Faculty 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. With John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O’Brien he is the co-author of Three Poets published by Minus A Press late last year. His poems have appeared such magazines as A Public Space, Fence, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among others. He is a recipient of The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters. (Core Faculty)

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. His second, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was a National Poetry Series selection. He has received residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, and Callaloo. Two of his operas, Sucktion and Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent City premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Hammer. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts, where he received his MFA in Writing (04). (Core Faculty)

Dorothea Lasky is the author of four books of poetry, most recently the forthcoming ROME (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2014), as well as Thunderbird, Black Life, AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013) and several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in New York City. (Co-Director)

Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade, his debut collection of poetry from W. W. Norton’s historic Liveright imprint. In 2007, he completed a Masters degree by editing two unpublished essays of John Ashbery at Boston University’s Editorial Institute; in 2010, he received his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His poems, essays and interviews have appeared in A Public Space, The American Reader, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the poetry journal Maggy. Last fall, he co-curated the immersive-environment exhibit “John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things” for Loretta Howard Gallery. He teaches at The New School and Rutgers University. He lives in the East Village. (Co-Director)

Photo: Irene Fertik

Harryette Mullen is the author of several poetry collections, including Recyclopedia, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, German, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Kyrgyz. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between, was published in 2012 by University of Alabama Press. A new poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press) was a “top pick” for fall 2013 by the Los Angeles Times. She teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. (Core Faculty)

Tom Healy’s latest collection of poems, “Animal Spirits” is tattooed on his left arm. His firstbook, “What the Right Hand Knows,” was a finalist for the 2009 LA Times Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award. But no tattoo. A collection of Tom’s essays about artists and writers, “Not Untrue, Not Unkind,” will be published this fall. Tattoo decision forthcoming. Tom is the chairman of the Fulbright Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright scholars program worldwide. He is also a Harriet Monroe Fellow of the Poetry Foundation, where he is co-editing an anthology of 20th century American poetry with Adam Fitzgerald and a book of essays and archival material on John Ashbery’s home in Hudson, NY with Karin Roffman. Each summer, he is a visiting writer at the New York State and Port Townsend, WA Writers Institutes. www.tomhealy.net (Art Talks Coordinator)

Emily Skillings is a dancer and poet. Her chapbook, Linnaeus: The 26 Sexual Practices of Plants is forthcoming from No, Dear/ Small Anchor Press. Skillings dances for the A.O. Movement Collective and The Commons Choir (Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik) and presents her own choreography in New York. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is a member of Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective and event series. This fall she will begin her graduate studies at Columbia University. (Program Coordinator)

Emily Pettit is an editor for Factory Hollow Press and notnostrums; and for three years has been the publisher of the exciting literary print journal jubilat. Pettit has taught writing courses at the University of Iowa, the University of Massachusetts and Elms College. She currently teaches poetry at Flying Object in Hadley, Mass. Pettit’s first collection of poems Goat in the Snow came out in early 2012 with Birds LLC. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets/Poem a Day Series, Fence, Open Letters, Verse Daily, and the Huffington Post. (Poet in Residence)

Eric Baus is the author of The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004). He has recently written about poetry audio files in his Notes on PennSound commentary column in Jacket2. He lives and teaches in Denver. (Poet in Residence)

2014 Faculty

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry.  Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf 2011), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.  Duende (Graywolf 2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question (Graywolf 2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2005 Whiting Award and was the Literature protégé in the 2009-2011 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, is forthcoming from Knopf. She is professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six collections of poems, including Louise in Love, The Bride of E, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. A new volume of poems, The Last Two Seconds, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2015. She lives in St. Louis where she is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington University.

Dara Wier‘s new book is YOU GOOD THING from Wave Books. Among her other dozen orso books are REVERSE RAPTURE and VOYAGES IN ENGLISH.  She’s an editor and founder of factory hollow press, a member of Flying Object, an arts lab in Hadley, Massachusetts, and as permanent faculty current director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s MFA for Poets and Writers where she’s a founding director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute.  Her love and admiration for John Ashbery cannot be exaggerated.

 

Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based artist, who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever more medium that takes to get her ideas across. In her installation/performance works, Aki moves and talks inside the careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating bizarre emotions behind daily life. Her works appear in theater spaces, gallery spaces, as well as in odd outdoor sites. Shown in exhibitions at Mori Museum, Take Ninagawa, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Japan; Gwangju Biennial 2012, South Korea; Chocolate Factory Theater, the Kitchen, Soloway, Whitney Biennial 2010 at Whitney Museum, Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1, New York; and numerous other international and domestic venues. Besides her own work, she has collaborated with visual artists, musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, and scholars. Aki is also a co-founder of the nonprofit interdisciplinary organization, Culture Push Inc.

Mark So lives in Los Angeles. His work explores ordinary situations in various open frames of perception and action through simple means of recording / transcription / reading, as well as changing experiences of silence. He has produced a vast output of scores, tapes, and ephemera, including some 300 pieces engaging the poetry of John Ashbery. His Heliogabalus operas for 1, 2, and 3 readers leverage Artaud’s text — a “concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence” — with his own. In addition to musical activities, he has collaborated on projects with a range of artists including Rick Bahto, Madison Brookshire, Adam Fitzgerald, Chris Girard, Julia Holter, Eileen Myles, Julie Tolentino/Stosh Fila, and Manfred Werder, often resulting in work that occupies its own genre.

Chris Russell was born in Palo Alto, CA, in 1982, and currently lives in New York City and works as a teacher of children with blindness and visual impairment.  He is the contributor illustrator for Stonecutter: A Journal of Art and Literature, and his work has been featured in Higher Arc, Washington Square Review, Juxtapoz, and 92Y’s Podium.  He is currently working on a “graphic translation” of Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos.