the Poetry Project Podcast

Monday Reading Series

Simon Pettet, as well as the recent author of Hearth and As A Bee, is the author of More Winnowed Fragments among other poetry collections. Black Sparrow published his Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler in 1999. He is also the author of Talking Pictures and Conversations About Everything with the photographer Rudy Burckhardt. British by birth, he is a long-time resident of the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

Morgan Vo was born in Norfolk, Virginia, to a Vietnamese father and an American mother. He moved to NY to attend the Cooper Union, where he studied in performance and design. Under the New Pinky imprint, www.newpinky.org, he publishes small-edition zines, broadsides and other poetic projects. He lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Wednesday Reading Series

Joshua Clover is the author of two books of poetry and two of cultural history and theory. His new book of poetry, Red Epic, is forthcoming from Commune Editions (spring 2015) and a book on the political economy of struggle, Of Riot, will be published by Verso in spring 2016. His column “Pop & Circumstance” appears monthly in The Nation, and he has completed collaborative work including articles and essays, book manuscripts, and conference organization with Jasper Bernes, Aaron Benanav, Juliana Spahr, Chris Chen, Annie McClanahan, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Tatiana Sverjensky, and Chris Nealon. He is a founder of the 95¢ Skool and Durruti Free Skool, and recently co-organized the Poetry and/or Revolution conference. He is a professor of English Literature at the University of California Davis; in Spring, he will convene a Residential Research Group on culture and finance capital at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Wednesday Reading Series

Nicole Peyrafitte is a pluridisciplinary artist. Her latest project, “Bi-Valve: Vulvic Space / Vulvic Knowledge,” was published by StockportFlats. more info: www.nicolepeyrafitte.com.

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the author of As Water Sounds (Bootstrap 2014) and Palm to Pine (2011), as well as the small books 88 Haiku for Lorca (Push Press), Against What Light (Ypolita), Room Service Calls (Lew Gallery Editions) and Universal Fall Precautions (Well Greased Press). She left New Orleans for San Francisco to attend (the now defunct) New College of California. She lives in $F with her daughter Lorca and husband Micah, with whom she co-edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

Wednesday Reading Series

Bruce Andrews is an experimental poet, performance artist, literary theorist & recently retired (after 38 years) left-wing professor of political science. As Musical Director for Sally Silvers & Dancers, he has created sound designs and, in performance, live mixes of music & text for over two decades of performances.

Most recent of a dozen or so big books is last year’s You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, followed by a chapbook, Yessified (Sally’s Edit) celebrating the Andrews Symposium and its expanded archive, online at www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews, with links to interviews, performance texts, poetry, collaborations, and critical essays on his work. Another online archive (and interactive project) materialized on April 1, 2014 as a curated 25 hour ‘twitter sculpture’ [Twitter.com @BruceAndrews25h], a 300 poem sequence.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA/P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.

Friday Reading Series

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Pick of Fall 2014. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and is forthcoming or published in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and Third Coast, among others. A Kundiman fellow, she holds a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University, where she was a lecturer in creative writing and composition for three years. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches in the Asian American Studies department at Hunter College.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight books in multiple genres, most recently the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, a hacked carcinogenic farce which was selected to inaugurate the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights, as well as The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, which reads together authors as diverse as Jack Smith, Wilfred Owen, Aime Cesaire and Kim Hyesoon. With Johannes Goransson, Joyelle edits the international press Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Wednesday Reading Series

Robert Kocik is a prosodist and design/builder. He has a business for each letter of the alphabet. Of late, he has concentrated on the writing of libretti (investigative, political economy, somato-sonic musicals) for the Commons Choir which he co-directs with choreographer Daria Faïn. His cross-disciplinary writings move through the hard, soft and sore sciences to comprise a field called “Supple Science.” He is also a caregiver whose father recently turned 100. Kocik’s publications include AUKSO (gain) (Object, 1995), Overcoming Fitness (Exit 18/Autonomedia, 2001), Rhrurbarb (Field Books/Periplum Editions, 2007), All Peoples Calendar (Prosodic Body, 2009), E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2012), Supple Science (ON Contemporary Practice, edited by Michael Cross and Thom Donovan, 2013), Ubiquitous Dividend (Poets House handout, 2014) and Anatolia to Iowa (forthcoming.)

Camille Roy’s most recent book is Sherwood Forest, from Futurepoem (2011). Earlier books include Cheap Speech (a play, Leroy), Craquer (a fictional autobiography, 2nd Story Books), Swarm (two novellas, Black Star Series), The Rosy Medallions (poetry and prose, Kelsey St Press) and Cold Heaven (plays, O Books). She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative (CoachHouse 2005, re-issued 2010).

Wednesday Reading Series

Benjamin Hollander was born in Haifa, Israel and as a boy immigrated to New York City. He presently lives on the west coast of North America. His books include: In the House Un-American (Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing, Spring 2013); Memoir American (Punctum Books, Spring 2013); Vigilance (Beyond Baroque Books, 2005); Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli (Parrhesia Press, 2004); The Book of Who Are Was (Sun & Moon Press, 1997); How to Read, Too (Leech Books, 1992); and, as editor, Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France (ACTS, 1988).

Of his newest book, In The House Un-American, the poet David Shapiro says: “It is difficult to speak of Benjamin Hollander’s masterpiece, so America, so like an inner emigration, as if we had all changed names….A book of this order comes very rarely to our consciousness; we are so censorious of new genres….[T]his book exists as music barely heard in the air becomes music of our ground, grain.”

Fanny Howe has written numerous books of fiction, essays and poetry and has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lenore Marshall Award and the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her most recent collection of poetry Second Childhood was published by Graywolf Press. She is currently a Visiting Writer at Brown University.

Friday Reading Series

Maryam Parhizkar writes, researches and works via her musical training, and is completing her MA concentration in American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the managing editor of Litmus Press and the author of Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She will be joined by cellist Hamilton Berry for part of this reading/performance.

Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Through sculpture, installation, text and performance, she makes conceptually driven work with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. She received a BFA from the University of Michigan and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown at Magnan-Metz, Reverse, Art in General, Socrates Sculpture Park, MOMA P.S.1 and the Center for Performance Research. She has been an artist in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and the Physics Department at the University of Oregon. Her work has been featured in Time Out NY, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, PennSound, and thresholds (MIT Dept of Architecture). She holds teaching positions at Parsons, The New School for Design, SUNY Purchase, and Dia:Beacon.

Wednesday Reading Series

Ed Sanders is a poet, historian and composer. Sanders’ books include Tales of Beatnik Glory, 1968, a History in Verse; The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg; The Family, a history of the Charles Manson murder group; and Chekhov, a biography in verse. His 1987 collection, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, won an American Book Award. His selected poems, 1986-2008, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War, was published by Coffee House Press. In 2011, Da Capo Press published his memoir of the 1960s, Fug You. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, and a 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Prize. Sanders was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs. He lives in Woodstock, New York with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.

Park McArthur is an artist from North Carolina living in New York. Solo shows include Essex Street, New York; Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Yale Union, Portland, OR. Her writing has been included in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and The Happy Hypocrite. “Other forms of conviviality: the best and least of which is our daily care, the most of which is our collaborative work,” an essay co-written with Constantina Zavitsanos was included in Women & Performance: A journal of feminist theory’s special issue We are Born in Flames. She is co-editing the book Beverly Buchanan: 1978-1981 with Jennifer Burris Staton.

Wednesday Reading Series

Reina Gossett is the membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project as well as the 2014-2015 Activist-In-Residence at Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women. Reina is a filmmaker collaborating with Sasha Wortzel to write, direct and produce STAR PEOPLE ARE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, a film detailing the lives of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The film builds upon the archival research and published writing she has done over the past decade about Sylvia Rivera and STAR , published in Captive Genders (AK Press, 2011), The Scholar and The Feminist Online and her personal blog: reinagossett.com. Reina was a 2009 Stonewall Community Foundation Honoree as well as a recipient of the George Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship by the Open Society Foundation to work with LGBT people navigating criminalization. During her fellowship she partnered with Critical Resistance to curtail the prison industrial complex by organizing low income LGBTGNC New Yorkers in a campaign that successfully stopped NYC’s Department of Corrections from building a $375 million new jail in the Bronx.