, film and visual studies, and performance culture, as well as contemporary women’s experimental writing. Hinton is currently working on a book about US women’s hybrid radical poetries, as well as finishing a three-part poetry book series called “A Little Book of Human Violence.” She is also the editor of Chant de la Sirene, the Journal. See www.laurahinton-singingsirens.com

Cynthia Hogue’s most recent collection is instead, it is dark (Red Hen Press, 2023). Her third book-length translation is Nicole Brossard’s Distantly (Omnidawn 2022). Other recent collections include Revenance, listed as one of the 2014 “Standout” books by the Academy of American Poets, and In June the Labyrinth (2017). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, two NEA Fellowships, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (2013). She lives in Tucson, AZ, and is a Professor of English Emeritus from Arizona State University.

Anthony Howarth was born in 1938, in north-west England. By the time he was seven he thought that the world at war was the norm and that when “peace” came there would be no more “news” on the radio. He went to boarding schools, studied engineering at Cambridge, and, while a student, developed parallel passions for photography and filmmaking, as well as engineering. He has traveled to 127 countries. He had a career in photography (British Press Photographer of the Year – Photo Essay), in filmmaking (Golden Globe and Oscar nominations), and in engineering (Africar and Solar Utility Vehicles). You can see his website at: http://www.anthonyhowarth.com

Geoffrey Jacques is a poet who has worked as a writer, labor journalist, editor, and freelance art and culture critic. His poetry collections include Hunger and Other Poems (Ridgeway Press, 1993), Suspended Knowledge (Adastra Press, 1998), and Just For a Thrill (Wayne State University Press, 2004) He is also the author of A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Hambone, Askew, Callaloo, Miramax, Ping Pong, Tidal Basin Review, and in the anthologies What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (University of Alabama Press, 2015) and Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001 (Wayne State University Press, 2001). His poem, "Trump," appeared in 2019 in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. "Murmured in the Ear" (2018), was published as a pamphlet by Happy Monks Press. His essay, “Freedomways and the African American Freedom Movement,” appeared in 2018 and can be found on the website Reveal Digital. His forward to the newest edition of the classic study by Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People's Music (originally published in 1948), appeared in 2019. Other essays of his have appeared or are forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of the American Left, and in the journals the Detroit Jazz Festival Program Book, Science and Society, Against the Current, The Journal of Modern Hellenism, and Cineaste. He teaches classes in literature, Black Studies, and the humanities in Southern California.

Susan Mohini Kane has enjoyed a versatile career as an established classical and crossover vocal artist as well as an author and tenured professor of voice and opera director.  Kane’s "crystal-clear voice and impeccable technique" (LA Culture Spot Magazine) has kept her teaching and performing professionally for decades. Kane’s book, The 21st Century Singer-Making the Leap from the University into the World (Oxford, 2015) has been called “A must-read for any emerging singer” by iCadenza Artists.  Kane has recorded two CDs: A MOMENT OF JOY (2009) and FROM THE HEART (2015). Dr. Kane served as the head of Vocal Arts at Cal State LA for two decades ending in December of 2020. Founder of Santosha Voice Group (2021), a group focused on meaningful singing projects, Kane is currently working on a project called Her Pieces, art songs by women composers; and Ancient Melodies, original music from ancient melodic scales. The website for this group, www.santoshavoicegroup.com, will launch in April 2021. For more information about Kane and her book you are invited to visit: www.the21stcenturysinger.com.

Meri Karako is a versatile artist whose creative expression spans across multiple mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, calligraphy, and Asemic Writing. With a deep love for poetry, she also writes in the haiku form. Since 2014, Meri has expanded her artistic journey beyond the canvas, delving into the realm of holistic body/mind therapy. Through the application of spiritual and energetic methods, she guides individuals towards balance and harmony, nurturing both their physical and emotional well-being. Born in Turkey in 1960, she currently resides in Israel. Her works have graced numerous group exhibitions throughout Europe and Israel. In recent years, Meri has become acquainted with artists, poets, and creators from all over the world and collaborated with talents from various disciplines. A composer from New Zealand, inspired by her art, has composed music that harmonizes with her artworks. A distinguished magazine in the Netherlands, dedicated to the convergence of poetry and visual art, has portrayed her work as drawing inspiration from the legacy of Allen Ginsberg. Her Asemic Writing has been published in Brazil and Italy. In her home country of Israel, she has exhibited her works intertwining the visual art with local poetry. In 2016, Meri merged her love of art and design, founding Meri Ve Sarte, a studio specializing in Home Decor. Blurring the boundaries between art and functionality, her approach unites the spheres of artistic expression and interior aesthetics. See www.merivesarte.myshopify.com

Adeena Karasick, Ph.D, is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of 14 books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein), "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin, “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural) word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work” (Mark Scroggins). Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas (The Institute of General Semantics Press:  2022), was shortlisted for Outstanding Book of the Year Award (ICA, 2023) and winner of the 2023 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form. She is also the author of Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), and the libretto for her Spoken Word opera; Salomé: Woman of Valor CD (NuJu Records, 2020), as well as Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute. She is the Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, a 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient, and winner of the Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. Recently she was appointed Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established in the Special Collections at Simon Fraser University.  Hot off the press is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, Ouvert: Oeuvre: Openings (Lavender Ink Press, 2023), and Eicha: The Book of Lumenations film, NuJu Films, NY, 2023. She also was just awarded the 2024 Inaugural Spoken Word Poetry Award from the League of Canadian Poets.

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is a mother, an author, an academic, an athlete, and a professor who treasures family and friendship.  An Associate Professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT., she specialized in American literary naturalism and the environment while writing creatively as well as academically.  She is also a lifelong ice skater and someone who is deeply passionate about sport (particularly tennis and golf).  Cara values collegiality, community, comradery, creativity. 

Burt Kimmelman was born and raised in New York City after the Second World War. His eleventh collection of poems, Steeple at Sunrise, will be published fall 2022. He has also published 11 books of criticism, most recently Visible at Dusk (a selection of his essays) and Zero Point Poiesis (a gathering of writings, edited and introduced by him, on the work of George Quasha). In addition, Kimmelman has published several essay-length memoirs. He is a distinguished professor of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches literary and cultural studies.

Alexis Krasilovsky was born in Alaska, survived sexual assault at gunpoint, and knows what it’s like to be completely deaf. After graduation from Yale and receiving an MFA at CalArts in Film/Video, Krasilovsky became an award-winning filmmaker and the author of “Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling” (2nd Place Winner, 2019 International Writers Awards). Her 2021 award-winning poetry film, The Parking Lot of Dreams, has screened in over a dozen festivals worldwide. It adapts poems from her most recent book, “Watermelon Linguistics: New and Selected Poems” (Finalist, 2022 International Book Awards).  See www.alexiskrasilovsky.com 

Hank Lazer has published 34 books of poetry, including P I E C E S (BlazeVOX, 2022), When the Time Comes (Dos Madres Press, 2022), and field recordings of mind in morning (with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo— available on YouTube). Forthcoming in 2024 from Chax Press is Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems. To order books, learn about talks, readings, and workshops, and see photos of Duncan Farm see Lazer’s website: https://www.hanklazer.com

Andrew Levy is the author of Artifice in the Calm Damages, and Don’t Forget to Breathe, both from Chax Press. He is also the author of a novella, Nothing Is in Here (EOAGH Books), as well as Cracking Up (Truck Books) and 11 other titles of poetry and prose, including, The Big Melt (Factory School), Ashoka (Zasterle), and Values Chauffeur You (O Books). Levy’s poetry and essays have appeared and been reviewed in numerous American and international magazines and anthologies, including The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry (Sun & Moon), Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press), LITSCAPES: Collected US Writings 2015 (Steerage Press), The Canary Islands Connection – 60 Contemporary American Poets (Zasterle Books), Poetics-for-the-More-than-Human-World – An Anthology of Poetry & Commentary, and Resist Much, Obey Little – Inaugural Poems to The Resistance. He lives and teaches in New York City, and is the proud father of Sadie Levy, who is published in CDLS Issue 4 as a photographer

Shirley Geok-lin Lim arrived from Malaysia at Brandeis University on a Fulbright and as Wein International Fellow, lived and taught in New York for 17 years, and as UCSB Faculty Emerita now lives in Santa Barbara. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and two American Book Awards. She has published a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces; 12 poetry collections, most recently Dawns Tomorrow; three novels; The Shirley Lim Collection; three story collections, two critical studies; and about a dozen edited/co-edited anthologies and journal special issues. She was featured in PBS by Bill Moyers and in Tracey K. Smith’s Slowdown, and her poems have been set to music as libretto for various scores. Recent publications include poems in The Hudson Review, Feminist Studies, and a chapter in Good Eats, NYU Press. Awarded the UCSB Research Lectureship, Multiethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS) and Feminist Press Lifetime Achievement Awards, she served as English Chair Professor at Hong Kong University and has held visiting professorships at MIT, NUS, National Sun Yat-sen University, City University of Hong Kong, and elsewhere. See her Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Geok-lin_Lim

Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, forthcoming, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, and Callaloo, and are anthologized in Bettering American Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets’ LatiNext, Brooklyn Poets Anthology and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department, and teaches English at The City College of New York (CUNY). Maldonado was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island. Her family hails from Honduras. She lives in uptown Manhattan. 

Kevin T. McEneaney is the author of Hunter S. Thompson: Fear, Loathing, and the Birth of Gonzo (2016), Russell Banks: The Search for Freedom (2011), and Tom Wolfe’s America: Heroes, Pranksters, and Fools (2009) which won a 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Award from the American Library Association. He is also the author of The Enclosed Garden(1991) and Longing (1997), which was translated and published in French and Japanese. Kevin is the Poet Laureate of Smithfield Valley in Amenia, New York, and the music and theater critic for The Mill Brook Independent.

James McCorkle’s books include Evidences (APR/Copper Canyon, 2003), which received the APR/HonickmanAward, The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan, 2014), and In Time (Etruscan, 2020). He is also the author of The Still Performance (University of Virginia Press), an examination of five contemporary poets, the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Wayne State University Press) and a co-editor of American Poets and Poetry from the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood). He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the NEA. Among his current projects is a book and installation project on migration, detention, and ecologies with the architect/artist Gabriella D'Angelo. McCorkle is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York. He also serves as director of the African Literature Association.

Tony Medina is older than Hip Hop. Born in the South Bronx and raised in the Throgs Neck Housing Projects, on the same Dewey Avenue block Grandmaster Flash is from, he is a multi-genre author/editor of 25 award-winning books for adults and young people, the most recent of which are Rock the Bells: For Hip Hop @ 50; (hybrid), Che Che Colé (fiction); Death, With Occasional Smiling (poetry); Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy (children’s); I Am Alfonso Jones (graphic novel); and Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky (anthology). The first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University, Medina holds a master’s and PhD from Binghamton University, SUNY. Medina’s work appears in over 200 anthologies and journals, and his I and I, Bob Marley audiobook, narrated by actor Jaime Lincoln Smith and produced by Live Oak Media, received the 2022 Audie Award in the Young Listeners category. His novelette, “Porto Rock Pegasus” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora and his poems “Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku” and “I’ve Got the Covid Blues” are featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Medina recently participated in a Congressional Roundtable Discussion on Book Bans by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, representing his banned books, Love to Langston and I Am Alfonso Jones. His interview, “Digging: A Conversation with Amiri Baraka, November 2, 2010,” will be published by The Black Scholar (Volume 54, Issue 1). His poem “Black Boys,” called an epic by journalist Mike Barnicle on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, appears in Kwame Alexander’s This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

Laura Mullen is the translator of Véronique Pittolo’s Hero (Black Square 2019) and the author of eight books, including Complicated Grief, her most recent. She has received awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among other recognitions. Poems from a manuscript in progress have appeared in Posit, can we have our ball back, and Together in a Sudden Strangeness. Her work is also included in Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia 2020).

Mary Newell is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Tilt/Hover/Veer  (Codhill Press) and Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press),as well as poems in journals and anthologies. She is also the author of essays, including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interimjournal 38.3). Her first video poem appears on Camilla Nelson’s website, https://www.singingapplepress.com/becoming-3. Co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, Newell teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, as well as online classes for the Poetry Barn and Chax Press. She presented on “Co-fostering and Cunning between Plants and their Pollinators” at the Northeast Modern Language Association (2022) and organized the panel “Plants and Poetics”for Kelly Writers House (2021). She is an ardent gardener of pollinator-friendly plants where she lives in the Hudson Valley. See https://manitoulive.wixsite.com/maryn

Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria. Raised bilingual in Igbo and English, he earned his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He lived in Germany and Holland for the next decade and immigrated to the United States in 2007. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007), all of which were published after he arrived in the United States. Earlier collections include Heart’s Field (2005); If Only the Night (2002); Chiaroscuro (1997), which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize; The Bremen Poems (1995); Second Act (1994); and Flower Child (1988). Belltime Letters (2000) is a collection of prose. His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian. Nduka lives in Brooklyn.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen  was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry. His works of scholarship include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant, Integral music and The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka. Back Pages: Selected Poems has recently been published by BlazeVOX books, selecting from nine previous volumes of poetry. Nielsen has taught at Howard University, San Jose State, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, Penn State, and Central China Normal University. Other awards include the SAMLA Studies Prize, the Kayde Award, a Gustavus Myers Citation, the Josephine Miles Award and the Darwin Turner Award.

Elise Niemand is the pseudonym of an award-winning American writer. 

Gillian Parrish is author of two books of poetry, of rain and nettles wove (Singing Horse Press, 2018) and supermoon (Singing Horse Press, 2020), as well as a chapbook (full text here) cold spell (DUSIE, 2019), a confession and prayer for animal life in the arctic. She lives in University City, St. Louis and works nearby as an associate professor and dept head of the MFA in Writing program at Lindenwood University. When time allows, she serves as the mothership of spacecraftprojects.com, which features interviews w/ artists as well as poems and stories. 

Gene Pfeiffer is a poet and fiction writer from the baseball town of St. Louis, MO. His work has appeared in various journals including Volt, Spillway, and The Cincinnati Review. He teaches in the Lindenwood University MFA program, including a course on climate change fiction.

Nicole Peyrafitte is a multidisciplinary artist born in the French Pyrénées. Recent presentations include The 11 Women of Spirit at Salon Zürcher, New York City; the 2017 multi-tier exhibition & live performance Peyrafitte / Joris : Domopoetic Works at Simoncini Gallery, Luxembourg, featuring her longtime collaboration with poet & translator Pierre Joris. Gallery Simoncini will host a second multi-tier installment in February 2021, including action painting & cooking. In 2018, Peyrafitte wrote & directed Things Fall Where They Lie, a documentary feature film starring Steve Dalachinsky & Yuko Otomo. Recent publications include Carnet 1 & 2 (RedfoxPress Ireland, 2018), Landsc0pes (2018) & Bi Valve: Vulvic Space/Vulvic Knowledge (2016) (Plaine Page). Peyrafitte’s Action Paintings have been performed in a range of international venues. Her website is: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com

Pina Piccolo is a poet, editor, blogger, and translator, who writes both in English and Italian. She has published internationally in journals and anthologies, both in print and online. Her Italian poetry collection, Canti dell’Interregno was published by Lebeg Edizioni in 2018. Her English language manuscript “Avatars on the Borderlands” is under submission. Piccolo is one of the founding editors of the Italian language and transnational literary journal La Macchina Sognante, and is the sole editor of The Dreaming Machine, its English language companion. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at UC Santa Cruz and other colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently lives in Bologna, Italy. Her blog is available at: www.pinapiccolossblogilblogdipinapiccolo.com 

Janelle Poe is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and scholar focusing on the Black experience in North America, nuances of oppression, and marginalized experiences across diasporas in literature and visual culture. She is the author of  Black & White Studies with Sheryl Oppenheim (to raise funds for BlackLivesMatter). Recently she has been a contributor to Aster(ix), Bushwick Review, and her short story “Eyes of The Tiger” in  Asteri(ix) was nominated for Best of The Net (2016). Poem has been featured or presented at many venues including National Poetry Foundation / Paideuma, Zinc Bar, Printed Matter, and The Shrine. A Harlemite, she teaches Black Studies and English courses at the City College of New York (CUNY), where she received her MFA; and this fall begins a doctoral program in English with concentrations in African American Studies and film at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

Sarah Porter is a writer and mixed-media artist, as well as a performer. She is the author of several novels, including Vassa in the Night and The Projections (forthcoming winter 2024). Her novel When I Cast Your Shadow was a Bram Stoker finalist. As a VJ, she has performed creating improvised video collages at venues including the Roseland Ballroom, Galapagos, Nokia Theater Times Square, and at Burning Man. Her recent mixed-media art is an attempt to translate her video work into an analog form. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Lennox Raphael was a poet and multi-media artist, author of the play Che!, as well as Blue Soap (musical direction by Archie Shepp). He was a major figure in the Umbra Black Arts group in New York. During that early ‘60’s period Raphael was a co-interviewer of a Harper’s interview with Ralph Ellison—done originally for an Umbra Magazine issue that he also edited. He was also a staff writer for The East Village Other (EVO), a writer for Evergreen Review, and many other venues. His Haitian earthquake essay (www.servinghousejournal.com) was nominated as one of the best online essays in the United States. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies including Amistad (edited by Ishmael Reed) and Natural Process (edited by Thomas E. Weatherly). Raphael has read widely in the United States, Brazil, and Europe. He taught at the City College of New York and The University of Rhode Island. He was also a Poet in Residence for the public schools in  Wilmington, Delaware. For many years a busy New Yorker, Lennox lived, since 1993, in Denmark, where he was an associate artistic director of www.desarts.dk, 2020visions.dk and the Copoenhagen Art Club, as well as co-curator with video artist Jesper Dalmose of the Berlin Soup International Arts Festival (www.berlinsoup.org).  Raphael passed away in 2023, and we honor him on the CDLS Issue 4 Introduction page.

Stephen Ratcliffe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including most recently Black and Yellow Notebooks(BlazeVox, 2023) w i n d o w and Some Time (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023 and 2022), Rocks and More Rocks (Cuneiform 2020), sound of wave in channel (BlazeVOX, 2018), and others. He is the winner of a San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. He has also written three books of literary criticism, including Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath, 2010) and Listening to Reading (SUNY Press, 2000), as well as a collection of his correspondence with Barbara Guest (Chax Press, 2022). His ongoing series of seven 1,000-page books, each one written in 1,000 consecutive days, are at Editions Eclipse (http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/editions.html); his series of daily poems-plus-photographs can be found at Temporality (stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com). He has work available at the Electronic Poetry Center (http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/ratcliffe/); PennSound (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ratcliffe.php); and in Jacket2 (https://jacket2.org/feature/listening-stephen-ratcliffe). Publisher of Avenue B books and Emeritus Professor at Mills College, he has lived in Bolinas California since 1973.

Anna Reckin lives and works in Norwich, England. She has published two collections of poetry with Shearsman Press, Three Reds (2011), and Line to Curve (2018). She has a particular interest in writing about the visual and about material objects, as well as plants and landscapes. She has an active interest in translation, most recently from Norwegian, working with the poet Hanne Bramness.

Sarah Riggs is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn. She translates poetry from French including Etel Adnan and Souad Labbize. Her most recent show of paintings was Earth Portraits of Poets in Marseille (2023) and her most recent book of poetry The Nerve Epistle (Roof Books, 2021)

Michael Ruby is a poet, literary editor and journalist. He is the author of seven poetry books, most recently Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019) and The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill, 2020). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). His other ebooks are Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018). He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020), and he is co-curator of the Station Hill Intermedia Lab. He works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.

Inna Romenska, a Ukrainian poet living in the current warzone, writes of herself and her life: “I am not a poet. I am 48 years old, married, mother of two daughters and owner of five cats. I have a Master's degree from Kharkiv University and now I teach history to children because I really like it. For me, the war with russia [sic] started in 2014, and I have been actively volunteering with my friends since the first day of the invasion. Because I was born and raised in Luhansk, where I still have friends, I helped them to leave the occupied territories for Ukraine. What they told me was horrible. Therefore, I was not surprised by the horror that happened in Bucha, Gostomel, Irpin, Chernihiv, Izium. There have always been killings and abuses of civilians in any territories occupied by rashists.* The war has affected me personally, because our family lived in Kharkiv, and my mother and all my relatives are from Izyum. Now we are forced to leave the city because it is being bombed by rashists every day. So far we have found shelter in Portugal, and we are very grateful for the help of other countries in Europe. It is very important that people know the truth, despite the constant lies and propaganda from russia.”

*[Translator’s note: “Rashists” is a disparaging word used by Ukrainians to describe Russians, a portmanteau word of “Russian,” “racist” and “fascist” that pre-dates the February 24, 2022, invasion, but has gained renewed traction over the past months. It has become particularly popular among Ukrainians in response to Putin’s groundless justification of his war being based on his ‘mission’ to de-nazify Ukraine. In the same spirit, the word ‘Russia’ (above) is never capitalized.—Pina Piccolo] 

Linda Russo is a poet, curator, essayist, teacher, and practitioner ecospheric care. Her most recent book, the verdant, is forthcoming in 2024. She is the author of three book of poems, Participant (Lost Roads), Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman), and To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light (Subito), which is a book of experimentally and lyrical literary-geographical essays. As co-editor, she's worked to put into the world Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press) and Geopoetics in Practice (Routledge). Her scholarly essays appear in many edited collections, including The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics (Routledge), Momentous Inconclusions: New Essays on Larry Eigner (University of New Mexico Press) and Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger (Clemson University Press). She lives on traditional Nimíipuu and Pelúuc homelands where she teaches at Washington State University and directs Ecoarts on the Palouse. On weekends you can find her co-creatively engated in the regenerative earth process of vermiculture composting.

Lauri Scheyer is Xiaoxiang Distinguished Professor at Hunan Normal University where she directs the British and American Poetry Center and Creative Writing Program and is co-editor of Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures. She is also Professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Los Angeles, and Professor of English and Creative Writing in the International Summer School at Renmin University of China. She has previously been a professor at Hampton University, University of Bedfordshire (UK), and Cardiff University (UK). Her book publications include A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge UP), Theatres of War (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama), The Heritage Series of Black Poetry (Routledge), and Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan). 


Susan M. Schultz  is author of many volumes of poetry and poetic prose, including most recently, I Want to Write an Honest Sentence (2019), and the forthcoming Meditations, from Talisman House, as well as several books of Memory Cards and two volumes of Dementia Blog. She was founding editor of Tinfish Press, which publishes experimental writing from the Pacific region. Her photographs in this issue are of places in Volcano on the Big Island of Hawai`i, where rain forest quickly reclaims human objects and machines.

Toni Simon is a multimedia artist and writer whose work encmpasses the ways in which the future might appear, accessed through trance states. The process of channeled, automatic writing led to her illustrated book of experimental prose poetry Earth After Earth(Lunar Chandelier Press, 2012) and her current manuscript and video animation Telescope Highway. Her drawings have been exhibited at the Drawing Center, Odetta and A.I.R. Gallery in NYC. See more information at Tonisimonart.blogspot.com  and https://vimeo.com/332959665

James Sherry is the author of 14 books of poetry and prose, most recently, Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), and the poetry book Entangled Bank (Chax Press, 2016). Since 1976, he has edited Roof Books and Roof Magazine, publishing nearly 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative, and environmental poetry. He started The Segue Foundation, Inc. in 1977, producing over 10,000 events of poetry and other arts in New York City. See: jamessherry.net

Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices, and held the fourth iteration of the conference at Pomona College this past spring (2023). Her recent poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2022, The New Republic, and Yale Review. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and is now the Henry G. Lee ‘37 Professor of English at Pomona College.

Jonathan Skinner is a poet, editor, translator, and critic, known for founding the journal ecopoetics. His poetry collections and chapbooks include Chip Calls (Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism, landscape and sound studies. Skinner teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Alan Sondheim is a new media artist, theorist, and writer concerned with the phenomenology of the virtual. He has collaborated with motion capture and virtual environment labs. His work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual; with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed reality and codework. His writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that partially appear within and determine the surface. His style embeds interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal systems. The textual body, body of text and writer, are deeply entangled. His current work is based on the psychogeography of real and virtual worlds and their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting"–the body behind the virtual/symbolic body–and modes of viral dispersion in a series of videos and texts. Sondheim was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended Brown University, and has exhibited, taught, and lectured at a number of venues in the United States and abroad. He has a new book out called Broken Theory (Punctum, 2022). You can see more of his work at:https://www.youtube.com/user/asondheim/videos and his website with an on-line index of his work is at: http://www.alansondheim.org/ 

Jennifer Spector is a poet / writer from New York City, long-based in Panama. Engagement with the natural world and projects in Central and South America energizes work that explores narratives in passage that draw through landscape, poetics and plaited artistic processes. She is the author of Hithe (Corbel Stone Press, 2021). Her forthcoming chapter, Thacchen: the dwelling body in the rough house, will appear in Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan, Autumn 2024). As a member of Cultural Literacy Everywhere (CLE), Jennifer presented related photo-essayistic work in the symposium, Dwelling, co-hosted by CLE and University College Dublin (2022). As part of a collaborative ensemble, the group separately presented their video essay ‘sand susurran shadow stone cros (sings).’ Her poetry has appeared in such journals and chapbooks as Shearsman, Reliquiae, Alterity, Litmus, Molly Bloom, La Vague, Nature & Sentience, Book of Hours (artist Rebecca Clark), Suelo, chapbook v1 (Estudio Nuboso), and Performance Studies International; 'Fluid States - Performances of Unknowing.’ www.jenniferspectorstudio.com

Eileen R. Tabios has released over 70 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the art monograph Drawing Six Directions; a poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other recent books include KalapatingLeon, a Filipino translation by Danton Remoto of her first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times; two French books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery); and a book-length essay Kapwa’s Novels. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st-century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. Translated into 13 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. She lives in Napa, California. See http://eileenrtabios.com

Ronni Thomas is a New York City filmmaker. His films have screened at festivals around the world, and have been shown in institutions from Carnegie Hall and the New York City Met to Horniman Museum in the UK. They’ve been honored by BAFTA, Tribeca Film Institute, Raindance Film UK, The British Independent Film Awards, among others.  His award-winning short narrative Radio Girl featured collaboration with long-time composer friend Stephen Coates (The Real Tuesday Weld) and the Witch director, Robert Eggers. His Midnight Archive web series went on to receive critical acclaim both on the small and big screens, garnering praise from Time.com to boingboing to Forbes magazine, before being co-opted for Discovery Channel’s digital network. His short doc Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens, would be nominated for best short at the Tribeca Film Festival, Raindance Film Fest, and Hot Springs International, with honors at Morbido Fest in Puebla, Mexico. Currently being released this month is his AMC 6-hour documentary digital series, The Broken and the Bad, on the real-life themes of the TV serial Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul. See: www.themidnightarchive.com

Georg Trakl was one of Austria’s premier Expressionist poets (1887-1914). He was born in Salzburg and died in Krakow at the age of 27. He was the author of four books of poetry, only the first of which (Gedichte, 1913) appeared before his death. As a young man, Trakl studied medicine in Vienna, where he fell in with a group of artists associated with the avant-garde journal Der Brenner. Through the good offices of the journal’s editor, he secured a sizable (and anonymous) stipend from Ludwig Wittgenstein. At the beginning of WWI, Trakl served in the Austro-Hungarian army as a medic and in the Fall of 1914 was deployed to the eastern front with an infantry unit in a campaign against the Russians in what is now Ukraine (then the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria). During the Battle of Gródek, he was put in charge of caring for ninety wounded soldiers in a commandeered barn with little or no medical equipment or supplies; here he also witnessed wartime atrocities, including the hanging of Ukrainian civilians. In October, he was admitted for depression to a military hospital in Krakow, where he died of a cocaine overdose. Wittgenstein, who had organized a visit to Trakl in the hospital, arrived a day too late, and the two never met.  His work in CDLS has been translated by Michael Golston.

Sam Truitt is the author of the ten works in the Vertical Elegies series, among others in print and other media, including most recently Tokyoatoto. Among other recognitions, he is the recipient of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. The producer and a co-host of the podcast Baffling Combustions and Director of Station Hill Press, he lives in Woodstock, New York. See: http://samtsong.com/about

Chris Tysh is a poet whose latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly.

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Patti Smith has called Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY with cover and interior art by Pat Steir (2020), “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.”Waldman was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970’s, while reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for the manufacturing of pits for nuclear warheads.Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry. She was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. See annewaldman.org and naropa.edu

Pam Ward is a writer/designer who just released her poetry book Between Good Men & No Man at All (2023 World Stage Press). She’s published two novels, Want to Get Some, and Bad Girls Burn Slow (Kensington). A UCLA graduate, recipient of a California Arts Council Fellow, and a Pushcart Poetry Nominee, Warm has published inChiron, Calyx, Voices of Leimert Park and the LA Times. She's currently working on a novel about her aunt’s dalliance in the Black Dahlia Murder, an event that shocked the nation and happened in Pam’s own neighborhood. Her website is www.pamwardwriter.com

DeJe Watson is a multimedia self-taught artist. Composing abstract portraits and figurative paintings inspired by human, plant, animal, and celestial forms, she probes spaces between artificial boundaries and living processes to discover meanings of 21st century global citizenry. Her paintings tell stories informed by African and Indigenous diasporas and the historic crucible that shapes their descendants. An emeritus professor, for years she taught Literature, Writing and African American Art History at San Diego City College. Adept at using word imagery to convey meaning, she incorporates collage and text fragments in her written and visual work. Inspired by an image of baby carriages left at the Polish border for Ukrainian women and their families, Watson began composing “Vera’s Lullaby,” published in this issue of CDLS, after seeing a video of violinist Vera Lytovchenko performing “Nich yaka misiachna / What a moonlit night” to calm the nerves of refugees sheltering from the constant shelling. She believes her painting testifies to human solidarity in the face of war’s senseless redundancy. Watson paints in her studio on Philadelphia’s west side. She was previously a featured artist in Caribbean Creatives, a 2021 virtual group exhibition at the Urban Art Gallery. Algorithms of Myrrh, opening May 2022 is her first solo exhibit.

Barrett Watten is a language-centered poet and critic, the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2004) and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (U Iowa Press, 2016), and many volumes of poetry. He participated in the 1989 Summer School in then-Leningrad, USSR, which led to sustained contacts with emerging post-Soviet poets and the publication of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union(1991), with Ron Silli­man, Lyn Hejin­ian, and Michael Davidson, now being prepared in Russian translation. In 2016, he traveled with Carla Harryman to St. Petersburg, where he took part in a conference devoted to the work of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. He has since published in Russian translation in Nosorog and Novoe literaturnoye obzrenie(Moscow); an anthology of American Language and avant-garde poetry, containing his poetry in translation, is forthcoming. He teaches at Wayne State University.

Marjorie Welish is the author of several books of poetry, limited-edition constructed artist’s books, and a book of art criticism. Her most recent book of poetry is A Complex Sentence (2020). Books of poetry also include The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems (2000), which was an Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize Finalist and A Village Voice Best Book of the year, Word Group (2004), Isle of the Signatories (2008), In the Futurity Lounge /Asylum for Indeterminacy (2012), and So What So That (2016)--all from Coffee House Press. Constructed books include The Napkin and Its Double (with Buzz Spector) and Oaths? Questions? (with James Siena), published by Granary Books in 2007 and 2009 respectively.  Her book of art criticism is Signifying Ais the website for her artrt: Essays on art since 1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); she is also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), and has written art criticism for popular magazines such as Art in America and Art Monthly (U.K.) as well as for scholarly journals, such as Partisan Review, Salmagundi and Textual Practice (U.K.). Fellowships include: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2014-15; St. Edmonds’ College, Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow—granted for 2014-15; New York Foundation for the Arts, 2007-8; Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship of Cambridge University, 2004-5; Pratt Faculty Development Fund, 2002; Academy of American Poets, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist, 2001; Fund for Poetry, awards: 1999 / 1989, and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship of Brown University, 1998-99. Her creative arts practice and art criticism were the subjects of day-long conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, resulting in a 300-page conference book Of the Diagram: The work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Foundation, 2003). She first came to Brooklyn College in 2009, having taught at Brown University, Columbia University and at Pratt Institute, and became the inaugural Madelon Leventhal Rand Chair in Literature. https://marjoriewelish.com/  is the website of her visual art practice.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry, including c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018, and, with Pat Clifford, washpark (Delete Press, 2021)). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He is the co-editor (with Jeanne Heuving) of an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). See: https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

Neda Zahraie is a writer, musician, painter, filmmaker and actress based in New York City. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Bar Scraps & Bathroom Confessionals (2010), and the hybrid book of poetry, Anamnèse which was recently staged as a hybrid performance piece at Rattlestick Theatre in NYC’s West Village. Trained as a classical pianist for over a decade, she switching her primary instruments to guitar and, subsequently, to voice. Neda writes and performs her original music under the moniker Kamalata. She is also a founder and member of the Synth Techno Rock trio, CHIC CHOC, a band in which she is co- composer, principal lyric writer, performer and singer. Her large format abstract paintings, as her writing, is impacted by the personal theme of growing up in war and inspired both by philosophical thought and works of literature—works that explore the relationship between trauma, security, synthesis and adaptation. Pushing the boundaries of the status quo, advocating experimentations in literature, music and film, her art is invariably oppositional, questioning the limits of mainstream art and culture, and applying methods that seek to surpass the limits of popular practice. She holds an M.A. in English Literature from the City College of New York, and a certificate of French Language & Civilization from Université Paris-Sorbonne. She is a reader/editor at OyeDrum literary magazine.