Poetry | Prose | Visual Arts | Playwriting | Composing | Current Juries

Past Juries: 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Poetry Jury : 2009 Season

 

Rachel Levitsky's book NEIGHBOR, will be out from Ugly Duckling Press in Spring, 2009. She is also the author of Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003,) Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, and Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999). Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Her work is published in magazines such as The Recluse, Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and the anthologies Boog City (vol. I & II), Bowery Women, and 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. Her work has been translated into Icelandic, French and Japanese. Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions. She has taught poetry workshops at Woodland Pattern, Naropa University, Poets House, the Poetry Project and the Pratt Institute. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics. Currently she serves as the CPW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, poet Akilah Oliver grew up in Los Angeles. As a child, she traveled around the country and throughout Mexico with her father and sisters in a motor home, visiting Acapulco, Vera Cruz, Mexico City, Baja, and Tijuana, as well most of the continental United States. She attended the University of California-Berkeley where her love of performance and poetry first took shape, performing with jazz musicians around Berkeley and Oakland.

Her son Oluchi McDonald was born in 1982 and, to continue her undergraduate studies, Oliver transferred from UC-Berkeley to New College of California where she received her bachelor's degree the following year. She attended graduate school in New York and moved to Los Angeles where she was involved in the then emergent multicultural arts movement there. She was artist-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center where she taught poetry and multicultural performance arts workshops while also teaching public school. During this time in Los Angeles she co-founded the avant-garde feminist performance group The Sacred Naked Nature Girls whose work has been the subject of critical work by Coco Fusco, Meiling Cheng and others. In 1993 she moved to Colorado and taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Naropa University for many years.

Her most recent chapbooks are The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna Press, 2006), a(A)ugust (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2007) and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla Press, 2004). She is also the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/ Erudite Fangs, 1999), which received the PEN Beyond Margins Award. Her performance with collaborator Anne Waldman can be heard on the new CD, Matching Half.

The recipient of grants from the California Arts Council, The Flintridge Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Oliver was curator for the Poetry Project's Monday Night Reading Series, Distinguished Author at Long Island University, and is on the faculty of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She currently lives and teaches in Brooklyn. Her most recent book was just published by Coffee House Press (2009), A Toast in the House of Friends.

As a translator, Matvei Yankelevich has published a little bit in journals including Circumference, Harpers, New American Writing, and The New Yorker. His translation of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007) has received praise from the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is a co-translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006). His translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Cloud in Pants" is included in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008). He is the author of a long poem, The Present Work (Palm Press, 2006) and his writing has appeared in Boston Review, Damn the Caesars, Fence, Open City, etc. He teaches Russian Lit. at Hunter College and edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Prose Jury : 2009 Season

Lisa Dierbeck is the author of the critically acclaimed novel One Pill Makes You Smaller. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has written for such periodicals as The Boston Globe, Elle, Glamour, The New York Observer, The New York Times Book Review, People, O, The Oprah Magazine and Time Out New York. Dierbeck's nonfiction is featured in O's Guide to Life: The Best of O, The Oprah Magazine. Her essay on The Pretenders will appear in Heavy Rotation: Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, a HarperCollins anthology, in June 2009.

Renee Gladman lives in Providence, RI, where she publishes Leon Works, a press for experimental fiction and cross-genre writing. She is the author of three collections of prose (Juice, The Activist, and Newcomer Can't Swim) and one poetry book (A Picture-Feeling), and teaches in the Program for Literary Arts at Brown University.
 

Laird Hunt is the author of Indiana, Indiana, The Exquisite and Ray of the Star (forthcoming fall 2009). A graduate of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, he is currently on faculty in the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program.

Carole Maso is the author of nine books including the novels Ava, The Art Lover, and Defiance; a collection of essays, Break Every Rule; prose poems, Aureole and Beauty Is Convulsive; and a memoir, The Room Lit By Roses. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and is currently at work on two projects, Mother & Child, a book of stories, and The Bay of Angels, a novel.

Alissa Quart is the author of two non-fiction books, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (Basic Books, 2003) and Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press, 2006). She is currently working on her third book, about the effect of subcultures on the mainstream, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her books have been translated into eight languages. She is a contributing writer to Mother Jones as well as Columbia Journalism Review, where she writes a media column. She also writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and many other publications. In addition, she teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Visual Arts Jury : 2009 Season

Jimbo Blachly is an artist living in New York City. His work has been exhibited at Franklin Furnace, The New Museum, P.S.1, The SculptureCenter in N.Y., and Catherine Clark gallery in San Francisco. In 2004 he was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency in Italy. During 2005 he was awarded a residency in Dijon France from the Farpath Foundation. Since 2004 he has been co-editor of The Chadwick Family Papers with the poet Lytle Shaw, they have presented work in exhibitions at ICA and Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia and at Wavehill in the Bronx, N.Y. In 2008 their exhibition "The Genretron" was exhibited at Winkleman Gallery in NYC.

Kenji Fujita has had One-Person exhibitions at Incident Report, Hudson, NY; Galerie Jean Bernier, Athens; Cable Gallery, New York; Luhring Augustine, New York; Rosenberg Gallery at Hofstra University, Hemptead, NY; Schmidt/Markow Gallery, St. Louis; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles. His Group shows include exhibitions at A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Venice Biennale; Luhring Augustine Hetzler, Santa Monica, CA; Jablonka Galerie, Cologne; Jack Tilton Gallery, New York; Henry Street Settlement, New York.

Fujita is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (Visual Art), National Endowment for the Arts (Sculpture, Works on Paper), New York Foundation for the Arts (Sculpture) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Since 1995, he has been on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program, School of Visual Arts at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He lives in Staatsburg, NY.

Katie Murken is a visual artist with interdisciplinary interests. Through book works and installed environments she creates new contexts for viewing and experiencing art. Murken received her Masters of Fine Arts from The University of the Arts in 2005, where she earned a degree in book arts and printmaking. She was awarded The Elizabeth C. Robert's Prize for Graduate Study and the Mr. Harry Eaby/Piccari Press Scholarship. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania State University in 2001, with honors in Visual Art from the Schreyer Honors College. In 2003, Murken traveled to Italy for a four-week artist's residency at the Scuola Grafica di Internazionale in Venice, where she created a one-of-a-kind artists' book. In 2007, Murken was invited to create a site-specific, media-based installation for Greenmachine, a project sponsored by InLiquid.com, at The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia, PA. She has exhibited her work at The Visual Arts Society of Texas, where she was awarded the Jack and Evelyn Miller Award and the Connoisseur Brush Award. Murken received the Purchase Award during the Book/ Paper/ Scissors artists' book fair at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2007, and her artists' book, For She is Time, is now included in the Special Collections Department of Temple University Libraries in Philadelphia, PA. Recently, the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, PA, selected Murken for a Career Development Fellowship. Murken is currently a full-time Lecturer and the Dean's Appointment for 2D Foundations at the Tyler School of Art.

Martha Schwendener is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn, NY. Her art criticism and essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Bookforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Nextbook.com, and The Village Voice. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction and KGB Bar Lit Magazine. She was a founding member of experimental music group Bowery Electric and released a solo electronic album as Echostar (Sola, Instinct / Knitting Factory, 2003). She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University, studied in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and was the recipient of a James A. Michener Fellowship while in the MA program in Creative Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. She has been a member of the Advisory Committee at PS 122 and Socrates Sculpture Park; a contributor to The Review Panel and CUE Art Foundation Roundtable; Critic in Residence at Art Omi (Summer 2008); Guest Critic, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Pratt Institute and Hunter College MFA Program. She teaches Art History and Writing in the Art Administration Masters Program at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY). Recent publications include the essays "What Crisis? Some Promising Futures for Art Criticism" in The Village Voice, "Notes on Landscape/Painting/Photography/the Sublime" in Cameron Martin: Analogue (GHava Press, 2009) and "Notes on Function" in the exhibition catalog for Return to Function (May 2009) produced by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, curator, and visual artist. He has worked in several media and disciplines including film and video, music recording, theater, painting and drawing. He is the author of one published collection of poems, Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); and is co-author of a image-text collaboration with author/translator/professor John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press, 2006), which features Stackhouse's drawings in dialogue with Keene's texts. His visual art has been exhibited in galleries and exhibition spaces, including Wilmer Jennings Gallery (NYC) and White Box: The Annex (NYC). He is a Cave Canem Writer Fellow; a 2005 Fellow in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts, was a panel/juror for the 2007 Fellowship in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, MFA in Writing candidate, 2009. He will present a talk as a Visiting Artist to both writers and visual artists at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's 2007-2008 Workspace Artists-in-Residence program in March 2008. A forthcoming essay on form and experimentation in poetry will be published by the Academy of American Poets, in their print magazine American Poet, in the spring 2008 issue.

Playwriting Jury : 2009 Season

Patricia Ybarra received her B.A. from Columbia University in 1994 and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Theatre History and Criticism in 2002. She is a Ford Foundation Minority Fellow and a founding member of the Latino/a Focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Her recent and forthcoming publications include reviews, chapters, and articles in Text and Presentation, Gestos, Theatre Journal, The Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, and Theatre and Nationalism. Her area of specialization is theatre historiography of the Americas, with emphasis on the relationship between theatre, nationalism, and American identities in North America.

She is currently writing her first manuscript, Performing Conquest: Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico 1538-2003.

She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University. She is also a director, dramaturg and the former Managing Director of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

She lives in Providence, Rhode Island

Kevin Cunningham is an award-winning writer, director, designer, producer, inventor and entrepreneur based in New York City. He is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of 3-Legged Dog Media and Theater Group and led the company's recovery from its destruction in the 9/11/01 attacks to a new home in Lower Manhattan.

Since 1994 Cunningham has focused on the creation of his own large-scale, live, multimedia performance/installation works and on the development of affordable intuitive technology for multiplexing and seamless multi media interaction. Works include: House of Bugs (Ontological Theater), The Realism of Simple Machines (La Mama), Automatic Earth (Signature Theater), Kampuchea/Loisaida (3LD Desbrosses Street), Accidental Records (Venice Biennale, 9th Annual Architecture Exhibit), and Degeneracy, Losing Something (2007 Hewes Design Award) and A Line of You at 3LD Art & Technology Center. He just completed designing and directing 3-Legged Dog's hit multi-media performance/installation of Chuck Mee's Fire Island which ran to sold out houses in the spring of 2008. He is completing work on a series of multi-layered interactive 3D video installations using the new Eyeliner 3D video projection technology and has begun a new collaboration with Chuck Mee: Fêtes de la Nuit (Paris Orgy). The HD video portion of which will be filmed in Paris. The work will premier at 3LD in the spring of 2010.

Awards and honors include the 2007 American Theater Wing Hewes Design Award for Production Design of Losing Something, residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation's Barn and The Rockefeller Study And Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy as well as numerous grants and awards. Cunningham frequently contributes to seminars, symposia and selection committees including the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Edward Albee Foundation (8 years), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and various foundations, artists retreats and service organization committees.

Composing Jury : 2009 Season

Composer Koji Nakano's works reflect the relationship between beauty, form and imperfection through the formality of music. As a composer and an educator, Mr. Nakano's musical activities have included community service and outreach to help bridge Eastern and Western musical cultures. Mr. Nakano's compositions have premiered in Aspen, Bowdoin, Buffalo, as well as at Tanglewood, Round Top, Algoma Fall and Vancouver music festivals. In New York City, his compositions have been performed at Merkin, Weill, and Cami Halls; in Boston at Jordan Hall; in Tokyo at Triphony and Musicasa Halls; in Vancouver at Scotiabank Dance Centre; in Brussels at Maene Piano Salon and in the Netherlands at Arnold Schoenberg Hall.

In addition to being the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, Mr. Nakano has also received the Japanese Government Artist Fellowship from the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, the Rockefeller Foundation (2009 Bellagio Center residency), the Margaret Lee Croft Fellowship from Tanglewood Music Center, the Global Connections Grant from Meet the Composer, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. At New England Conservatory, he was the winner of composition competitions for the Honors Brass Quintet in 1998 and the Commencement Composition in 1997 and 1999. Mr. Nakano is the first recipient of the Japan Society of Boston's Toru Takemitsu Award in Composition awarded annually to the most talented young composer in the Boston area.

In the spring of 2008, Mr. Nakano was Composer in Residence for the Japanese Spring Festival at the United Nations International School Theater in New York City. He also served as one of resident composers of the Thailand International Composition Festival in Bangsaen, Thailand in 2008. In 2009, Mr. Nakano will be a visiting composer at California State University at San Bernardino, Royal University of Fine Arts in Cambodia, and at Payap, Burapha, Rangsit, and Silpakorn Universities in Thailand.

Samita Sinha sings North Indian classical music fused with electronics, jazz, and text in multiple languages. She began her training at age ten in Flushing, the same time she began singing in choirs and musicals.

After studying Literature and Cultural Criticism at Yale, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Hindustani vocal music in the guru-student tradition with Dr. Alka Deo Marulkar in Goa, India.

Her current projects include an electro-Hindustani/ hip-hop project called Anatomy in collaboration with pianist/ producer Marc Cary, which has been expanded into a multimedia music performance piece entitled Naked. In 2006 her music collective Kaash released their debut album Seep listed as one of Billboard's Top 5 Hear and Now and named a 2006 Top Pick by All About Jazz. Samita sings with jazz ensembles such as Marc Cary's FOCUS and Sunny Jain Collective, and is a featured vocalist in performance poet Sekou Sundiata's music-theater work, the 51st (dream) state, which premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music and continues to tour internationally. She lives in Queens.