Paradise Found Bookstore
Browse 136 titles, featuring many of the Hudson Valley's notable poets.
In “The White Room” of Green Kill is the Paradise Found Bookstore, named by the poet Noah David Roberts. The store currently contains 136 titles including books of poetry, fiction and visual art, featuring many of the Hudson Valley's notable writers. On this page, you can browse all the books in the store and read the writer profiles. If you are interested in buying one, please write to 229greenkill@greenkillorg. All proceeds from the sale of books go back to the writers.
Reincarnation by Street Light by Christopher Wheeling from CAPS Poetry 2020, #1
Paradise Found Bookstore Titles
Writer Profiles
This profile list is being assembled over time. In come cases the writers are being contacted for information. Please revisit this page.
CAPS (Calling All Poets)
Since our first open mic twenty years ago, Calling All Poets’ only goal has been community outreach and providing that community an open and democratic stage. To that end, CAPS has been hugely successful.
But other wonderful things have happened along the way, fulfilling CAPS larger vision. Its perseverance and duration have made it the longest running poetry series and the most diverse and dynamic in the Hudson Valley. CAPS has become what its founder, Beacon poet Jim Eve, and fellow poet Mike Jurkovic envisioned: a poetry hub, an expansive network connecting poets from New York, Long Island, Woodstock, Albany, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Early in 2015, with the addition of technologically adept poets Glenn Werner and Beacon's first Poet Laureate, Larry Sansone, CAPS urban and rural outreach includes the global community, streaming our events live and streaming in poets for live readings from all over NYS, as well as Arizona, Colorado, California, Slovenia, and North Carolina.
Relying on talent and tenacity CAPS has recently become 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. With funding possibilities now available, CAPS will continue, as it has successfully done in the past, to nurture the artistic and literary aspirations of its supporters. Many who started at CAPS open mic (and whom we still count as fervent supporters and members) include acclaimed playwright/poet/children's author/Pushcart Award winner Irene O'Garden; world renowned tattoo artist/poet Shotsie Gorman; author/poet/photographer Eddie Bell; poet/translator Bill Seaton, and performance poet Janet Hamill. Member poets Ken Holland, Matthew J. Spireng, Mike Jurkovic, and Glenn Werner are former Pushcart Award nominees. Suffolk County's first poet laureate and internationally recognized poet, George Wallace, is a frequent guest. National Slam finalist Elizabeth K. Gordon continues to bring her talents to CAPS. Several regional publishers, including Donald Lev, Dayl and Alison Kofler-Wise, Jane Ormand, and Susan Sindall are regulars. Mt. St. Mary professor and widely published poet Dr. James Cotter returns often. SUNY Nerw Paltz professor Laurence Carr and Chair of Creative Writing, Pauline Uchmanowicz regularly share their work. Award winning poets Raphael Kosek and Rebecca Schumejda call CAPS home. Besides numerous books bearing their names, CAPS supporters Will Nixon, Mike Jurkovic, Kate Hymes, Roberta Gould, Cheryl A. Rice, Dr. Lucia Cherciu, Dan Wilcox, Linda Lerner, and others have individually been published two hundred times and more at the national level. And, as CAPS prepares its second anthology, Beacon poet and publisher Roger Aplon has been highlighting our featured poets in his nationally distributed magazine, Waymark - Voices of the Valley since 2015.
2016 was been a watershed year for CAPS. Our recent certification as 501(c)(3) non-profit (EIN#46-4971399) will enable us to expand our program. Partnering with Roost Studios (www.roostcoop.org) provides us a greater community presence. Our second CAPSAnthology 2015 is hot off the presses. Our CAPS website, www.callingallpoets.net.is a veritable trove of poetic information, from open mic tips to poetic terminology; members work and bios; an active Hudson Valley Poetry calendar and even RideShare software. Live streaming of our events and the streaming of poets from afar, has taken Calling All Poets well beyond the Hudson Valley.
James Belflower
James Belflower is Teaching Assistant Professor at Siena College. As an interdisciplinary poet/critic his work investigates how we mingle with matter. He is the coauthor of the multimedia project Canyons (Flimb Press 2016) with Matthew Klane, The Posture of Contour (Spring Gun Press 2013), Commuter (Instance Press 2009), and Bird Leaves the Cornice, winner of the 2011 Spring Gun Press Chapbook Prize. His work appears, or is forthcoming in: Postmodern Culture, JML, PulpMouth, SOBER., & Barzkh among others. He is the content developer and graphic designer for Fence Digital, the electronic publishing platform of Fence Books.
Dasha Bazanova
Dasha Bazanova is an international mixed media artist living and working in NYC. She exhibits her work both nationally and internationally. Working in two and three dimensional art forms, she is propelled by the concepts of time, decay, and multi-sensory cognition. She uses discarded objects to create her artwork.
Michael Brownstein
Michael Brownstein is a poet, a novelist, and an activist. Often associated with Beat writing and both the New York School and a second generation of New York School poets, Brownstein moved to New York City in 1965 and quickly became part of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. In his poetry and prose, Brownstein draws on shamanic and indigenous healing practices from South America as well as non-Western wisdom and mystic traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Behind the Wheel (1967); Highway to the Sky (1969), which won a Frank O’Hara Poetry Award; 3 American Tantrums (1970); Strange Days Ahead (1975); and Oracle Night: A Love Poem (1982). His novels include Country Cousins (1974), The Touch (1987), and Self-Reliance (1994). His experiences in the anti-globalization movement led him to write the “treatise/poem” World on Fire (2002). Brownstein has taught at the University of Colorado, Columbia University, and the Naropa Institute.
Ralph Carusillo
A resident of New York State for most of my existence, I have been writing for over 25 years. I attend open readings around the Ulster, Orange, Sullivan and Dutchess counties.
Billie Chernicoff
Billie Chernicoff was conceived in the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg by a soldier and a ballerina, born left handed in Detroit, and educated at Bard College. She raised a daughter in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts where she lives with her husband and writes. She has worked as a printer, editor, teacher and gardener. Her book, The Pleasures, was published online in 2014. A book called A Drop is forthcoming in 2015 from Lines Chapbook.
John Digby
John Digby was born in London in 1938. He began writing Surrealist poetry from the early 1970s. He was influenced by Breton, Eluard, Arp, and Desnos. Although he was living in England, the first publications of his Surrealist poetry was in America during the time that he worked with George Hitchcock on Kayak Magazine in California. Three books of his poetry were published by Anvil Press Poetry in London: The Structure of Bifocal Distance (1974), Sailing away from Night (1978), and To Amuse a Shrinking Sun (1985). These were illustrated with his black and white collages, a medium he has continued to expand from figurative to abstract over the past several decades. Over the years, he was published in Wales, France, Belgium, Germany, Colombia, and Romania. His poetry is included in The Penguin Book of English Surrealism. In England, he was the co-founder of Caligula Books.
For the last 38 years, he has lived in Oyster Bay, New York, where he co-founded (with his wife Joan Digby) The Feral Press, which publishes digitally produced limited editions of illustrated booklets of poetry and short fiction. In 2017, the press migrated to New Feral Press. For the past several years, he has been collaborating with Hong Ai Bai on an extensive project publishing books devoted to English improvisations of classical Chinese poetry.
Lila Dunlap
From New Orleans, Lila Dunlap is a graduate of Bard College. Her most recent book of poetry is TRYSTS (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2019). Her previous collection, THE SEA COMES BACK, was published in 2017 by Lunar Chandelier Collective. Her chapbooks have been published by Metambesen and The Doris Press. Her work has appeared in The Doris Magazine, Open Space Magazine, The Bat, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. She lives in Catskill, NY.
Marcella Durand
Marcella Durand's forthcoming books include The Prospect from Delete Press (Spring 2019) and a new collection from Black Square Editions (Fall 2019), along with her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Earth's Horizons. Other publications include Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard (joca seria, 2016), Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, (Little Red Leaves); AREA (Belladonna); and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem), written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her long poem, "The Anatomy of Oil," was recently performed at sites of oil production in the Los Angeles area as part of an art exhibition at GasDot Gallery. She is currently working on her next collection, To Husband Is to Tender, and a translation of Métail's Toponym: Berlin.
David Fox
As something of a polymath, I continue to make art that is, hopefully, cogent, provocative, aware, and compelling. I work in visual arts as well as poetry and music. These various disciplines work together and nourish each other.
My work is post-modern in the sense that it embraces a wide range of subjects and disciplines. A new body of work always requires a new way of working. The old-school method of one-style-fits-all is constricting and out-dated. I employ a pluralist approach in my thinking and try to avoid a signature style. A single idea may manifest itself in various media as in my Interrogation series which resulted in work produced as drawings, prints, animation and a play.
A personal morality and an aching sense of redemption is the loam in which my work germinates. I work from a Humanist point of view. My subject is the human drama, the joy, love and sorrow of existence. I often draw on literature as a starting point for a series. Poetry and drama, including Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, the absurdist plays of Pinter and some poems by Zbigniew Herbert, are among my interests. But I also have drawn and painted construction sites, demolition sites, a series based on books, a series based on LP records, Dante's Inferno, war, power and abuse of power. I am not restricted in any sense by subject because the same sensibility is at work with each new project.
It is important to state that I work to discover the form my art will take and not with any a priori notions that are then merely illustrated. This may, and often does, require new materials and approaches that take me on a journey of exploration. This way I work, not for a market or to fulfill a role or style that an audience might expect, but to surprise and astonish myself and the public alike.
I also do not discriminate between subjects or impose a hierarchy. I find that life drawing and observational drawing are just as important as overt political statements I might make in other works. To me, they are all responses in one way or another to the Human Condition.
Verna Gillis
Verna Gillis is a free-lance producer who has gained recognition for her work promoting and producing music from various cultural backgrounds. Gillis holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. She was an assistant professor at Brooklyn College from 1974 to 1980 and at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 to 1990.
From 1972 to 1978, Gillis recorded traditional music in Afghanistan, Iran, Kashmir, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Surinam, and Ghana. In 1979, she opened Soundscape, the first multi-cultural performance space in New York City, on west 52nd Street which she directed for the next five years. Gillis, Soundscape and the music played there is the subject of a web based project by WKCR Radio 89.9 NY [1]
From 1984, Gillis worked on career development with international musicians including Youssou N'dour from Senegal, Yomo Toro from Puerto Rico; Salif Keitaform Mali, and Carlinhos Brown from Brazil.
Gillis has been the subject of a number of press articles, with The New York Times describing her as "the closest thing world music has to a doyenne".[2]
In 1996, she was hired as a consultant by the ICRC to accompany musicians on a trip to Angola, Liberia, Kenya and South African to witness first hand the results of ethnic cleansing. Gillis worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross to produce a CD.
Twenty-five of Gillis' recordings have been released by Smithsonian Folkways and Lyrichord.
As well, there have been 9 releases on DIW of Live from Soundscape tapes made during the years that the performance space which was located at 500 West 52nd Street was open.
In 2000, she was nominated for a Grammy in the Producer category for the Archie Shepp/Roswell Rudd Quartet Live in New York, and again in 2001 for Roswell Rudd's MALIcool.
She has performed "sit down comedy" – and has a One Older Woman show Tales from Gerriassic Park- On the Verge of Extinction. She has published two books "I Just Want to be Invited - I Promise Not to Come, and I'll Never Know If I Would Have Gotten The Same Results if I'd Been Nice.
Anne Gorrick
Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of six books of poetry including: An Absence So Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light (the Operating System, 2018); The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017), and A’s Visuality (BlazeVOX, 2015). She co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016). She has 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 has also collaborated on in-depth visual and textual projects with Scott Helmes and John Bloomberg-Rissman. With Melanie Klein, she curates the reading series Process to Text, which focuses on innovative writing from in and around New York’s Hudson Valley.
Roberta Gould
I began writing in my 20’s and by age 30 I had made a full committment to the art, working most days but not sure where I wanted to go. To say or Not to say?
My early work had a decided surreal influence though I attempted to make the poems accessible to readers. Musicality and cadence of language have always been important to me,the sound of our language with meaning.
Early on I was influenced by poet Pedro Garfias an exile in Mexico, generation of ’28, with great craft and beauty in his poetry and with always the desire to tell the truth. Among others were Gerard Manley Hopkins with the great thrust of his “sprung” rhythm” and, totally different, the poet Syzmborska with her range of subjects amazingly interesting and which, very often, no one else could have thought of as material for poetry.
While attempts have been made to bring poetry into the mainstream, artists in the USA are separate from the general population. What gardiner or waiter, secretary or account has poetry in mind? This is not so in more than a few other cultures. A Neruda living here would have the usual limited audience of an art subculture . When meeting people, I do not pull out my work and offer it as a topic of conversation. This is how we operate unless among fellow writers.
As far as the day by day life, I try to make each day worthy of the air I breathe. I do not force myself to write and try to be aware while sweeping or swimming, sitting or walking. I no longer count on dreams as material for poems but as always I revise and revise for precision and for sound and with respect for the language which a poet must be concerned with.
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen was raised in Oakland California USA. He graduated from Bishop O'Dowd High School in 1961 and attended six colleges. After reading the poems of the characters in Kerouac's books, he felt he'd found his life's vocation and headlong began trying to be a Beat poet in 1965. He has traveled and read his poetry all over North America and the world. (New York, California, Alaska, Texas, Prague, Kathmandu, Amsterdam etc.) He has maintained a driven intrepid lifestyle and aspired to be a champion of the underdog. He has had many occupations studying humanity and earning a living. Clausen has written about his friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, Peter Orlovsky, and many others of the Beat Generation.
He has lectured at universities, high schools, and art centers. Clausen has taught at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. He was co-editor of, POEMS FOR THE NATION, with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz (Seven Stories Press). He was an editor at LONG SHOT Magazine. Clausen wrote about Ray Bremser
and appears in Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (Kurt Hemmer, editor) Clausen has back packed around the world and has resided in over twenty states and provinces.
For twelve years AC conducted poetry workshops in the NY state prison system for Incision Arts. In 1999 Clausen began teaching poetry in the schools under the auspices of Teacher's & Writers Collaborative. Andy now resides in Woodstock, NY, where he teaches, writes, and performs his work. He lived with Janine Pommy Vega the last 12 years of her life and celebrates The Annual Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival in Woodstock.
Teresa Costa
Teresa Costa (sometimes referred to as Teresa Marta Costa) is a diehard poet dedicated to promoting poetry throughout the Hudson Valley. She has hosted the Woodstock Goddess Festival (2012 and 2013) and poetry readings in Saugerties, Woodstock, and Kingston, NY since 2002. She currently runs the Word of Mouth Poetry series at the ArtBar in Kingston, NY. Costa has been published in Wildflowers: a Woodstock Anthology (Shivastan Press), Other #6, Stained Sheets, Chronogram, Home Planet News, Up the River, Riverine (Codhill Press), Companions (Crazy Ladies Press), Walt’s Corner, Long Island Quarterly, HeyDay Magazine, among many others. She has lectured at Northeast College of Poetry on the Beat Poets and has done a workshop at the Seligman Center in Sugarloaf, NY on the Jazz Poets.
Brenda Coultas
Brenda Coultas is the author of the poetry collections A Journal of Places(online, Metambesen Press, 2015), The Tatters (Wesleyan University Press, 2014), The Marvelous Bones of Time (Coffee House Press, 2007), and A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003). Her poetry can be found in anthologies, including Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology(2017), What is Poetry (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009) (2017), and Symmetries: Three Years of Art and Poetry at Dominique Levy (2017).
Elizabeth Cunningham
Elizabeth Cunningham (born 1953) is a feminist visionary novelist and author of The Maeve Chronicles, which includes the books The Passion of Mary Magdalen, Magdalen Rising (a prequel), Bright Dark Madonna and Red-Robed Priestess. Earlier books include The Wild Mother and How To Spin Straw Into Gold.
A descendant of nine generations of Episcopal priests, Cunningham expressed the desire to reconcile her Christian origins with a sense of the Divine Feminine. She completed her undergraduate work in English at Harvard in 1976. Now an ordained interfaith minister, she is in private practice as a counselor. Cunningham is also director of the Center at High Valley in New York's Hudson Valley.
Edith Decker-Phillips
Published originally in German, Paik Video is the first English language edition of this full treatment of the “Father of Video Art,” Nam June Paik. Richly illustrated with photographs and descriptions of his works, it includes a definitive discussion of the artist’s claim to be the first Video Artist. A “must-read” for all persons interested in Video Art, this book will also be essential to all serious art collections and is an ideal introduction to the field.
Vito Desalvo
Originally from Pittsburg, Vito went through art training at Carnegie Mellon University. He lived in Chicago starting in the late 1970’s and in 1998 moved to Maine for ten years. He returned and has been creating artwork in Chicago ever since.
His current work, International People in the Know, is his reflection on interpersonal relations in today’s world. He has chosen both fictitious faces as well as actual subjects of people in his life. The backgrounds suggest no clue as to place, identity or nature of the conversation. The artist only offers the finality of the implied statement. In some of the faces is a lingering hint of relating the knowing implication of their comments. Others possess only a sense of innocent use of common use phrases. Vito has made comments related to these pieces that all serious conversations eventually lead to a confirmed answer form of ‘no’
Peter Christian Hall
Peter Christian Hall, author of American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence, is a writer and filmmaker who grew up in upstate New York and has visited more than 50 countries. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the School of International & Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he later was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow. He currently lives in Woodstock and Manhattan.
Hall's words have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, the Village Voice, Reuters.com, Mother Jones, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Big Money. He served as executive editor at Financial World.
Hall wrote, produced, and directed Delinquent, a feature film (with an original soundtrack from Gang Of Four). It sold on five continents and played in American movie theaters for months. (Watch the trailer!)
When the movie opened in LA, the Los Angeles Times said:
“Delinquent is one of those great little near-no-budget movies that every now and then seem to come out of nowhere to give hope for a truly independent American cinema. It marks a stunning feature debut for writer-director Peter Hall, who never makes a false move as he builds suspense right from the start.
Janet Hamill
Janet Hamill was born in Jersey City, NJ. For her first five years, she gazed across the Hudson from the Palisades in Weehawken before her family moved to New Milford in Bergen County. She attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in south Jersey, where she earned a BA in English. After graduation, she made New York City her home base, interweaving jobs in bookstores with travels across the U.S.A. and down into Mexico. She took a freighter across the Atlantic and travelled through southern Europe, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Upon her return, Janet’s first book of poetry was published in 1975. Troublante (Oliphant Press), was followed by The Temple(Telephone Books), Nostalgia of the Infinite (Ocean View Books), Lost Ceilings (Telephone Books), Body of Water (Bowery Books), Tales from the Eternal Cafe (Three Rooms),Knock (Spuyten Duyvil) and Real Fire (Alexandria Quarterly Press).
Her work has been nominated for the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Tales from the Eternal Cafe, her first collection of fiction, was named "One of the Best Books of 2014" by Publisher's Weekly.
Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Resist Much, Obey Little, InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, The Low-Tech Manual, Living With the Animals, The Unmade Bed, Deep Down: The New Sensual Writing by Women, Bomb, City Lights Review, Alexandria Quarterly, New Wilderness, The World, Recluse, Cafe Review, Poetry Flash, and the Hart Crane Newsletter.
A strong proponent of the spoken word, she has read at The Poetry Project, The People's Poetry Gathering, The Knitting Factory, The Andy Warhol Museum, Central Park Summer Stage, as well as other venues across the US, in Ireland and England. In collaboration with the band Moving Star, she's released two CD's of spoken word married to garage rock: Flying Nowhere and Genie of the Alphabet. Her poem "A Thousand Years" was set to the music of contemporary Irish composer Ian Wilson. Under the title "How Goes the Night," it premiered at Symphony Space in November 2018.
She received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from New England College in 2014.
Janet presently resides in NY's Hudson Valley where she serves as director of Megaphone Language Arts at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY.
R. Cole Heinowitz
B.A., University of California, San Diego; M.A., Ph.D., Brown University. Previously taught at Dartmouth College, Brandeis University, and Brown. Monograph: Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh University Press, February 2010). Scholarly articles have appeared or are forthcoming in European Romantic Review; Revista Hispánica Moderna; Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature; “Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic”: Essays in British and American Romanticism; Connecting Continents: Britain and Latin America, 1780–1900; and Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary. At Bard since 2004.
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins (1938–1998) was an American artist, composer, art theorists, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement (and community). Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of using electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
Susan Hoover
Susan Hoover is a poet and teaching artist who has been a featured reader at such venues as The New School, the Knitting Factory and the Cornelia Street Café in New York City. She has also performed regionally at several Woodstock Poetry Festivals, the Colony Arts Center, and the Woodstock Artists Association. Susan was a member of All Right! Girls, a poetry performance group, with Nancy Rullo and Janice King. Her poems have been published inIsinglass Review, Cold Mountain Review, Cover Arts New York, University of Colorado Literary Magazine, EPT, Dark Thirty, Home Planet News, Chronogram, and Granite. Her books include The Magnet and the Target (The New School Chapbook Series, 1995) and Taxi Dancer (Exotic Beauties Press, 1979). Her poems have been anthologized in lifeblood: woodstock poetry society anthology (Chickaree Press, 2011) and As If the World Had Not Known Sorrow (The Poets Press, 1986). A singer songwriter and guitarist, she taught guitar at the Mannes College of Music and the Guitar Study Center in New York City. Born in Montreal, Susan grew up in Williamstown, MA, and lived for many years in New York City’s West Village. She now resides with her two cats, James Joyce and Tiger Magritte, in Woodstock, NY.
Sharon Israel
Sharon Israel, poet and soprano, has a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.S. from the New School of Social Research. She was an early recipient of Brooklyn College's Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award, and her work most recently appeared in Per Contra, SPANK the CARP, 5:2 Crime Poetry Weekly, Medical Literary Messenger and Spry Literary Journal. Her poem, “Melodrama at the Biograph”was nominated by 5:2 Crime Poetry Weekly for 2016 Best of the Net Anthology (Sundress Publications).
Her chapbook, Voice Lesson, was published by Post Traumatic Press in 2017. Sharon was a local news reporter, feature writer and music critic for Courier-Life publications, Women’s ENews and for the late, lamented Brooklyn Phoenix; she worked as a shoe saleswoman, microbiology lab technician, secretary, had a short stint as a municipal bond salesperson, and worked over two decades as a grant writer and development director.
Sharon collaborates with composer Robert Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments, and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York. She hosts the radio program, Planet Poet-Words in Space, an edition of the Writer's Voice, on WIOX FM, in Roxbury, New York.
Mick Jurkovic
Mike Jurkovic’s poems and music criticism have appeared everywhere but generate no reportable income. Mike is the author of the poetry collection, Purgatory Road (Pudding House Press, 2010) and his work has appeared in the anthologies WaterWrites and Riverine (Codhill Press, 2009, 2007), and Will Work for Peace (Zeropanik, 1999). He is currently the co-director of Calling All Poets in New Paltz, NY and producer of CAPSCAST, live readings from the Calling All Poets Series available on www.callingallpoets.net and iTunes. His CD reviews and regional music features appear in Elmore Magazine, Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange and the Van Wyck Gazette. He loves Emily most of all. www.mikejurkovic.com
Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly grew up in Brooklyn and was drawn to poetry upon encountering Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in an anthology. Educated at the City College of the City University of New York and Columbia University, Kelly is known as a founder of the Deep Image movement, which he described in a 2006 interview as “the journey to the depths with language as our only tool and music our only weapon.”
Kelly’s more than 50 collections of poetry include Armed Descent (1961); Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News (1980), chosen as the Los Angeles TimesBook of the Year; Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960–1993 (1995); and May Day(2007). Bookforum critic Joseph Donahue, praising Lapis (2005), noted that Kelly “has given magic back its dignity, finding it in human warmth.” Kelly’s free-verse poetry, both spare in language and wide-ranging in its attention, is often engaged with the intimacy of audience: the connection forged between individuals looking outward together.
Kelly co-founded, with George Economou, both Trobar and the Chelsea Review (now Chelsea), and has edited Matter. Kelly has also served as a contributing editor for several other journals. His poetry has been featured several times in Best American Poetry and has been included in The Voice That Is Great Within Us (1971) and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology(1994). He has co-edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets (1965), written numerous works of fiction, and published an essay collection, In Time (1972). His work has been translated into several languages.
Kelly’s honors include an Award for Distinction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Bard College, where he was a founding member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Alison Koffler
Alison Koffler was the recipient of the Green Heron Poetry Award in 2011 and was the 2016 winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Award for poetry, having won it as well as in 1993, 2000, and 2006. Her poems are included in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, SUNY Press, 2013 and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets and Writers, Bright Hill Press, 2017. She lives in the Bronx and Woodstock, NY with her husband, the poet Dayl Wise, and their dog, Cole.
Mark Lennon
I was a short scene writer for a talent troupe, and co-wrote a film "Four". I returned to writing and decided to publish 28 Tee Shirts.
Donald Lev
Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of both The Daily News and The New York Times , and then drove a taxi cab for twenty years (with a 6 year hiatus in which he ran messages for and contributed poetry to The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969, the same year his brief underground film acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of the Poet in Robert Downey Sr.'s classic Putney Swope . He met Enid Dame (1943-2003) at a N. Y. Poet's Cooperative meeting in 1976. They became life partners in 1978, and in 1979 founded the literary tabloid Home Planet News.
Gary Lindorff
I am a writer / poet, dreamworker, living in Southern Vermont with my wife, Shirley and our three cats. Author of six published works: two collections of poetry published by Two Plums Press: The Last RecurrentDream and The Blue Man: Poems for the Late Nuclear Age (originally published in 1981), (non-fiction) New Wasichu, Crossing: Our Story is Just Beginning, a “call to redeem our ways and to begin walking a path that is spiritually and ecologically sustainable” (quoting Tom Cowan, from back cover), 13 Seeds: Health, Karma and Initiation, a memoir of sorts, available through Indiebound, Children to the Mountain (Hearth Press), a collection of poetry for our times, and Healing the Land with Tao: An Overture to North Americans (available, April, 2018). I am also the resident poet for the leftist internet journal, ThisCantBeHappening.net,
Counselor with a private home practice, I offer a free consult / session and am happy to adjust my fee based on financial considerations. (I am willing to work online, via email or Skype, especially when the work involves dreams because in most dreams archetypal patterns and themes arise, providing a clear map for the work.) My background is in Jungian Psychology (40 years of dreamwork and shadow work) and Shamanism (guided journeys and working directly with nature). I also offer guided wilderness fasts in the area, respectfully drawing on the traditional Native American vision quest.
My passion is being with and working with the land. We host story fires and healing ritual on our own land, offering several events every year, advertised locally.
Andrew McCarron
Andrew McCarron (B.A., Bard; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.Phil, Ph.D, Graduate Center of The City University of New York) currently chairs the Religion, Philosophy, & Ethics Department at Trinity School in Manhattan, and also teaches in the English Department. He has published a collection of poetry called Mysterium (Edgewise Press, 2011), and two book-length psychological studies of artists’ lives: Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle, and Paul Violi (Station Hill Press, 2015), and Dylan on Dylan: the transfigurations of an American troubadour (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2015).
James Minnis
James Minnis was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1954; his childhood was divided between Terre Haute and a cattle farm in eastern Illinois. At the age of fifteen he stole a copy of “Leaves of Grass” and concluded that creating something from nothing was the ultimate success. After majoring in premed for two and a half years at Indiana State University, he was encouraged by a university therapist to change his major to art. A year later, in 1975, he had a painting accepted into “American Painters in Paris” show. In 1976 he moved to New York and started developing his poetry while also working with film and synthesizer music. He travelled most of the next six years, including a winter in Kashmir where he was adopted by a Sufi family.
He had his first featured reading at Wave Books in Soho, in 1980, and self-published his first book, “Rare as Believers” in 1981. In 1982 his son, Rory, was born. During the 1990s, Minnis toured Europe almost every year, reading in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. In the midst of composing his ninth book of poetry, he abruptly quit, and studied Tae Kwon Do.
In 2016 Minnis moved to Baia Mare, Romania with his wife, Miha, and second son, Gavi. A year later he was tracked down by poet Noah David Roberts, who found a book of his poetry, “1,2,3,4,5,6 Selections,” previously owned by David Rattray, in a Kingston used bookshop. Noah offered to republish two of his books in one volume. This sparked his return to poetry. In November of 2018, he did his first live reading in almost twenty years at Greenkill in Kingston, New York.
He’s currently prepping the completed books ten and eleven for publication.
Joel Newberger
Joel Newberger writes and teaches in New York City. He is an editor of Oread Press. His work has been published in Galatea Resurrects and The Doris. He is the author of Four, a pamphlet published by The Doris/Books in 2016 and A CAW (Oread Press, 2017).
Perry S. Nicholas
Perry S. Nicholas is an English professor at SUNY Erie Community College in Buffalo, N.Y., where he was awarded the 2008 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities and the 2011 President’s Award for Classroom Instruction. He received the SGA’s Outstanding Teacher Award on two occasions. He has been a guest lecturer at Daemen College, Villa Maria College, Buffalo State College, Niagara County Community College, and at New York College in Athens, Greece.
Perry has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2010. His poems have appeared in Common Ground Review, Literary House Review, Caesura, Word Worth, Silver Birch Press, Snapdragon, Verse-Virtual, Slant, Feile-Festa, Louisiana Literature, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Chest, The Healing Muse, New York Quarterly, Great Lakes Review, and Chronogram. His poems have appeared on over twenty occasions in the Buffalo News. He has published approximately 150 poems in print and online. They also appear in the anthologies Right Here, Right Now, Resurrection of a Sunflower, and Flash in the Dark. In February, 2013, Perry judged the Just Buffalo Annual Poetry Contest and the national Poetry Out Loud competition at SUNY Erie.
In 2013, he read in Greenwich Village's Cornelia Cafe in NYC. In 2016, he was featured at the well-known Cafe Lena in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In 2017, he directed the Writers Workshop for Just Buffalo. He has edited local anthologies and written many book reviews.
His first full-length book, The River of You, was published in September 2009 by FootHills Publishing. His second book of poetry, What the World Sees, was published by Saddle Road Press in July 2011. His third book, Small Crafts, was published by The Writer’s Den in March, 2012, and Perry's fourth and latest book, Beginnings: Poems to Greece and Back, was released in early December, 2012. Perry has put out five chapbooks, Ancient History, in 2013 , Like Trying to Explain, in 2014, Emergency Visit in 2015, The Poet Upstairs in 2017 and Laundry n 2018. His poem "The Last Night We Heard Bob Dylan Play" was nominated for the Best of the Net in 2018. Perry's newest book, Why I Learned to Spell was recently published by The Writer's Den.
Perry Nicholas has co-hosted the Lewiston Arts Café in Lewiston, NY, the Screening Room Poetry Series, Empire State College's Poetry Series, the Center for Inquiry Poetry Series, and the Buffalo Corner Series. .Perry has read his poetry in Schenectady, New Paltz, Albany, Campbell Hall, and Woodstock, Saratoga Springs, and NYC, N.Y.
Will Nixon
Will Nixon grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, spent his young adulthood in Hoboken and Manhattan, then moved to a Catskills log cabin in 1996 complete with a wood stove and mice. For years, he wrote environmental journalism, then turned to poetry and personal essays. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed in Best American Essays 2004. He now lives in Woodstock, NY with a wall thermostat for heat, but still can't get rid of the mice.
Valery Oisteanu
Valery Oisteanu was born September 3, 1943. is a Soviet-born Romanian and American poet, art critic, essayist, photographer and performance artist, whose style reflects the influence of Dada and Surrealism.[1] Oisteanu is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of short fiction, and a book of essays.[1] He is the brother of Romanian historian of religion, cultural anthropologist and writer Andrei Oișteanu.
Tamas Panitz
Tamas Panitz is the author of Blue Sun (Inpatient Press); Uncreated Mirror (Lunar Chandelier); and Upper Earth (Oread Press). He edited Pierre Joris’ American Suite (Inpatient Press). A new book Invisible Marches (Lunar Chandelier) is forthcoming this year. He lives in Catskill, NY.
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro is the author of Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Wave Books, 2013). Santiago was born José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (Mexico City, 1953). In 1975, he and Roberto Bolaño founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement. During his lifetime, Santiago Papasquiaro published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de cisne (1996). Santiago Papasquiaro died in Mexico City in 1998.
Evan Pritchard
Evan Pritchard (a Mi’kmaq descendant) is a well-known poet, author of Greetings from Mawenawasic(Foothills), Red Head Band (Resonance Books) and many more, was a contributor to Tending the Fire (Univ of New Mexico), and was editor of Resonance Magazine. His poetry was included as part of a production of "Cedars" at LaMaMa in 2015 and a Chris Felver documentary called Tending The Fire. He is also the author of Writing is Becoming (Resonance) and fifty other books, and is well known for his song lyrics.
George Quasha
George Quasha is the co-founder of Barrytown/Station Hill Press. He is a poet and artist who works across mediums to explore principles in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, installation, and performance. His books of poetry include Somapoetics, Giving the Lily Back Her Hands, and [with Chie Hasegawa] Ainu Dreams. He is also the co-editor of America a Prophecy [with Jerome Rothenberg], Open Poetry [with Ronald Gross], An Active Anthology [with Susan Quasha], and The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [with Charles Stein]. His most recent book is Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry (1975), and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in video art (2006).
Carter Ratcliff
Carter Ratcliff is a poet who writes about art. He first published his poetry in The World and other magazines in the orbit of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, in downtown Manhattan. In recent yearspoems of his have appeared in The Sienese Shredder, The Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, Hudson River Art, Vanitas, Cover Magazine, among other journals; and in In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson Valley (Station Hill, 2015); The KGB Bar Book of Poems(New York: Harper Perennial, 2000); and Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2001). His books of poetry include Fever Coast (New York: Kulchur Press, 1973); Give Me Tomorrow (New York: Vehicle Press, 1983); and Arrivederci, Modernismo (New York: Libellum Press, 2004). A Contributing Editor of Art in America, Ratcliff has published art criticism in leading journals in the United States and Europe, as well as catalogs published by the Museum of Modern Art; El Museo del Barrio; the Guggenheim Museum; the Royal Academy, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and other institutions. Among his books on art are The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art 1965-1975 (New York: Allworth Press, 2000); and Andy Warhol: Portraits (London: Phaidon Press, 2006). Since 2003, Ratcliff has lived with his wife, Phyllis Derfner, in the Hudson River Valley.
Guy Reed
Guy Reed is a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and author of the poetry chapbook, The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press). Most recently, he published and read two lyrical prose pieces on the podcast, The Strange Recital. He’s published poems in Poetry East and contributed two poems, performing one, in a featured role for the independent feature film, I Dream Too Much (2015, The Orchard), available on Netflix. In 2018, he co-wrote and directed the short film, How The World Looks Now, about poetic perspective as after-effect of the Earthrise photo and the Apollo astronauts’ experiences in space. Guy has lived in Minnesota, California, and Oregon. He now resides in New York’s Catskill Mountains with his wife and their two children.
Evelyn Reilly
Evelyn Reilly’s books of poetry include Styrofoam, Apocalypso and Echolocation, all of which are published by Roof Books. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies, among them The Arcadia Project: Postmodernism and the Pastoral, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene, In|Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line, The &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and Earth Bound: Compass Points for an Ecopoetics (forthcoming). Reilly's essays have been published in Omniverse, The Eco-language Reader, and Interim, and are forthcoming in The Supposium (Litmus Press) and Buffalo Poetry and Poetics: A History of Innovative Writing (Lake Forest Press). She has taught poetics at St. Marks Poetry Project and the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, and has been a co-curator of the Segue Reading Series.
Cheryl A. Rice
Cheryl A. Rice’s work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Florida Review, Home Planet News, Mangrove, The Temple, andWoodstock Times, among others. Chapbooks include Llama Love (2017: Flying Monkey Press), Moses Parts the Tulips(2013: APD Press), and My Minnesota Boyhood (2012: Post Traumatic Press). Rice is founder and host of the now-defunct “Sylvia Plath Bake-Off.” Her RANDOM WRITING workshops are held throughout the Hudson Valley. Her poetry blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/.
Noah David Roberts
“Schizo Mind & Bad Art”
messy/uncalculated/spontaneous/collage/mixed-media/improvisational/expository/poetic/jargon/puzzling/these fragments I have shored against my ruins
My collage work, while spontaneous, uncalculated, and improvisational, is intended to speak truth to power first and foremost. I am an anarchist, and there are many quiet, violent power structures in the current American Capitalist State that I find violating and disturbing. It is secondly introspective, and often a diagram of myself.
I hope to use the confusing, poetic, fragmented format of collage to draw out that which is hidden in our collective blind spots, whether outward or inward. I am a poet first, and this is always my goal. I am not a trained artist; I am merely someone who likes to make things.
This collection of works are primarily focused on how place and setting are affected by one’s mindset. My pieces engage the viewer in derangement, in confusion, in psychosis, often in confusing jargon. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T.S. Eliot once said. There is peace in the chaos, knowledge in the confusion, and truth in the derangement.
Tom Romeo
I guess I’d be considered an Outsider Poet. I’ve been writing and performing my work since the mid-1990s, but have no academic background in poetry. Originally from Long Island where I was a member of the Long Island Permance Poets Association, I moved to Kingston, NY in 2014 where I self-published two Chapbooks: Remember? and Demented Love, and am currently working on a third entitled OMG. My poetry is personal, political and Spiritual.”
Michael Ruby
Michael Ruby is the author of six full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019). His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes the ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). He is also the author of the ebooks Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018), and four chapbooks with the Dusie Kollektiv, including The Star-Spangled Banner. He coedited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s prose collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020). A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he works as an editor of US news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
Charles Stein
harles Stein is the author of ten books of poetry including The Hat Rack Tree (1994), Parts and Other Parts (1982), Horse Sacrifice (1980), and Poems and Glyphs (1973). Robert Kelly has called Stein “. . .a poet with all the means of his craft at hand. . .one of the smartest men of his generation, and one of its most exemplary poets.” Stein also is the author of the critical study The Secret of The Black Chrysanthemum (1987, Station Hill Press), a critical study of Charles Olson’s poetry and prose, and the editor of Being = Space x Action: Searches for Freedom of Mind in Mathematics, Art and Mysticism(1998).
Stein has collaborated and continues to work with George Quasha in the production of “dialogical” criticism: innovative approaches to the discussion of literature, art, and related concerns. He is the inventor and practitioner of a species of “Sound Poetry” and has published “Text-Sound Texts” arising from his work in both music and literature.
Edward Sanders
dward Sanders is a poet, historian, and musician. Sanders took up concerns of Beat poetry and the 1960s countercultural movement in his work. He writes research-driven investigative poetry, at times taking biography as his subject.
From 1998 to 2011, Sanders wrote the nine-volume America, a History in Verse. Portions of this manuscript were supported by Sanders's 1997 Grants to Artists grant. His books of prose include A Book of Glyphs, Tales of Beatnik Glory (1990), The Family (1971), a history of the Charles Manson murder group, Chekhov (1995), a biography in verse of Anton Chekhov, and Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (2011).
Other publications include Investigative Poetry, (1976) 1968, a History in Verse (1997), FCPA-supported The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg (2000). His selected poems, 1986-2008, Let's Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War (2009), was published by Coffee House Press. Sanders' collections of poetry include Poem from Jail (1963), Poems for New Orleans (2008), and Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985 (2009).
Previous to his FCPA grant, Sanders received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1983), and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1987).
Sanders earned a B.A. in Ancient Greek at New York University. He founded and published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in the 1960s. For eight years he published the Woodstock Journal, a biweekly newspaper. In addition to writing, Sanders is the founder of the satiric folk-rock group The Fugs, which has released many albums during its nearly fifty-year history.
Karen Shasha
Karen Shasha works with photographs, installation, and artist books. Most recently, she has been composing and singing songs, and telling stories in performance with installation. Her photo work has led to her interests in storytelling, event and fairy tale.
She studied philosophy, history of art and sculpture at Yale University and has an MA in photography from the New York University and International Center of Photography masters program. She has taught at NYU, and performed at Middlebury College as well as in several NYC venues.
Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Yale University Art of the Book Collection. Her work is also in the collections of the Maison Européene de la Photographie,the Pompidou Center and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France, and the Velan Association in Turin, Italy.
Gary Siegel
Gary Siegel has read his poetry, hosted poetry nights, curated a film night and been a featured reader at Green kill. He released his first book of poetry “ In the Cradle of Silence” in 2019 at Green kill. Gary has very generously answered the Green Kill “Ten Questions” and consented to the inclusion of a video he released June 4, 2019.
Tom Thompson
Tom Thompson is the author of The Pitch, Live Feed, and Passenger (forthcoming in Fall 2018). He has won grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America, and published poems, essays, and reviews in such journals as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Volt. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Miranda Field, and their two sons.
Edwin Torres
A self-proclaimed “lingualisualist” rooted in the languages of sight and sound, Edwin Torres was born in the Bronx and is a longtime resident of New York City. He is a poet whose highly acclaimed performances and live shows combine vocal and physical improvisation and theater. He is the author of the collections Ameriscopia (2014), One Night: Poems For The Sleepy (2012), Yes Thing No Thing (2011), In the Function of External Circumstances (2010), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (2007), Please (2004), Onomalingua: noise songs and poetry (2002), The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (2001), and Fractured Humorous (1999); the chapbooks Lung Poetry (1994), with photographs by Luigi Cazzaniga; and the self-published chapbooks I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said (1992) and SandHomméNomadNo (1997). His recordings include Oceano Rise, Novo, and Holy Kid.
His visual poetics have been exhibited at Exit Art, EFA Gallery in NYC, and a graphic retrospective Poesís: The Visual Language of Edwin Torres at the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. His work has been widely anthologized in volumes such as Postmodern American Poetry (2013), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics Vol. 2 (2007), and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café (1998), among others.
Torres has collaborated with artists in a variety of media. As a member of Real Live Poetry (formerly Nuyorican Poets Café Live) from 1993 to 1999, he gave workshops and performed in the United States and abroad. He continues to teach his process-oriented creativity workshop, “Brainlingo: Writing The Voice Of The Body” across the nation. He created and conducted a series of structured improvisations called Poets Neurotica, and has explained the origins and tenets of his movement as “i.e. (interactive eclecticism).”
In describing Torres’s eclectic style, Brenda Coultas wrote of Fractured Humorous in a review: “It is a visit with the fractist, who in healing becomes the healer. The nomad is a constant in Torres’s work, an alter ego for this poet who is claimed by a diverse group of avant-garde factions that include: The Nuyorican Poets Café, Poetry Project, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Thus he finds himself a nomad, a traveler among poets.” And according to poet and critic Juliana Spahr, “Edwin Torres is our 21st Century Mayakovsky.”
Torres has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has also been awarded the Nuyorican Poets Café Fresh Prize for Poetry, and his CD Holy Kid was included in the Whitney Museum’s exhibit The American Century Pt. II. He is coeditor of the journal/app Rattapallax.
From 2008 to 2011, he was a periodical guest blogger for the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet.
Sam Truitt
Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. His books include Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (SHP, 2012, Vertical Elegies: Three Works (UDP, 2008), Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia, 2003) and Anamorphosis Eisenhower (Lost Roads, 1998), among other books. An excerpt of Raton Rex (from Three Works) was selected by Robert Creeley for 2002 Best American Poetry (Scribner), and his work has also been anthologized in A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (Fence Books, 2009) American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Explosive, Jacket, Talisman, and First Intensity, among other journals. His critical writing may be found in Fulcrum and the American Book Review. His works of visual poetry have been exhibited at the Rothstein Gallery, Tonic and the St. Marks Poetry Project and may be seen on www.ubu.com, among other sites. His writing is in a semi-permanent installation at the Paramount Hotel’s Whiskey Bar, designed by Philippe Starck, off Times Square in New York City.
He is the recipient of a 2010-2011 George A. and Eliza Howard Fellowship, two Fund for Poetry grants, the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia and residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center, among other professional acknowledgments.
Sam Truitt holds a BA from Kenyon College, MFA from Brown University, and a PhD from SUNY-Albany, where he teaches, as well as at Bard College. He is also the Managing Director of Station Hill of Barrytown, and with Kim Jaye and their daughters, Indiana and Evangeline, lives in the Mid-Hudson Valley. For more, visit www.samtruitt.org
T.G. Vanini
T. G. Vanini’s performances and recordings on vocals, violin, and piano include his own songs and songpoetry with The Princes of Serendip. Their most recent recording is Seed-Maid: Sentimental Songs (Jaiya Records). All the while he has pursued an active career as a mathematician in the form of one of his alter egos, Laurence Kirby, a Professor of Mathematics at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and a specialist in mathematical logic. T. G. Vanini provided electronic music for the soundtrack of Professor Kirby’s short documentary film Plimpton 322: The Ancient Roots of Modern Mathematics. An Englishman born in Hong Kong, T. G. Vanini lives in Woodstock, New York. This is his first book.
Harvey Wang
Harvey Wang studied visual arts and anthropology at Purchase College, State University of New York. He has published six books of photography including Harvey Wang’s New York (1990) and, with co-author David Isay, Flophouse: Life on the Bowery (2000) and Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes (1995). His most recent book is From Darkroom to Daylight (2015). Wang has exhibited widely at museums, including the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York. His films have screened at festivals all over the world. His short film about the photographer Milton Rogovin won the prize for Best Documentary Short at the Tribeca Film Festival. He lives and works in New York City.
Bruce Weber
Bruce Weber is the author of four previously published books of poetry, These Poems Are Not Pretty, How The Poem Died, The First Time I Had Sex With T. S. Eliot, and Poetic Justice. This, Bruce Weber's fifth book of poems, and the first since 2004's Poetic Justice, is a return to the jolting, driving, darkly humorous and surprising voice that originally emerged on the New York poetry scene in the early 1990s. Filled with a spectrum of poems that touch on everything from the kinky to the mournful, this constantly playful, and astonishingly imaginative collection of writings will make you stir in your seat with wonder, delight, and an occasional dose of scalp scratching. Seventy-six pages which are sure to take away the blues and restore your dormant faith in poetic imagination.
Ron Dionysius Whiteurs
Born in the Bronx, brought up in the hills of Mahwah NJ, R. Dionysius Whiteurs has lived in the New Paltz-Rosendale region since 1966. With an MA from SUNY New Paltz, he taught English at that institution in 1970-71 and went on to a long career as unofficial “Poet Laureate” of IBM Publishing in Poughkeepsie (1980-1989). While working at IBM in the mid-1980's, he appeared as guest consultant with Anthony Fast in two broadcasts of classical music on the Vassar College radio station show, “Treasures from Captain Classics Collection.” One broadcast featured the music of Franz Peter Scubert, and the other broadcast featured the music of Karl Maria von Weber.
R. Dionysius performed regularly at the Rosendale Creative Space Co-Op from 1989 to 1992; He performed annually at the Cave Readings at the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale from 1991 to 1997; He starred in the Igneous It performance Ox Necks in Tweed on April 3, 1992; He performed at Fountain House, NYC, and slammed at the Nuyorican Cafe, NYC, during these years; He performed at the Woodstock Guild's Byrdcliffe Barn as part of Summerjazz (FM Artist's Coalition) in 1992; He performed as main feature poet at the Outloud Festival in Claryville in 1994; He formed the absolutely amateur rock n' roll band “Glory-Hole Bishops of the Holy See” in which he starred as lead singer and song writer; He recorded four poems and interviews in 1993 for the Steve Charney Show (“Knock-on-Wood”) on WAMC Albany Public Radio; He featured in the brief biographic film Trapped in Amber by Bart Thrall of Big Time Records (2006); He hosted the 19th Annual Hudson Valley Poet's Fest in the Widow Jane Mine (2009); He was a featured poet at the 2010 Albany Word Fest; He was a featured poet at the 17th Annual Bowery Poetry Club Spoken Word; He was a featured poet at Sound, Sight, and Motion (2011) in New Paltz, and he has been published in the Rondout Review, Abraxas Magazine, The Poets Gallery, Chronogram, Hunger Magazine, Wuzz Buzzin (Switzerland), Arabesque (Shivastan Press), The Home Planet News, Heyday Magazine, Lifeblood, and in And Then Magazine.
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Peter Lamborn Wilson's reputation goes back to as early as the late sixties when he wandered North Africa, India and Asia, spending a long time in Iran for his voluminous reading of Islam heretical texts and studying the historical and mystical dimensions of Sufism. Wilson has writen on early American spiritual anarchism and published some pseudonymous manifestos and books (Temporary Autonomous Zone).As an underground intellectual he is involved in a range of initiatives, including bi-weekly broadcasting his 'Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade' on WBAI, regular lectures at the New York Open Center, being a member of the Autonomedia collective, and author of 'high and low' publications from science fiction zines to 'Studies in Mystical Literature' and his latest collection of essays 'Sacred Drift'.
Dayl Wise
Dayl Wise has worked as a paperboy, caddy, draftsperson, engineer and teacher. He is an active member of Veterans for Peace. He is one of the speakers of NY Veterans Speak Out, a group of veterans who talk to high school students about the experience of war.
He lives part time in the Bronx and Woodstock, New York with his wife, Alison a poet and teacher; Molly, a Labrador-pit bull mix and six, a calico cat with a bad leg.
He self published a chap book, The Best of Post Traumatic Press 2000, a collection of poems by veterans, and authored Poems and other stuff (Post Traumatic Press).
In 2007, Dayl edited and published Post Traumatic Press 2007. This book tells the stories of veterans with direct experience of the military. The book includes writings of veterans from World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, peace time and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Brian Wood
Brian Wood is a painter working with multiple media. His paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, films, and books are exhibited internationally and are held in many private and public collections. Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX; the New York Public Library: the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario; the Davis Museum, Wellesley; the Tampa Museum of Art; Asheville Art Museum, NC; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal; The Canada Council Art Bank; Concordia Art Gallery, Montreal; the Museum of Modern Art in Prague; and many others.
Wood's awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Rome Prize finalist in 2019, American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and numerous Canada Council Grants including the prestigious Established Artist "A" Grant.
Brian Wood works primarily with painting and graphite or ink drawing. Throughout his career, Wood has been immersed in questions about consciousness and ontology, the mystery of intense images arising to awareness and being, and their complex relationship with and away from time. Pursuing this inquiry into the tensile nature of time and space, he has explored many media and is accomplished in painting, drawing, photography, film, print-making, and cross-bred hybrids. Each medium generates different yet complex relationships to time and radically different experiences of space/form. All Wood’s images are connected by the daemon driving their emergence, but his curiosity and extensive investigation into different media, each with its own concrete and metaphorical differences, both perceptual and psychic, have contributed to the particular experience of Wood’s current paintings.
As described by Holland Cotter in his review in The New York Times (3/14/14) of Brian Wood’s solo exhibition Enceinte, “…[Wood] creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”
Born and raised on the prairies of northern Saskatchewan, Wood's early imaginative experience was formed in harsh land, severe weather, and the life and death cycles of animals, crops, and wilderness. Wood's childhood on the farm, his absorption in nature, books, playing piano, and his later studies in physics and mathematics combine with his fascination and close attention to the shifting boundaries of body, sexuality, and awareness itself. From these inquiries, his close and active participation with arising inner images and perception, and his sense that the conventional separation of inner and outer worlds is actually an illusion, come the form and obsessions of his work.