Readers:

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original performance artworks around the world. Since May 2014, she has been performing Say My Name (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls) as an act of embodied remembering. Her art writing has appeared in The Third Rail, Art21, Small Axe,and Obsidian. Her essays and translations have appeared in Something on Paper, Aster(ix), and Two Lines. Her memoir in performance art Swallow the Fish was named by Entropy a “Best Non-Fiction Book of 2017.” Her forthcoming book Experiments in Joy engages race, performance, and collaboration. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and the BFA program in Critical Studies courses at CalArts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

 

Nylsa Martínez is a short fiction writer linked to the current "boom" in noir fiction and detective fiction currently changing the face of contemporary Mexican letters, especially with regards to the letters from the country's border region; this trend has been called "Literatura del desierto," and boasts of excellent writers from such cities as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.  She is the author of five collections of short fiction, among them Roads (Editorial Paraiso Perdido, 2007), Tu casa es mi casa (CONACULTA, 2009), and Afecciones desordenadas (Editorial Artificios, 2016).  Her stories have been culled for inclusion in such anthologies as Territorio ficción (SEP, 2017), Lados B (Nitro / Press, 2017), and LATINX: Writing Los Angeles (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).  Her stories have been published in numerous journals on both side of the US / Mexico border, like Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Revista de literatura mexicana contemporanea and Rio Grande Review, both from the University of Texas at El Paso, Parrafo (UCLA), Bengal Lights (Bangladesh), and journals throughout the Spanish speaking world.  

 

Martha Ronk has published eleven books of poetry, most recently with Omnidawn Press:  Silences 2019, Ocular Proof 2016 on photographs, and Transfer of Qualities 2013 (the title a quotation from Henry James), long-listed for the National Book Award. Her book, Partially Kept, published with Nighboat Books, is in dialogue with Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus; Vertigo with Coffee House Press pays homage to W.G. Sebald, and why/why not, UC Press, plays off to be or not to be and is indebted to the play, Hamlet.  In a landscape of having to repeat, influenced by Freud’s essay on “Screen Memory,” won the PEN USA best poetry book of 2005. Often in dialogue with other authors, Ronk sees her work taking shape in the spaces between various forms, vocabularies, and genres, each volume operating as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual poems.  Besides the profound influences of other authors, Ronk has also focused her poems on paintings, photographs, ceramics, and photograms, and many of her books include ekphrastic poems. Her collection of short stories, Glass Grapes and other stories, utilizes a variety of obsessive, unreliable narrators; and her book on food, Displeasures of the Table—semi-autobiographical, satiric, appreciative of all cooks—recommends reading over eating. She has received a NEA award, had residencies at MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. She received the Sterling Award for scholarly excellence at Occidental College. Ronk has had readings at numerous bookstores and other venues, was a visiting writer at the University of Montana, was an editor of poetry books published by Littoral Press, and has had work included in eight anthologies.

Janet Sarbanes is the author of the short story collections Army of One and The Protester Has Been Released, which was declared a best fiction book of 2017 by Entropy magazine. Recent short fiction appears in North Dakota Quarterly and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A 2017 recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol art writer’s grant, Sarbanes has published art criticism and other critical writing in museum catalogues, anthologies, and journals such as East of Borneo, Afterall, Journal of Utopian Studies and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essay on Shaker aesthetics and utopian communalism received the Eugenio Battisti prize from the Society for Utopian Studies. Sarbanes holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program and the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts, and offers courses on the BFA in utopian studies, social movement rhetoric and the theory and art of everyday life.

Anthony Seidman is the author of five collections of poetry, including A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed (Eyewear Publishing, London, 2016) and the new Cosmic Weather (Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2020). In 2015, he published Confetti-Ash: Selected Poems of Salvador Novo (Bitter Oleander Press, 2015) with co-translator David Shook. He has translated and published poetry from the northern border region of Mexico, and his translations have appeared in many journals, including New American Writing, World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Nimrod, Modern Poetry In Translation, and Huizache, among others. His most recent book-length translation is A Stab in the Dark (LARB Classics, 2019) by Facundo Bernal.  He has collaborated with French artist Jean-Claude Loubieres on three artists books, all published by AdeLeo in Paris, France, and these works are included in collections such as the Kandinsky Library in the Pompidou Center. His poetry has been published in the United States, England, France, Mexico, Romania, Bangladesh, and Nicaragua, in such journals as Ambit, Luvina, Círculo de Poesía, The Black Herald, and La Prensa de Managua, among others.