Make (No) Bones

Kevin Coval is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago—where he teaches hip-hop aesthetics—he’s mentored thousands of young writers, artists, and musicians.

He is the author and editor of 10 books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Schtick, and co-author of the play, This is Modern Art. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Daily Show, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fake Shore Drive, Huffington Post, and four seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Coval’s collection, A People's History of Chicago dropped in April 2017 on Haymarket Books.

Photo by Bryan Allen Lamb

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, recipient of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), Memories of my Overdevelopment (Kenning Editions, 2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011). He has translated poetry collections from Spanish, including Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia (Coimpress, 2016); Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). He lives in Chicago. 

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition will be reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015, and the audio book of that collection will be available in late 2017. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and is on faculty at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC.

Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit (Trio House Press, 2016) and Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009).  Her work has appeared in POETRY,  American Poetry Review, Essence, NYLON,  ESPNW and numerous anthologies. Tara is also one of the co-editors of The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century (2Leaf Press, 2017). Tara holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University and a MFA in Creative Writing from New England College. She teaches at University of Illinois-Chicago. She represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam as part of the first two Mental Graffiti slam teams, and has appeared on radio and television, including HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

Olivia Cronk is the author of Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). She co-edits The Journal Petra with Philip Sorenson, tweets @InterroPorn, and is an Instructor of Composition and Creative Writing at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, IL.

Jennifer Nelson’s first book of poems, Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife, came out with Ugly Duckling Presse in Dec. 2015. The second, Civilization Makes Me Lonely, was chosen by Anne Boyer for the Sawtooth Prize and will appear from Ahsahta Press in the spring of 2017. Nelson’s other work has appeared recently in BathHouse, LIT, Pinwheel, Wreck Park, and elsewhere. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. He is the author of Radios (Make Now Press, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2015), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His editorial work can be found online at UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and Jacket2. With Mashinka Firunts and Avi Alpert, he is one-third of the academic performance group Research Service. He is currently at work on a memoir entitled Apocalypse Diary. See also: http://dss-edit.com

Sara Wainscott’s recent work appears in DIAGRAM, The Journal Petra, Powder Keg, The Fairy Tale Review, BOAAT, The Collapsar, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of sevenlings is forthcoming from dancing girl press (Fall 2017). She co-curates Wit Rabbit, an inter-genre reading series in Chicago.

A founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, Kathleen Rooney is the co-editor with Eric Plattner of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Her second novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, has just been released by St. Martin’s Press. She teaches at DePaul University and lives in Chicago with her husband, the writer Martin Seay.
 

Photo by Eric Plattner

Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American poets, “ Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990).

His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and will be reissued in a new edition this fall. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.