Make (No) Bones

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Olio, his second collection, was published by Wave Books in April 2016. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry. His poetry has appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Mosaic, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Nashville Review and 580 Split.

Parneshia Jones is the author of Vessel: Poems (Milkweed Editions). After studying creative writing at Chicago State University, earning an MFA from Spalding University, and studying publishing at Yale University, Jones has been honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Her work has also been anthologized in She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, edited by Nikky Finney. A member of the Affrilachian Poets, she serves on the board of Cave Canem and Global Writes. She currently holds positions as Sales and Subsidiary Rights Manager and Poetry Editor at Northwestern University Press. Parneshia Jones lives in Chicago.

Photo by Susan Aurinko

Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is author of four poetry collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poems and stories have appeared in POETRY, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, LUNA, Prairie Schooner and the recent anthology, Stray Dogs. His work was included in the Poetry Society’s Poetry In Motion project, as well as the Poetry Foundation/NEA recitation program, Poetry Out Loud. He has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Grant, two Literary Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Josephine Gates Kelly Memorial Fellowship from Wordcraft Circle. He was the 2008/09 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and served as Visiting Writer-In-Residence for Spring 2014 at the Center For The Writing Arts at Northwestern University. Since 2009 he has been a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.

Find more information about the broadside of Mark's poem, "Battlefield," from Interbang Press, contact Mitch Marti at [email protected].

Hannah Gamble is the author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books, 2012), selected by Bernadette Mayer for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She has performed her work at the Pitchfork music festival, the Chicago Art Institute, The Chicago MCA, and as part of the Clark Street Bridge arts series in association with FCB Global.

Gamble's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Believer, jubilat, and Pleiades, and she has written for the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the culture magazine Fanzine. In 2014, Gamble was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. 

She lives in Chicago.

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Erika L. Sánchez is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf, 2017) and a Young Adult novel forthcoming from Knopf in the fall of 2017. Her nonfiction has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Read "A woman runs on the first day of spring" here.

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Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently, a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. Her book Museum of Accidents was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. Zucker teaches poetry at New York University and is currently delivering a series of lectures on the intersection of poetry, confession, ethics and disobedience as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She recently launched a podcast, Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People). 

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Natalie Eilbert is the author of the debut poetry collection, Swan Feast (Bloof Books, 2015). She is the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she will serve a one-year academic appointment. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Tin House, jubilat, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.

Photo by Kate Enman

Mike Lala (b. 1987, Lubbock, TX) is a poet who works with text, recorded sound, and, occasionally, images. His first book, Exit Theater, was selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming later this year. Current work can be found in Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Awl, and VOLT, as well as a number of chapbooks, most recently In the Gun Cabinet (TAR 2016) and Twenty-Four Exits (Present Tense Pamphlets 2016). He lives in New York. www.mikelala.com

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Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award, the Poetry International Prize as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem Foundation and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Third Coast and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the Programs Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Read "The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born" here.

Read "Legendary" here.

Hybrid artist/poet Jay Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including Chelate, Telephone (both from Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press), and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). He is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His performances and video poems have been featured in various festivals and series, including Meekling Press’ TALKS Series, Chicago Calling Arts Festival, Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}, and Absinthe & Zygote. Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous publications including Jacket2, Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature, PANK, Petra, Barzakh, The Collagist, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The VOLTA, and the CCM organs ENTROPY and ENCLAVE. He is a contributing editor with The Operating System, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago, where he lives with his partner and a very helpful cat.

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