Bios

AMMIEL ALCALAY is a poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist. Deputy chair of the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and former chair of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College, he is also the founder and general editor, under the auspices of the PhD program in English and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and has edited texts by Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, and Joanne Kyger for the series. His latest work, A Little History, was published in 2013 by UpSet Press/re:Public, along with a new edition of  from the warring factions, a book length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, first published in 2002 by Beyond Baroque. Neither Wit Nor Gold, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011. Scrapmetal, was published by Factory School. Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East, a lecture given at Cornell, was published in 2003 by Palm Press. Other books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the cairo noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999). He has translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) and Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996). He has also been involved as an activist on many domestic and international issues. His latest projects include co-translation of  a Hebrew novel (with Oz Shelach), Outcast, by Shimon Ballas (City Lights, 2007). City Lights published a novel, Islanders, in 2010. He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, al-Ahram, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, and various other publications in the United States and abroad. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project.

WILL ALEXANDER works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all the fields of experience are open for exploration. Art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, poetics, each being a portion of the fields open for exploration. His books include Asia and Haiti, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity, Sunrise In Armageddon, Diary As Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace, Towards The Primeval Lightning Field, and Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents. Alexander meditates and ambulates in The City of Angels.

CARLA BADILLO CORONADO was born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1985. She is a poet, storyteller, filmmaker, and a founding member of a traditional dance group called Tullpucuna (in Quichua it means Colors), which performs with and for indigenous communities. She has made a documentary film on the life of Jaime Guevara, an Ecuadorian anarchist song-writer. Her poems are found in two collections which are being translated into English. She is currently working on an account of her travels in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe, and she writes articles on the arts and culture. This poet’s work was introduced to San Francisco in 2008, when she read at the North Beach Poetry Festival and she was invited back to participate in the San Francisco International Poetry Festival in 2009.

MICAH BALLARD was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Recent books include Waifs and Strays (City Lights, 2011),  Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners, Bettina Coffin, Evangeline Downs, Parish Crews and the collaborations Death Race V.S.O.P. and Easy Eden. From 2000-2007 he directed the Humanities Program at New College of California and currently works for the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco. With Sunnylyn Thibodeaux he has printed over 20 books of poetry under the imprints Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions.

ART BECK is a San Francisco poet and translator who has published three books of original poetry, most recently Summer With All It’s Clothes Off  (Gravida, 2005), and selected poems of Luxorius and Rilke in two translation volumes. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including Translation Review, Two Lines, Artful Dodge, Alaska Quarterly, Sequoia, OR, and the 2004 Heyday Books anthology, California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present. Recent articles on translating Horace and Rilke can be accessed in the Australian online journal Jacket and in Rattle e-issues.

BILL BERKSON was born in New York in 1939. A poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties, he is professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where, between 1984 and 2008, he taught art history, art writing and poetry. He studied at Trinity School, The Lawrenceville School, Brown University, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.  He is the author of some twenty books and pamphlets of poetry and several books of critical writing, lectures, interviews and correspondence, including Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press, 2005); Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007); Goods and Services (Blue Press, 2008); Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009); Lady Air (Perdika, 2010); What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006); BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen (Gallery 16 Editions, 2008); Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman (Cuneiform Press, 2009); Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer (Jungle Garden Books, 2011); Repeat After Me with watercolors by John Zurier (Gallery Paule Anglim, 2011); The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings (Qua Books, 2004); Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 2007); and For The Ordinary Artist (BlazeVox, 2011). During the 1960s he was an editorial associate at Art News, a regular contributor to Arts, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art, an associate producer of a program on art for public television, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School and Yale University. After moving to Northern California in 1970, he began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint.

WALKER BRENTS III, born in 1959, is a poet and storyteller who has studied myths since he discovered at the age of five the myths of Hercules and the Greek gods. After majoring in English and philosophy at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, Brents worked with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in the early 1980s. It was while working at a refugee center in southern California that he was able to listen to the many stories of Vietnamese, Romanian, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees. Brents now tells Hindu, Japanese, and Chinese myths and folk tales at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and teaches at Berkwood Hedge School in Berkeley. He has published poetry in a number of literary magazines, including the Berkeley Review of Books, Moksha Journal, and Galley Sail Review. He has also been a featured performer at various cafes, as well as at the Marsh, a theater in San Francisco.

NEELI CHERKOVSKI, born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1945, is an applauded poet, critic, memoirist and literary biographer. He has written twelve books of poetry, including: From the Middle Woods (2011), From the Canyon Outward, the award winning Leaning Against Time, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography; and a collection of critical memoirs, Whitman’s Wild Children, which has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. For five years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy. In 2005 Cherkovski won the Pen Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award.  He is also a Friends of the SF Public Library Literary Laureate.

MAGGIE CLEVELAND looks for omens and wears her heartbreak like jewels in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where she works as a grant writer and lives as a proud mama of two fierce little girls. She is the director of the New Bedford-based Whaling City Review LIVE poetry series, and coordinated the southeast regional kickoff event for the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Maggie was the co-founder of the Baker Books Poetry Series, which she hosted from 1995-2000. She is the author of The Kids Ate My Homework: A New Bedford Area Resource Guide for Adult Students with Children (2008), and was recently published in the Newport Review, and the journal …like this. Maggie is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College.

CLARK COOLIDGE was born in Providence, RI, in 1939, and has lived, among other places, in Manhattan, Cambridge (MA), San Francisco, Rome (Italy), and the Berkshire Hills. He currently lives in Petaluma, California. His many volumes of poetry and prose include At Egypt, Odes of Roba, Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds, and This Time We Are Both. He has also edited the Collected Writings, Lectues, and Conversations of Philip Guston, with whom he collaborated on the 1991 publication, Baffling Means: Writings/Drawings.

JUSTIN DESMANGLES is Chairman of the board of directors of the Before Columbus Foundation. He is the creator the critically acclaimed radio program, New Day Jazz, now in its thirteenth year. Described by Ishmael Reed as one of the most important young black intellectuals in America (C-Span, April 3, 2011), his poetry and journalism have appeared in Amerarcana, Black Renaissance Noire (NYU), Drumvoices Revue (SIUE), and Konch. With the Poetry Center, he chaired a recent panel (with poet-scholars Maria Damon and Will Alexander) on the life and legacy of Bob Kaufman, and presently is collaborating with Roscoe Mitchell (Art Ensemble of Chicago), as librettist, for an opera on the life of Bob Kaufman.

DIANE DI PRIMA was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1934. For many years, she lived and wrote in Manhattan, where she founded the New York Poets Theatre and the Poets Press and where she edited the literary newsletter The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). She is the author of 44 books of poetry and prose, including Revolutionary Letters, Loba, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Pieces of a Song, Memoirs of a Beatnik and Dinners & Nightmares. For the last 35 years, she has lived and taught in and around San Francisco, which city recently named her its fifth Poet Laureate. In 2006 she received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and community service. She has also received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from St. Lawrence University in 1999 and a 1993 Lifetime Service Award from the National Poetry Association. She has received grants from the Lapis Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. In 2000 she lived in Chicago for several months, while serving for a semester at Columbia College as Master Poet in Residence.

STEVE DICKISON is the current director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University since 1999, teaches at SFSU as well as at California College of the Arts. Dickison is coeditor of Shuffle Boil, a music magazine, with David Meltzer (2002–06); editor and publisher of various works under the imprint Listening Chamber (with offshoots Rumor Books and Parrhesia Press); and coeditor of Prison/Culture (City Lights, 2009) and Homage to Etel Adnan (Post-Apollo, 2012). His poetry collection Disposed was published by the Post-Apollo Press in 2007, and “Wear You to the Ball” was performed as collaboration with new music composer Bill Dietz in London and Berlin in 2009.

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library/Geschke Center for the University of San Francisco. A graduate of the Poetics Program at the now defunct New College of California, his writings have appeared widely. Recent chapbooks include: from Chansonniers (Blue Press, 2008), Spirit Guest & Others (Lew Gallery Editions, 2009), Easy Eden with Micah Ballard (PUSH, 2009), and her friends down at the french cafe had no english words for me (PUSH, 2010). His first full length collection, There Are People Who Say That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A GUSTONBOOK, was published in February 2011 by the Post-Apollo Press. In 2013, Ugly Duckling Presse with publish his booke Das Gedichtete.

CHRISTINA FISHER “uses the antimatter of Orpheus in order to determine the best of the worst,” and lately borrows lines religiously from the Home Videos of David Meltzer. After almost 15 years in San Francisco, she recently moved to Florida’s southern Gulf Coast, where attempts to divine and index the suburban beach wildlives of everything from lost rings to possums to the ever-present osprey and mockingbird provide a cadence one might never guess exists. A graduate of New College Poetics, a student of the Rosy Cross, her collection Maybe A Painter was published by Auguste Press. Her latest publication is Young (Bird & Beckett, 2014)

MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI has written/directed several short films, including Psychosomatic (2005), Dreams of Wingless Flight (2003), and All About My Lover (2002). She worked on feature film projects Situation Room #2 (2005) with NY-based director Steve Staso, Security (2005) with Cannes/Sundance-winning director Rob Nilsson, and most recently on the PBS television documentary Stand Up: Muslim American Comics Come of Age (2008). She has screened her work at Pacific Film Archive, Women of Color Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, among others. Traveling extensively to Brazil, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and United Arab Emirates, she has contributed poetry and critical writing to several publications. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She has worked in collective solidarity action on the Palestinian occupation for seven years.

BARRY GIFFORD’s novels have been translated into twenty-eight languages.  His book Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.  David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart, which was based on Gifford’s novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, and his novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia in 1997. Barry Gifford co-wrote with director David Lynch the film Lost Highway(1997); he also co-wrote with director Matt Dillon the film City of Ghosts(2003), as well as the libretto for Ichiro Nodaira’s opera, Madrugada(2005). Mr. Gifford’s books include The Phantom Father, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Wyoming, named a Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, and which has been adapted for the stage and film; The Sinaloa Story; The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader; Do the Blind Dream?; and The Stars Above Veracruz. His most recent books are the novels The Imagination of the Heart and Memories from a Sinking Ship. Mr. Gifford’s writings have appeared in Punch, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Sport, the New York Times, El Pais, El Universal, La Repubblica, The New Yorker, Brick, Projections, La Nouvelle Revue Française and many other publications.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

NAOMI GOLDNER is a San Francisco-based writer and educator. She has published both fiction and non-fiction in Israel, where she spent more than half of her childhood, and is currently pursuing an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University where she is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. Naomi teaches creative writing to children in various SF schools and has two lovely boys of her own.

JASON GRABOWSKI was born in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn. He is the co-founder of Push Press, with Jason Morris, and the Heliopolis Project, a storefront in Brooklyn dedicated to experimental art and literature.

QR HAND, a native New Yorker, is the author of whose really blues; i speak to the poet in man and How Sweet It Is. His poetry has appeared in many journals and two seminal anthologies, Black Fire and Outlaw Poets. A former counselor in the San Francisco community health system, Hand has given poetry readings in San Francisco neighborhoods and at political gatherings over the years. Hand recently co-edited We Came to Play: Writings on Basketball. He is a member of the Wordwind Chorus, a group of poets and musicians who perform together.

SARAH HEADY writes on human geography, American history, and the built environment. She is the author of Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award in poetry. Her manuscript “Corduroy Road” was a finalist for the 2013 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize. Sarah is a founding member of the New Philadelphia Poets, a writing and performance collective whose work was featured at the Philly Fringe Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, and the Kelly Writers House. In 2013 she was a writer-in-residence at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska. A native of New York’s Hudson Valley and a graduate of Oberlin College, she is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at San Francisco State University.

JACK HIRSCHMAN was born in The Bronx, NY, in 1933. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some 45 translations from a half-dozen languages, as well as the editor of a number of anthologies and journals. In 2006, he was announced as the fourth Poet Laureate of San Francisco. That same year, his massive collection called The Arcanes was published in the English language in Italy. After his official term as Poet Laureate finished in late 2007, he became Poet in Residence with Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, in part to continue organizing the San Francisco International Poetry Festival with Friends. His laureate-series book is All That’s Left, published in 2008. He’s a member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA) and the Revolutionary Poets Brigade.

CARRIE HUNTER received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, edits the small chapbook press, ypolita press, and is a member of the Black Radish Books publishing collective. Recent poems appear in Big Bell, TH.CE, and in the video journal Jupiter 88. Chapbooks includeVorticells (Cygist Press), A Musics(Arrow as Aarow), Angel, Unincorporated (Lew Gallery editions), and four chapbooks with the Dusi/e-chap Kollektiv. Her book The Incompossible was published in 2011 by Black Radish Books.

JOJ KASTRA/GEORGES CASTERA, one of the leading poets of Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1936. After living many years in exile, he returned to his native land after the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier’s regime. He has been publishing books of poems in both Haitian and French since 1965. In his exile, while living in New York, he was known as a brilliant theoretician who wrote incendiary tracts in the Haitian language calling for the overthrow of the hated Duvalier dictatorship. His poems were a key incentive for the late poet Paul Laraque to create Curbstone Press’ major anthology of Haitian poetry, Open Gate. Castera’s Wisdom Teeth was published bilingually in 2007.

AYO KHENSU-RA was born in Oakland, CA and grew up in Hawaii. He currently lives in Novato, CA. 

AVA KOOHBOR was born in Tehran and now lives in San Francisco. Her first collection of poetry, Doubt itself is a belief, was published in Iran by Homa Press. Poems from this collection and others have been published in English, translated with the assistance of poet Patrick James Dunagan.

BASIL KING is a painter/poet, born in England before WWII and living in Brooklyn since 1968. He attended Black Mountain College as a teenager and completed his apprenticeship as an abstract expressionist in San Francisco and New York. For the past three decades he has taken his art “from the abstract to the figure, from the figure to the abstract.” His books include Mirage: a poem in 22 sections, Warp spasm, Identity, 77 Beasts/ Basil King’s Beastiary,Talisman#36/37, and In the Field Where Daffodils Grow, Short Stories.

JOANNE KYGER, often associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, studied philosophy and literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, moving to San Francisco in 1957 just before she finished her degree. In San Francisco she attended the Sunday meetings of poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and moved into the East West House, a communal house for students of Zen Buddhism and Asian studies. She lived in Japan with Gary Snyder, her husband at the time, and traveled in India with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky. She eventually returned to California, where she still lives. Kyger has published more than 20 collections of poetry, including The Tapestry and the Web (1965), All This Every Day (1975), The Wonderful Focus of You (1979), Going On: Selected Poems 1958-1980 (1983), Just Space, poems 1979-1989 (1991), Again: Poems 1989-2000 (2001), As Ever: Selected Poems (2002), and About Now: Collected Poems (2007). She is also the author of the prose collection Strange Big Moon: Japan and India Journals 1960-1964 (1981). Kyger lives in Bolinas, California and occasionally teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado.

JOHN LANDRY was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he has served as poet laureate. He has organized poetry events and publications for over 30 years. He has served as contributing editor to the New College Review and the 50th anniversary anthology of Beatitude. As editor of Patmos Press he published chapbooks by Robert Lax, Everett Hoagland, and George Wilkie.

MARINA LAZZARA was born and raised in Pennsylvania where the Lehigh River falls into the Delaware, but she has called the Bay Area home for more than 20 years. She has toured throughout the U.S. with several musical projects, including the all-girl rock band, Blue Gum Art, her indie-folk solo project, Poetiks, and her current band (with partner, J. Lee) The Rabbles. Marina has also had numerous published works of poetry with such journals as Processed World Magazine, Big Bridge, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Amerarcana, Occupy SF: an anthology of voices for social change, and recently in Big Bell. She studied Poetics at the New College of California where she wrote a thesis on Emily Dickinson’s letters. She has also studied Western Herbalism and Horticulture and is a California native plant gardener by day. She resides in San Francisco with the musician J. Lee and their daughter, Maizie Jade.

RODRIGO LIRA was a Chilean poet. His poetry is in line with other Chilean bards who preceded him, as Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. His work abounds with the use of irony, experimentation with language, intertextuality, criticism, and particularly black humor, in which are all victims, including himself.

ED LOFTUS

NATHANIEL MACKEY was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a B.A. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His books of poetry include Nod House (New Directions, 2011), Splay Anthem, which won the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; Whatsaid Serif (1998); Song of the Andoumboulou: 18-20 (1994); School of Udhra (1993); Outlantish (1992); Eroding Witness (1985), which was selected for the National Poetry Series; Septet for the End of Time (1983); and Four for Trane (1978). He is also the author of an ongoing epistolary novel, From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the first three volumes of which have been brought back into print together in a single volume from New Directions. The fourth volume is Bass Cathedral (2008). He is also the author of two collections of essays and interviews, Paracritical Hinge and Discrepant Engagement. He teaches at Duke University, after many years at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

MICHAEL MCCLURE gave his first poetry reading at the age of 22 at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. He has received a Guggenheim Felowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award, and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting. His more than a dozen books of poetry include Of Indigo and Saffron, Mysteriosos, Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones. He has published eight books of plays and four collections of essays. His novels are The Mad Cub and The Adept. McClure’s songs include “Mercedes Benz,” popularized by Janis Joplin and new songs which are being performed by The Twenty-first Century Doors. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife the sculptor Amy Evans McClure.

DUNCAN MCNAUGHTON  is a poet, critic, teacher and editor born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1942. He received a degree in Classics from N.Y.U. before pursuing graduate work in Oriental Studies at Princeton and completing a Ph.D. in English literature and poetics at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo. In addition to his own important and original work as a poet, McNaughton is a small press editor, and the founder/ publisher for FATHAR and MOTHER, two seminal little magazines. He also established the Poetics Program at the New College of San Francisco and directed the Program from its opening until 1990. The Poetics Program, from its inception, was at the forefront of innovative literature, not only in the Bay Area but also in the country at large. McNaughton is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including A Passage of Saint Devil (1976), Sumeriana (1977), Valparaiso (1995), Kicking the Feather (1996), and Capricci (2003).

JACKSON MEAZLE is from Arkansas. He lives in San Francisco, where he edits and publishes small books under the imprint Gas Meter, with Rod Roland. His own collections include HH (Old Gold, 2012) and Jack of Diamonds and the Queen of Spades (Bird & Beckett, 2013).

DAVID MELTZER has published numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays, including David’s Copy: The Selected Poems, Beat Thing, No Eyes: Lester Young, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets and When I Was a Poet, the sixtieth volume of City Lights’ Pocket Poets series. A long-time faculty member of the Poetics Program at the now defunct New College of California, he has also edited several anthologies, including Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz, and The Secret Garden: An Anthology in the Kabbalah. He lives in Oakland, CA.

SARAH MENEFEE  is most recently the author of Human Star. Her other books include I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart. A long-time activist in the homeless movement, she is also a founding and active member of San Francisco’s Revolutionary Poets Brigade and can be found leading workshops among the occupiers of Occupy San Francisco.

RICHARD O. MOORE, a documentary filmmaker for public television, was one of the founders of KPFA—the first publicly supported radio station in the United States. He was born in Alliance, Ohio, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied poetry with Josephine Miles. He was associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and frequented Kenneth Rexroth’s Friday meetings for poets, philosophers, and poetry aficionados. During World War II, Moore was classified 4-F and counseled conscientious objectors. He wrote poetry for decades but shared little of it until poet Brenda Hillman encouraged him to publish. In 2010, Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp edited Moore’s book Writing the Silences, a collection representing more than 60 years of his work, published by UC Press.

BENJAMIN MORRIS is a native of Mississippi, currently living in New Orleans and finishing a PhD in Archaeology at Cambridge . His work has appeared widely in both the US and the UK, and among other awards has received a commendation in the National Poetry Competition, a Pushcart nomination, the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry and the Brewer Hall Prize from Cambridge, and recently, a tied-for-third-place entry in a ‘shark poetry’ contest, of which he is most proud of all. Recently he co-edited the anthologies Stolen Stories and The Golden Hour Book volume II, both from Forest Publications in Edinburgh. His preferred drink is bourbon and rocks.

JASON MORRIS was born in Vermont and lives in San Francisco where he reads, tends bar, writes poems, and publishes the magazine Big Bell, with Russell Dillon, and small books under the imprint Push Press, along with Jason Grabowski. Morris is the author of Spirits and Anchors (Auguste Press), Golden West Notebook (Allone/Publication Studio), and Local News (Bird & Beckett, forthcoming 2013).

JESSE MORSE lives in Denver and is in the PhD program at the University there. He spends a lot time outside with his Labradane Hank. The chapbook Rotations came out in 2011 (C_L Press) and the chapbook paragraphs for dolphins is due out soon. Work forthcoming in Greetings and With + Stand. He hopes to sing again someday.

FRED MOTEN, born in Las Vegas, NV, is the author of ARKANSAS, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, I Ran from It but Was Still in It, Hughson’s Tavern and B Jenkins. He lives in Durham, North Carolina with Laura Harris and their sons, Lorenzo and Julian, and teaches at Duke University.

JEFFREY JOE NELSON  grew up in the Garden State. Extended sojourns throughout North Carolina, Wales, Florida, California, Italy, Holland, Cuba and Prague eventually brought him to Brooklyn when he has lived for the past 13 years. Jeffrey Joe’s work has appeared in Oyster Boy, New York Nights, Dial Tone, Lungfull!, Ashville Mountain Review, and Greetings, a magazine of the sound arts he founded in 1998. Recent chapbooks include a car/A Pome (Lew Gallery Editions), and Caption my Caption (Gneiss Books). He teaches English and coaches Basketball at the Coalition High School for Social Change in Harlem.

ERIK NOONAN was born in Los Angeles in 1974, and lives in San Francisco. A graduate of the New College of California, he teaches at Woodside International School. His poems have appeared in diverse journals and magazines.

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received the Poets & Writers California Writer’s Exchange Award in 2010. He earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco and a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

JULIEN POIRIER is the author of El Golpe Chileno, the Ugly Duckling Presse chapbook Stained Glass Windows of California and numerous other chapbooks, including most recently The Assassinated Tropics, published by Gas Meter Books. His large poem system Way Too West in due out this year from Bootstrap Press. He is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he co-edited 6×6 and edited New York Nights newspaper from 2001 to 2006. His editorial projects included Jack Micheline’s One of a Kind, Steve Dalachinsky’s In Glorious Black and White, Stan Apps’ Soft Hands, and Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings (editions 1 and 2). He lives in Berkeley.

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE was born in Boston and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since the age of four. He graduated from Burlingame High School, went to Reed College for a year and a half, then attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he got a BA in 1970 and a PhD in 1978. He also attended Stanford University on a Stegner Poetry Fellowship in 1974–75. Ratcliffe has published more than twenty books of poetry, including New York Notes(1983), Distance (1986), [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (1989), spaces in the light said to be where one/ comes from (1992), Present Tense (1995), Sculpture (1996), SOUND/(system) (2002), and Conversation (2011). In the late 1990s, he began a series of ‘poems-written-in-consecutive-days’ which is still going on, and has thus far resulted in three 474-page books — Portraits & Repetition(2002), REAL (2007), and CLOUD / RIDGE (2011) — and three 1,000-page books — HUMAN / NATURE, Remarks on Color / Sound, and Temporality, all available at Editions Eclipse. Audio recordings of his work, including a fourteen-hour performance in collaboration with several Bay Area musicians of HUMAN / NATURE at UC Davis on June 8–9, 2008, and another fourteen-hour performance of Remarks on Color / Sound on May 16, 2010, at Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, can be found at his page on PennSound; his ongoing ‘daily poems’ can be found online at stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com. Ratcliffe has also written three books of literary criticism: Campion: On Song (1981), Listening to Reading (2000), and Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (2010). He has lived in Bolinas since 1973, is the publisher of Avenue B books, and has taught at Mills College in Oakland since 1984.

BARBARA JANE REYES was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, entitled Diwata, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2010. Her chapbooks, Easter Sunday (2008), Cherry (2008), and West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM and other Oakland poems (2008) are published by Ypolita Press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, and Deep Oakland Editions, respectively. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Latino Poetry Review, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, among others. She has taught Creative Writing at Mills College, and Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

WILLIAM ROCKWELL received a BA from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Along with artist, Chris Lux, he recently published Twelve Saints (Peradam Press), a collection of paintings and short stories inspired by The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.

BLAKE ROGERS

ROD ROLAND is a poet and artist. His books include The Playgroup (Gas Meter Press, 2012) and Best Loved (Old Gold, 2013).He lives in San Francisco, where he co-edits Gas Meter Books with Jackson Meazle.

JOHN SAKKIS is the author The Islands (forthcoming from Nightboat Books) and Rude Girl (BlazeVOX Books), and with Angelos Sakkis he has translated three books by Athenian poet and multi-media artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis — “now, 1/3″ and thepoem (BlazeVOX Books), Maribor (The Post-Apollo Press), awarded the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation, and Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling Presse). Lives in Oakland, where he edits and publishes Both Both.

WALY SALOMAO was a Brazilian poet. He was born in Jequié, Bahia. He acted on several areas of Brazilian culture as poet, songwriter and writer. His first book was Me segura qu’eu vou dar um troço in 1972. His last book Pescados Vivos was published after his death in 2004. He wrote successful lyrics for Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.

CEDAR SIGO  was born in 1978 on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Washington State. He studied at the Naropa Institute with Anne Waldman, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. His first book, Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), was reprinted in a revised edition in 2005. In 2010, City Lights published his Stranger In Town. Other collections include Goodnight Nurse, Slivers (Push Press, 2010) and Plains Pictograph (Gasmeter, 2013). A writer on art, literature, and film, Sigo is also the editor and publisher of Old Gold books.

WILL SKINKER  was born & raised in Marshall Virginia, then moved to Portland OR, and then to San Francisco CA, and then to Denver CO. Auguste Press published his book Mascara in 2007, and Lew Gallery Editions published his small book Feed My Lambs in 2011. He attempts to climb mountains for fun and is writing a long non-fiction work-in-progress about his mountaineering adventures titled We Eat Distance,  two chapters of which have been published. His poems appear and disappear in journals here and there and this makes him smile. He moved to Denver in 2012 with his wife Yolanda and their two cats. He works for Adam’s Camp in Centennial CO, a non-profit organization that runs summer camps for developmentally disabled children and their families.

MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER  is the author of the chapbooks In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys, Abandoning the Firmament (Menagerie Editions 2009 and 2010), The Bridge (Push Press 2011) and 20 Love Poems for 10 Months (Ugly Duckling Presse 2012); a collaborative play, I Am You This Morning You Are Me Tonight, written with her husband, poet Chris Martin; and the collection, Ceremony, winner of the 2012 Slope Editions book prize and published in February 2013. New poems have recently appeared in epiphany, Boston Review, Boog City Reader, Iowa Review, Lungfull, New Orleans Review and elsewhere, and her critical work can be found in Pleiades,The Claudius App, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She runs a tiny design studio in Iowa City, IA, where she works as a book designer and illustrator.

SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX is best described as a “New Orleans poet stranded in San Francisco.” Her poems have been published in Big Bridge #11, Big Bell, The Blue Press Portfolio, Generacion, Greetings, Nevada State Line, Morning Train, and Polis: Resistance. Small books include 20/20 Yielding, Hidden Driveways Ahead, Room Service Calls and United Untied. With Micah Ballard, she is co-editor for Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions. Her first full length collection, Palm to Pine, was published by Bootstrap Press in 2011.

TISA WALDEN was born in Meridian, Mississippi, raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. receiving a B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland. In 1978 she moved to San Francisco where she began writing and reading her poetry publicly, founding the small press Deep Forest which has published over 70 titles including authors such as Kirby Doyle, Jack Hirschman, Howard Hart, Franz Wright, and many others. In 1984 she received a M.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University. City Lights published her title Fire Road, and she has published sixteen other chapbooks of her poetry including Perfumes, Blue Junk, Transcendental Etude and Dark Opera. In 2011, Loosestrife Editions published a collection of her photographs entitled San Francisco in the 21st Century.

ELIZABETH WITTE received her MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is Assistant Editor of The Common.

MAURICE WOODS