List of Granary Contributors A–E
David Abel is a poet, editor, bookseller, raga singer, and poker player who moved to Portland in 1997. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Cut (Situations, NYC), and the long collage text "Conduction" in the exhibition catalogue Conduit, devoted to the work of artist Anna Hepler (Modular Unit Design, Seoul, Korea), as well as the artists' books Rose and Selected Durations (collaborations with Katherine Kuehn, published at the Salient Seedling Press).
Marina Adams is a painter who splits her time between New York City and Parma, Italy. She received her MFA in painting from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, New York, NY and a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Selected solo exhibitions include Marina Adams at CUE Art Foundation in NYC, and The Nature of Line at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Italy. Adams’ paintings and drawings have been included in numerous group shows, such as Color Walks Away at Galerie Andres Thalmann, Zurich, Switzerland; Winter Break at Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NYC; Draw the Line at Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Mimosa at Sala Uno Galleria, Rome, Italy; Americani a Roma, Arte Architettura Moderna, Rome, Italy. She has exhibited at many of New York City’s key art spaces including, Art in General, Exit Art and Roebling Hall. Adams frequently collaborates with poets. Some of these collaborations have produced books and limited editions, including The Tango with Leslie Scalapino (Granary Books, 2001), Vue sur Mer! with Christian Prigent (Gervais Jassaud, 2010) In Our Own Backyard (Tolling Elves, 2006) and New Alphabet, published in Bomb Magazine Winter, 2010, both with the poet Norma Cole. On occasion Adams collaborates with curators to organize exhibitions, most notably with Dean Daderko in 2007 when they co-organized Sex in the City D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center (DAC) in Brooklyn, NYC. Adams is a Visiting Critic of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, and has taught at Middlebury College, VT, Rutgers University, NJ, and Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn.
David Antin (1932–2016) was known as a poet, performance artist, and critic of art and literature. After studying linguistics at New York University, where he earned an M.A., Antin edited and translated several math and science books. He pursued a career as a poet beginning 1955, and that of an art critic since 1964, serving as Educational Curator for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and Director of the University of California—San Diego's Mandeville Art Gallery. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry (1984), and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include include Definitions (1967), Autobiography (1967), Code of Flag Behavior (1968), Meditations (1971), Talking (1972 & 2001), After the War (A Long Novel with Few Words) (1973), Dialogue (1980), Tuning (1984), Selected Poems 1963-1973 (1991) and What It Means to be Avant-Garde (1993), A Conversation with David Antin, a dialogue with Charles Bernstein,; i never knew what time it was (University of California Press, 2005), and Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literarture 1996-2005 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) (publication list from Antin's Electronic Poetry Center biography). Read more about Antin's life and work at Jacket 2.
John Ashbery (1927–2017) was born in Rochester, New York. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. Best known as a poet, his many collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007), which was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize. His Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) won the three major American prizes: the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an early book, Some Trees, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. He has served as executive editor of Art News, and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Read more about Ashbery's work and legacy at the Flow Chart Foundation.
Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in New York City. Bee has had four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, as well as solo shows at Kenyon College, Columbia University, and other venues. Her work has been included in numerous group shows and has been widely reviewed. Her books and paintings are in many private and public collections. Bee was the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues from 1986-1996 and is the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Theory, and Criticism, published by Duke University Press in 2000. She co-edits M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Granary Books has published six of Bee's artist's books, including The Burning Babe & Other Poems with Jerome Rothenberg (2005), A Girl's Life with Johanna Drucker (2002), Bed Hangings with Susan Howe (2001), and Talespin (1995). She has collaborated with Charles Bernstein on five books: Log Rhythms (1998) and Little Orphan Anagram (1997) with Granary, The Occurrence of Tune (1981), Fool's Gold (1991), and The Nude Formalism (1989). She teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism program. Learn more at her Electronic Poetry Center biography.
In the Contemporary Authors Autobiography series, Guy Beining (b. 1938 in London) notes: “my literary pulse is not an easy one to take, and it is getting more entangled as I go along” (vol. 30, p. 63). Writing since the 1960s, and creating visual art since the 1970s, Beining’s work is situated within the verbal/visual/borderblur avant-garde and the ephemeral world of little magazines and small presses. He has published with Z Press, Runaway Spoon, Potes and Poets, Leave Books, Red Ozier, and Industrial Sabotage, among many others and his first poetry chapbook was published by Sun & Moon in 1976. Now with over fifty publications, Guy Beining’s poems primarily stand free or are embedded in gestures of color and collage. He continues his work in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he lives with Anna.
Guy Bennett (b. 1960) is a poet, translator, and author. He has a PhD in French Literature from UCLA. His collections of poetry include Drive to Cluster (Piacenza, Italy: ML & NLF, 2003) and, with Béatrice Mousli, Poésies des deux mondes: un dialogue franco-américain à travers les revues, 1850-2004 (Paris: Ent'revues, 2004). His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, and the USA. Recent translations include works by Nicole Brossard, Jean-Michel Espitallier, Mostafa Nissabouri, Valère Novarina, Jacques Roubaud, and Giovanna Sandri. Bennett is also the publisher of Seeing Eye Books, co-editor of Seismicity Editions, and a contributing editor to the New Review of Literature (USA) and Électron Libre (Morocco). He lives in Los Angeles and is Associate Professor at Otis College of Art and Design. Read more on his website at: http://www.guybennett.com/.
Charles Bernstein (b. 1950) is the author of thirty books of poetry and libretti, as well as two books of essays and one essay/poem collection. He edits a number of publications, including the Electronic Poetry Center (epc.buffalo.edu), which he co-founded. He is also the co-editor of PENNsound and the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at the University of Alabama Press. With Bruce Andrews, he was co-founder and co-editor of the eponymous journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–1982).
Bernstein's work has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, among others. He has lectured throughout the United States and Europe and has been host and co-producer of three radio poetry series. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of the SUNY Distinguished Professor Award (2002) and other honors, Bernstein published his latest original work, Girly Man, in September 2006. Read more at his Electronic Poetry Center biography.
Poet, editor, and publisher of the legendary C Press, Ted Berrigan was a charismatic presence on the literary scene of New York's Lower East side during the '60s and '70s. "Fiercely unpretentious, intensely self-absorbed, prodigious in his ambition and energy, Berrigan did more than create a substantial body of poetry. He also embodied a spirit that gave meaning to many other writers' lives," writes Ken Tucker shortly after his death. Berrigan was an influential figure in the second generation of New York School poets.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1934, he began three years of service in the Korean War at age 19. He returned to the United States in 1957 and completed his BA and MA in English at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma where he met future allies and collaborators Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard. In the early '60s, Berrigan moved to New York City, where he published C Magazine and C Press Books, wrote art criticism, and collaborated with artists and other poets. Berrigan taught at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and was Writer in Residence at the University of Michigan, University of Iowa, Yale University, SUNY Buffalo, the Naropa Institute, and University of Essex in England. He published more than twenty books before his death in 1983. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan was published by the University of California Press in 2005. Read more at his Electronic Poetry Center biography.
Jen Bervin’s poetic and multidisciplinary work results from research and collaboration with artists and specialists ranging from material scientists to literary scholars. Her practice engages in a process of trying to understand irreducible complexity, and activates the intersections of art and scholarship; text and textiles; the work ranges from poems written nanoscale to large-scale museum installations.
Bervin has published six projects with Granary Books, and is the author of 11 books, including Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented both as a biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab and as a book—a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and a New Museum Book of the Year. Her publication, Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, with Marta Werner and Susan Howe, first published as a limited edition by Granary, was a New Yorker Book of the Year.
Bervin’s work has been exhibited internationally at University Museum and Art Gallery at Hong Kong University; Artisterium, Tbilisi; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; MASS MoCA; Des Moines Art Center; Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University; Rhode Island School of Design; Tufts University Art Galleries; and The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, and is in more than thirty collections including Yale University, Stanford University, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Jen Bervin has received fellowships, residencies, and grants in art and writing from the Bogliasco Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Creative Capital, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop, Center for Book Arts, Camargo Foundation in France, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Read more at http://jenbervin.com/about.
bill bissett (b. 1939), Nova Scotia-born poet and performance artist, has written more than 60 books of poetry. In British Columbia, where bissett (legally lower-cased) fled his father's career expectations at age 16, his poetry matured and gained popularity. He attended Dalhousie University (1956) and the University of British Columbia (1963–1965) before beginning blew ointment magazine, an early incarnation of blewointment press. bissett's most recent collaborations in sound, image, and word are Deth Interrupts Th Dansing: A Strangr Space (2006), with musician Pete Danko, and the illustrated children's book A Name is a Label (2006) with Irene June Karasick.
Poet, painter, and printmaker, William Blake was born in London in 1757. Though his contemporaries largely dismissed him as eccentric, later generations have rediscovered Blake with respect and critical attention. Encouraged by his father, Blake studied drawing at school, later apprenticing for seven years with an engraver. Among his illustrations are drawings and engravings for The Divine Comedy and The Book of Job, and for Milton's Paradise Lost and Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life. His most notable writings include Songs of Innocence (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), Songs of Experience (1794), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). Blake died in 1827; the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica now recognizes him as a saint. Read more at: www.blakearchive.org/blake/main.html.
Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was born in Salem, Arkansas and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He showed artistic talent from an early age. In high school he co-edited The White Dove Review, an art and literary magazine, with poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup. After high school and a few months of study at the Dayton Art Institute, Brainard moved to New York City in early 1961, joining Padgett and poet Ted Berrigan. In New York, Brainard focused his energy on painting and assemblage. He worked at a furious pace, showing the influences of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell in his early work. By 1965, the Alan Gallery presented his first solo show, a forerunner to group exhibitions around the country and abroad. His theater work included set designs for LeRoi Jones's The Dutchman and Frank O'Hara's The General Returns from One Place to Another, as well as sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.
Brainard befriended and collaborated with many writers and artists associated with the New York School scene, including John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, and Fairfield Porter. He designed covers for poetry books and magazines; illustrated C Comics and C Comics 2, engaged in collaborations with contemporary poets; and with Ted Berrigan's encouragement, started to write his own material, including the celebrated I Remember. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett and with an introduction by Paul Auster, was published by The Library of America in 2012. Brainard's drawings, collages, assemblages, and paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Joe Brainard Archive at the University of California-San Diego, among other institutions. Read more at: www.joebrainard.org/.
Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) was an experimental filmmaker, known for a range of techniques including collage, emulsion scratching, and hand-painting film. Brakhage's style evolved alongside his rich interdisciplinary and domestic life, placing him in close contact with a variety of postwar American avant-garde movements. After making his first film in 1952 at the age of nineteen, Brakhage traveled to San Francisco and met poets like Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Patchen, and others; in 1954, he met new collaborators and influences in New York City, including John Cage, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Joseph Cornell. In 1957, Brakhage married Jane Collom (now Jane Wodening), and their experience of family with their five children had a significant impact on his work. Brakhage divorced Jane in 1986, and married Marilyn Brakhage with whom he moved to Boulder, Colorado. He taught at the School of the Art Institute at Chicago, University of Boulder, Colorado, and Colorado University, and has received the James Ryan Morris award, the Telluride Film Festival Medallion, and the American Film Institute award, among other recognition for the importance and impact of his work in twentieth-century filmmaking.
Betty Bright is a scholar, curator, writer, and teacher. Before settling into her PhD studies, Bright helped found the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. During her nine years as Program Director, she curated over fifty exhibitions, several of which toured nationally with accompanying catalogues. In spring 2000, she received a PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota. That research formed the basis of her book No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America, 1960 to 1980. Bright lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924–1976) was an interdisciplinary artist who realized new ways of giving material expression to language through painting, film, objects, books, and prints, as well as exhibitions, which he referred to as “Décors.” In 1968, he founded the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles) and its multiple sections, and in 1972, closed this museum by way of opening the Musée d’Art Ancien, Département des Aigles (Museum of Ancient Art, Department of Eagles). Broodthaers was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 11 – May 15, 2016.
John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. An experimental music composer, writer, and visual artist, Cage pioneered composition techniques in aleatory (chance) and electronic music. He attended Pomona College, the New School for Social Research, where he studied with Henry Cowell, and the Cornish School of the Arts. During his early studies, Cage took free lessons from Arnold Schoenberg, a professed idol. Years of working with found sound, noise, and unusual instruments brought Cage to his notorious 1952 piece 4'33", three movements performed without playing a single note.
During a rich career in composition and experimental writing, Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design, the New School, and Black Mountain College, where he collaborated regularly with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Among Cage's compositions are Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), Musicircus (1967), Lecture on the Weather (1975), Hymns and Variations (1979), Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), and Litany for the Whale (1980). His published writing includes Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983). Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992.
British book artist Ken Campbell (b. 1939) writes, designs, and prints his books by letterpress and other such processes. He has exhibited works publicly and privately in England, America, and Germany, including at The New York Public Library (1994), the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (Germany, 1995), the Yale Centre for British Art (1996), and at the Herzog-August Bibliothek (Germany, 2001). The Yale Centre for British Art, the New York Public Library, and the Herzog-August Bibliothek each own a complete set of Campbell's publications. Read more at https://brokenrules.co.uk/.
Paul Celan (1920–1970), writer, poet, and translator, was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, Romania. After studying medicine briefly in Paris, he returned to Romania at the outbreak of World War II, when his parents were deported; they later died in Nazi labor camps. Celan survived an eighteen-month internment before escaping to the Red Army and moving to Bucharest in 1945. There he befriended leading Romanian writers and worked as a translator. By 1947, Celan had moved to Paris, married, and published his first book. His second book, Poppy and Memory (1952), garnered critical acclaim and solidified his reputation.
Celan received the Georg Buchner Prize (1960) and published more than six books of poetry, while continuing to translate work by Henri Michaux, Paul Valéry, Fernando Pessoa, and others. He served as a reader in German Language and Literature at l'École Normal Superieure of the University of Paris from 1959 until his death in 1970.
Emilie Clark (b. 1969), artist and editor, was born in San Francisco. With Lytle Shaw, she co-founded and co-edited Shark (1998–2003), a journal of arts writing and poetics. Clark has designed and illustrated for collaborative projects with poets Anselm Berrigan, Lewis Warsh, Shaw, and others. Her books with Lyn Hejinian are The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill (1998) and The Lake (2003). Articles on Clark have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, Denver Quarterly, and other publications.
Since the early '90s, Clark has contributed her artwork to dozens of group exhibitions, public institutions, and private collections. Four years after she finished her MFA at Bard College, Michael Steinberg Fine Art presented her first New York solo show, Home Studies in Nature (2005). Among her recent group exhibitions are Rare Specimen (2006) at The Arsenal, New Prints 2006/Winter at the International Print center, and Watercolor at Rose Burlingham. A busy visiting lecturer at various colleges, Clark has received a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and other awards. She lives in New York City. Read more at www.emilieclark.com/index.html.
Laurie Clark was born in Manhattan. Her botanical drawings are concerned with the particular and unrepeatable rather than the essential aspects of plants. Among other works, she illustrated Bob Arnold's book Sunswumthru A Building for Origin Press. Since 1986, with Thomas A. Clark, she has run Cairn Gallery, one of the earliest and most respected of British "artist-run spaces." Tom and Laurie Clark live in a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland.
Thomas A. Clark was born in Scotland in 1944. After early exposure to the international Concrete Poetry movement, Clark started Moschatel Press in 1973 with artist Laurie Clark. Encouraging experimentation with form, they published small books and cards by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jonathan Williams, Cid Corman, and others. Since 1986, Tom and Laurie Clark have run Cairn Gallery, one of the earliest and most respected of British artist-run spaces.
In addition to publishing his poetry books A Still Life (1977), The Tempers of Hazard (1993), and One Hundred Scottish Places (1999), Thomas A. Clark has engineered site-specific installations in gardens and other landscapes, and has many works in permanent collections worldwide. Arc Press, Yorkshire published a recent book, A Path to the Sea, in 2005; new publications are also forthcoming from Longhouse in Vermont. Tom and Laurie Clark live in a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland.
Steve Clay is the publisher of Granary Books, as well as an editor, curator, archivist, and writer specializing in literature and art of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. He is the author or editor of several volumes including Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins with Ken Friedman, Threads Talk Series with Kyle Schlesinger, A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing with Jerome Rothenberg, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980, with Rodney Phillips and Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005, with Jerome Rothenberg. He lives in New York City and Ancramdale, NY.
Francesco Clemente was born on March 23, 1952, in Naples, into a family with aristocratic roots. After writing poetry and painting as a child, he went to Rome to study architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza in 1970. Leaving school before completing the program, he focused instead on art.
Although he came of age when Arte Povera and Conceptual art were in vogue, Clemente concentrated on representation in works on paper. His first solo exhibition was at the Galleria Valle Giulia in Rome in 1971. After meeting Alighiero e Boetti in Rome in 1972, Clemente traveled with the artist in Afghanistan. In 1973, Clemente first visited India, a country to which he would return again and again, often summering there. In 1974, he met Alba Primiceri, a theater actor, whom he would later marry; she would become a frequent subject of his art. In 1976 and 1977, Clemente spent time at Madras's Theosophical Society, where he delved into its library of religious and spiritual texts. His interest in Hindu spiritual life and in other non-European cultures was combined with an enthusiasm for local popular culture and crafts. Clemente began collaborating with Indian sign painters, miniaturists, and papermakers, as in “Francesco Clemente Pinxit,” a 1980–1981 series of miniatures in gouache on handmade paper, for which young miniaturists from Jaipur and Orissa painted the decorative elements.
He continued making drawings and other works on paper in the 1970s, pursuing what would become his signature subjects: the human form, particularly women's bodies; his own image; sexuality; myth and spirituality; non-Western symbols; and dreamlike visions. Clemente's participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale brought him international attention. He rapidly became seen as one of the leaders of the return to figuration, dubbed the Transavanguardia in Italy (by art critic Achille Bonito Oliva) and Neo-Expressionism in the United States, though Clemente himself was uncomfortable with such labels. This acclaim coincided with Clemente's move to a New York loft with his growing family. In 1981, he studied Sanskrit in New York.
In 1981–82, Clemente created his first large oils, a series of twelve paintings titled “The Fourteen Stations”, which were shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1983. The following year, he collaborated with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on a group of works. While Clemente was working on a large scale, he simultaneously developed various book projects, including three unique works created with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. In the 1980s, Clemente continued to travel to India; he also sojourned in southern Italy and the American Southwest. In the 1990s, he added Jamaica to his list of favorite spots and began working in a studio in New Mexico. He used a wax fresco method known as cera punica around this time. During a 1995 trip to Mount Abu in the Himalayas, Clemente painted a watercolor a day for fifty-one days in between taking walks and meditating.
Among Clemente's less traditional undertakings have been murals for the now-demolished Palladium nightclub in New York (1985) and a mural and lampshades for New York's Hudson hotel, which opened in 2000. In addition, he produced some two hundred works for director Alfonso Cuarón’s film Great Expectations (1998).
Clemente's art has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The first major American traveling show of his art was organized by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (1986). Retrospectives have been organized by the Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1994) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1999). Clemente continues to divide his time between New York, Madras, and Rome. His biography here is courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum.
Norma Cole is a Canadian poet, artist and translator. Among her poetry books are Mars (1994), Moira (1995), Contrafact (1996), and Scout (2005), a multimedia text in CD-ROM format. Cole, who has tirelessly explored contemporary French writing in many forms, earned her MA in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. Her translations include Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000) and Anne Portugal's Nude (2001).
Cole has collaborated with poets and painters in a variety of media, winning a Purchase Award with Ben E. Watkins for their photo/text collaboration "They Flatter Almost Recognize" (1994). In addition to receiving numerous awards and residencies for poetry, art, and translation, Cole has edited special issues of magazines Chain and Avec, and with Stacy Doris co-edited a translation issue of Raddle Moon. Cole lives in San Francisco where she teaches at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco.
Clark Coolidge (b. 1939), author of more than thirty books of poetry, was raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He studied geology at Brown University (1956-58) before traveling to Los Angeles, Greenwich Village in New York City, and back to Providence, experimenting with writing and music composition along the way. Among his collaborations are Supernatural Overtones (1990) with Ron Padgett, On the Pumice of Morons (1993) with Larry Fagin, and other pieces with Philip Guston, Bernadette Mayer, and Keith Waldrop.
Coolidge has taught at the Naropa Institute and the American Academy in Rome (1985-85). He has read his work locally and internationally in France, London, Scandinavia, and Russia. In 1993, he co-founded the MIX poetry and jazz group with David and Tina Metzer. After five decades of publishing poetry, Coolidge's work continues to evolve. Qua Press published The Act of Providence in 2006. He lives in Petaluma, California. Read more at his Electronic Poetry Center biography.
William Corbett is a poet and memorist who frequently writes on art. He has edited the letters of the poet James Schuyler and published books on the painters Philip Guston and Albert York. He directs the small press, Pressed Wafer. Corbett lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Holland Cotter is a writer and Senior Art Critic for The New York Times.
Robert Creeley (1926–2005), poet, editor, and teacher, published more than sixty books of poetry and more than a dozen books of prose, essays, and interviews. Part of an emerging counter-tradition in post-War American poetry, Creeley began correspondence with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound in the 1940s. In 1950 he met the poet Charles Olson, rector of Black Mountain College, who invited Creeley to join the faculty of the progressive arts college in North Carolina. Creeley edited The Black Mountain Review and received his Master's Degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1960.
While publishing poetry at a prolific rate, Creeley taught at universities in the United States and one in Canada. He received numerous honors, including two Fulbright fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, Yale University's Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and others. From 1989-1991, he was the New York State Poet Laureate. Robert Creeley died near Marfa, Texas, where he was in a two-month literary residency at the Lannan Foundation. In fall 2006, The University of California Press published The Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005. Read more at his Electronic Poetry Center biography.
Simon Cutts (b. 1944), British writer, designer, and artist, founded Coracle Press and Gallery in the 1970s. At present, he co-directs the press with book artist Erica Van Horn. In 2005, he published the collaborative work Tin funnel, jug & dish, with silhouettes by Van Horn. He has lived in the mountains of South Tipperary in Ireland since 1997. Read more at: www.coracle.ie/
Fielding Dawson (1930–2002), writer and visual artist, lectured widely and worked energetically as a creative writing teacher in prisons and women's shelters. Born in New York City and raised in Missouri, Dawson studied portraiture before joining Black Mountain College, where he studied painting under Franz Kline and poetry under Charles Olson. His experience in North Carolina, which he recalled later as a lecturer and historiographer, continued to influence him after graduation. He eventually returned to New York City, where he joined the fulminant arts scene.
Dawson published 22 books over five decades; most were anthologies of shorter fiction, like the late Land of Milk and Honey (2001). A committed socialist, Dawson began teaching creative writing in prisons in 1984, eventually chairing American PEN's Prison Writing Committee. His work No Man's Land (2000) is a fictionalized account of his prison teaching. Dawson also taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. He died in New York City in January 2002. Read more at: jacketmagazine.com/16/hreb-daws.html
Donna Dennis (b. 1942), sculptor, painter and printmaker, was born in Springfield, Ohio and grew up outside of New York. She received her B.A. from Carleton College and later studied in Paris and at the Art Students' League. She is best known for her complex sculptural installations that draw inspiration from vernacular architecture, both urban and rural. BLUE BRIDGE/red shift, a 24-foot long evocation of railway drawbridges was exhibited at SculptureCenter in New York in 1993 and her subway-inspired Deep Station filled the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum in 1987 and then traveled to the Delaware Art Museum, the Madison Art Center and the Indianapolis Museum. In 2007, her Tourist Cabins on Park Avenue, an outdoor installation, was exhibited on Park Avenue in New York City. Her work is included in the recent Phaidon Press Sculpture Today, which overviews developments in sculpture worldwide during the past 40 years. In 2004, her work was included in an important international survey, "Architecture & Arts 1900 – 2004," at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, Italy, curated by Germano Celant. Dennis has collaborated with poets Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie and Ted Berrigan and with performance artist/puppeteer Dan Hurlin. Her work is in prominent collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum, the Microsoft Collection, the Walker Art Center, Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany, the Indianapolis Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Neuberger Museum and the Martin Z. Margulies Collection. She has also completed permanent public art commissions at John F. Kennedy Airport, P.S. 234 and Queens College in New York and at the Wonderland MBTA Station in Boston. She is the recipient of many grants and awards including four National Endowment Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. She heads the Sculpture program at Purchase College, SUNY and lives in New York City. Read more at: www.donnadennisart.com
Tennessee Rice Dixon is a multimedia artist, illustrator, and web designer. As a freelancer, she offers interactive design, animation, programming, and creative services for commercial and artistic productions. Since earning her B.F.A. in illustration at The Academy of Art College, San Francisco in 1984, Dixon has collaborated with theater and performance artists on multimedia projects, lectured widely, and taught at City College and The School of Visual Arts in New York. A former Computer Arts fellow at the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mass MOCA Performing Arts Resident with the Touching the Moons ensemble, Dixon's awards and grants include Electronic and Film Arts Presentation Funds and an Experimental Television Center fellowship. She has provided illustrations for clients such as The New Yorker, Newsday, St. Martin's Press, and numerous children's book authors. Dixon lives in New York City.
Elsa Dorfman (1937–2020), veteran portrait photographer, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After studying French Literature at Tufts University, she took a job as editorial secretary for the managing editor of Grove Press and The Evergreen Review in New York. Before moving back to Boston in 1962, Dorfman co-founded The Paterson Society, an agency that helped arrange poetry readings for college poets and published small books of their work.
Back in New England, Dorfman earned an MA in elementary education from Boston College and briefly taught fifth grade before beginning work at the Educational Development Corporation in 1964. At EDC, a center for developing innovative curriculum materials for schools, Dorfman met a number of photographers, learned how to use a camera and develop prints, and became hooked. By 1974, she had assembled and published Elsa's Housebook—A Woman's Photojournal, a collection of informal portraits of friends and houseguests Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Laurence Ferlinghetti, and others.
For many decades, Dorfman has produced personal and commercial portrait photographs of what she calls "affection and survival." She was one of the few photographers to use a special oversized Polaroid camera (one of only six worldwide) to create very large prints (23" x 23"). She worked in New York and in Cambridge, where she lived until her passing in 2020. Read more about her work and legacy at: https://www.elsadorfman.com
Toni Dove is an artist who works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality and interactive video laser disk installations that engage viewers in responsive and immersive narrative environments. She also creates linear narrative fictions. Her installation "Mesmer—Secrets of the Human Frame" was part of the 1990 Art in the Anchorage exhibition sponsored by Creative Time, New York. A radio version of the piece was aired by New American Radio; an essay by the artist on the piece appeared in the summer 1992 edition of the New York University drama journal, TDR, and a book based on this exhibition was published by Granary Books in the spring of '93. Read more at: www.tonidove.com/
Rackstraw Downes is a British-born artist and writer. He is a MacArthur Fellow whose work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He is represented by the Betty Cunningham Gallery and lives in New York City.
Illustrator and artist Henrik Drescher, born in Copenhagen, immigrated to the United States with his family in 1967. After one semester at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Drescher left to work locally and travel in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, keeping journals of notes and drawings, which he incorporated into later projects.
Drescher works in notebooks, publishing his illustrations as mass-produced books with different publishers and as editorial illustrations in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and others. He has received numerous honors, including two awards from the Society of Illustrators, and his work can be found in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Drescher shares excerpts and images from his recent work, including his prolific forays into children's books and his work-in-progress The Dread See Scrolls, on his website, www.hdrescher.com/
Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited-edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her published titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide with Emily McVarish (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition in 2012). In 2012 she published Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick (MIT Press) and in 2014, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press). Her work was the subject of a travelling retrospective titled Druckworks: Books and projects 1972-2012, and recent titles include Stochastic Poetics (Granary and Druckwerk, 2012), Downdrift (Three Rooms Press, 2018), and The General Theory of Social Relativity (The Elephants, 2018). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received an honorary doctorate from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016.
Kevin Killian writes, "She is the only living witness to the so-called 'Boston Renaissance,' the little band of poets, including Steve Jonas and John Wieners, that revitalized New England poetry in the years of the Korean War. She attended Black Mountain College in its final days, when Olson and Creeley and Rumaker were there, when jazz ruled, though bread was scarce. Jack Spicer brought her and Joe Dunn, her then-husband, to San Francisco to start the White Rabbit Press and to hold poetry meetings in their apartment. For decades she has been the mystery woman of the Spicer-Duncan circle, vividly remembered, but misunderstood."
Carolyn Dunn was born in Missouri in 1932 and raised in Massachusetts. She currently lives in Florida.
Starting in the early '90s, Joe Elliot ran a weekly reading series at Biblios Bookstore and Café for 5 years and helped move the series to the Zinc Bar, where it now continues. He co-edited two chapbook series: A Musty Bone and Situations, which published authors such as Antje Katcher, Paul Genega, Duncan Nichols, Mitch Highfill, Kim Lyons, Douglas Rothschild, Shannon Ketch, Lisa Jarnot, Bill Luoma, Kevin Davies, Marcella Durand, and many others. Joe is the author of numerous chapbooks including: You Gotta Go In It's The Big Game, Poems To Be Centered On Much Larger Sheets Of Paper, 15 Clanking Radiators, 14 Knots, Reduced, Half Gross (a collaboration with artist John Koos), and Object Lesson (a collaboration with artist Rich O'Russa). Granary Books published If It Rained Here, a collaboration with artist Julie Harrison. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The World, The Poker, Giants Play Well In The Drizzle, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Torque, and Arras. His long poem, "101 Designs for The World Trade Center," was published by Faux Press's e-mag, and a collection of his work, Opposable Thumb, was published by subpress in 2006. Read his feature on Brooklyn Poets.
Kenward Elmslie was born in New York City in 1929. He graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a BA in literature and began his writing career as a lyricist and librettist, working in collaboration with several composers. He wrote both the book and lyrics for a musical, The Grass Harp (1972) based on Truman Capote's novel. In 1954 Elmslie began to publish his stories, short plays, and verse in little magazines and gather them into collections. He also began to collaborate with graphic artists, especially with Joe Brainard.
In 1973 Elmslie became the editor of the Poetry Project's literary magazine, Z, and continued through issue ZZZZZZ in 1978. He was also editor and publisher of Z Press, publishing work by John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Jean Boulte, Joe Brainard, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Steve Gianakos, Joanne Kyger, Harry Matthews, Ron Padgett, James Schulyer, Anne Waldman, and Marjorie Welish, among others.
Timothy Ely was born in the Snohomish General Hospital in 1949. Truman was president. On the site of the hospital now stands the new version of the Snohomish Public Library. He became a voracious reader at a young age. A sympathetic teacher (who taught him to draw) would often lead him back into that public Library (a fine old Carnegie building) where tales of pirates, Tesla coils, maps, flying saucers and back issues of Scientific American and Popular Mechanics would begin to tarnish the goals set for him by the rest of the family. In this library he began to explore images in the worlds of science fiction and comic books.
Following high school and tenure in several local area rock bands, Ely enrolled at Everett Community College following luminaries such as Chuck Close and Donn Trethewey by several years. This was just after the summer of love (1967) and a time of extraordinary fertility in painting. Ely was perfectly placed.
Painting was a primary interest and with an awareness that design was the grounding language, Ely pursued a degree in fine art. A number of chance remarks by teachers began to gradually orient Ely towards the inherent duality in the forms of the book. There were no opportunities for study in that area, but the pull of the idea of the book as aesthetic carrier was a potent and inspiring image. Following graduate school (1975 MFA Design) Ely began a self-motivated study of bookbinding. He began to fabricate the work he is known for today, a fusion of largely English style binding techniques with visionary drawings of an unknowable future.
He has received numerous awards. With an NEA grant (1982) he traveled to Japan, Italy, and England studying bookbinding and paper making. Following this he moved to New York where he established a studio and also taught at the Center for Book Arts. During a decade in New York, he traveled to Europe, Central America, and Scandinavia lecturing, exhibiting and teaching. He has had numerous solos exhibitions and has participated in many group exhibitions. His two most recent exhibitions were at the Jundt Museum of Art and The Northwest Museum of Art and Culture. His work is collected planet wide and is held in public, private, and secret collections.
He currently lives in Eastern Washington near the Colfax river. Explore his website at https://aplanetarycollage.com.
Ed Epping (b. 1948) is an imagist and teacher. All of his published artist books, much of his drawings, collages, paintings and sculptural installations have combined word and image as active agents in the construction of meaning. Preferring to see their combination as a collaborative act, he has located a word type, heteronyms, as a means of keeping meaning suspended and therefore coherent with other constructs.
In two of his publications, Mettle (with Kimberly Lyons) and Desire for a beginning Dread of one single end (text by Edmond Jabes translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) this collaboration was extended to other authors and translators. In these texts, the reader is invited to work through the collaboration to reach a reading informed beyond image illustrating text and text captioning image. His most recent work, Poise, will eventually be realized in a film.
Epping's work has not been shown widely as he has focused most of his energies on teaching other imagists. As the A.D. Falck Professor of Art at Williams College he is occasionally invited to lecture in the United States.