Tisa Bryant

Tisa Bryant (MFA, Brown 2004) makes work that often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history. Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), her first full-length book, is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. An excerpt from her novella, [the curator], was published by Belladonna Books in 2009, in a companion volume with writer Chris Kraus. She is also the author of the chapbook, Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000), a prose poem collage of narratives including a Barbados genealogy, a Passover seder and a film by Yvonne Rainer. She is interested in archives, hybrid forms, mythologies, ethnicity and innovation, the interdependence of experimental and conventional fiction, cinematic novels and ekphrastic writing. Bryant’s writing has appeared in Evening Will Come, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, in the ‘zine, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson and in the catalogues and solo shows of visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Cauleen Smith. She is co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay male desire and survival, from AIDS Project Los Angeles, which was nominated Best LGBTQ anthology by the LAMBDA Literary Awards. She is also co-editor/publisher of the hardcover cross-referenced literary/arts series, The Encyclopedia Project, which recently released Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K.

Janet Sarbanes

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.

Army of One, Otis Press 2008.

People of the Pancake, Coop Books, 2014.

The Protester Has Been Released, C & R Press 2017.

The Autonomy Project: Letters to Artists and Activists, forthcoming.

http://janetsarbanes.net/

Matias Viegener

Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who works solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, and social practice. He is the author of 2500 Random Things About Me Too, a book of experimental non-fiction, hailed as the first book composed on and through Facebook. In 2004 he co-founded Fallen Fruit, a participatory art practice focusing on fruit, urban space and public life; he left the collaboration in 2013. His work has been exhibited at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, Ars Electronica, The Whitney Museum, The Smart Museum of Art, The Blaffer Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Machine Project, New Langton Arts, Highways Performance Space, The Hammer Museum, the ARCO Madrid biennial, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Colombia and Mexico.

He has fiction in the anthologies The &Now Awards—The Best Innovative Writing, Vital Signs—Essential AIDS Fiction, Encyclopedia F-K, Chronometry, Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper. He has published in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Ex Nihilo, Fiction International, Framework, High Performance, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, The Huffington Post, Mirage, Paragraph, Radical History Review, Semiotext(e), Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra, for whom he writes regularly on visual art. His academic criticism appears in Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper; the queer theory issue of Critical Quarterly; and Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media; and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style. With his colleague, Christine Wertheim, he has edited two anthologies, The Noulipian Analects and Séance in Experimental Writing. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles' The Trial of Gilles de Rais. As literary executor for the writer Kathy Acker, he has written and lectured extensively on her work, and edited a volume of her correspondence with McKenzie Wark which is forthcoming on Chiasmus Press. His work has been written about in The New Yorker, salon.com, The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Art:21, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post. He is the recipient of a 2013 Creative Capital Grant.

http://www.fallenfruit.org/

Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2015) and the critical book Ed Vs. Yummy Fur: Or What Happens When a Serial Comic Becomes a Graphic Novel (Uncivilized, 2014). His collection Windeye (2012) and the novel Immobility (2012) were both finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the 2009 ALA-RUSA Award). His novel The Open Curtain (2004) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, David B., and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian.

He has fiction in the anthologies The &Now Awards—The Best Innovative Writing, Vital Signs—Essential AIDS Fiction, Encyclopedia F-K, Chronometry, Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper. He has published in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Ex Nihilo, Fiction International, Framework, High Performance, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, The Huffington Post, Mirage, Paragraph, Radical History Review, Semiotext(e), Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra, for whom he writes regularly on visual art. His academic criticism appears in Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper; the queer theory issue of Critical Quarterly; and Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media; and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style. With his colleague, Christine Wertheim, he has edited two anthologies, The Noulipian Analects and Séance in Experimental Writing. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles' The Trial of Gilles de Rais. As literary executor for the writer Kathy Acker, he has written and lectured extensively on her work, and edited a volume of her correspondence with McKenzie Wark which is forthcoming on Chiasmus Press. His work has been written about in The New Yorker, salon.com, The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Art:21, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post. He is the recipient of a 2013 Creative Capital Grant.

https://www.brianevenson.com

Anthony McCann

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of four collections of poetry including Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014). His book Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a nonfiction prose work investigating the 2016 armed right-wing occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Anthony’s teaching, writing and research interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century North American Poetry; Political Theology; Political Ecology; Native American History; History of the Revolutionary, Constitutional and Reconstruction eras; Ecological History of the American West; Cultural Anthropology; Modern Latin American Poetry; and Anarchist thought and practice as it pertains to art-making, politics and other spheres of human endeavor. He lives in the Mojave Desert.

Gabrielle Civil

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

https://www.gabriellecivilartist.com/

Michael Leong

Michael Leong is the author of the critical study Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the poetry books e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009), Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017), and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018). His creative work has been anthologized in THE &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3 (Bettering Books, 2019). His co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s long poem Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven was published by co•im•press in 2020. He has received grants from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the National Endowment for the Arts.

https://michaelleong.wordpress.com/