Erin Sullivan (‘15) moved to California to pursue Environmental Sciences at Pitzer College. She published a series of limited edition artist books, and in her free time she continues to produce handmade bindings. This coming year she will be a collaborator in the thesis of a book arts student at the Claremont Graduate University.
Poetry + Visual Art Master Class
Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, S.C. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and is a graduate Cave Canem Fellow. In addition to a chapbook publication by Finishing Line Press entitled Something of Yours (2010) her work is published in several journals and anthologies including The African-American Review, PLUCK, Cave Canem Anthology XIII, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her current manuscript, MEND, tells the story of women who were the experimental subjects of Dr. James Marion Sims of Montgomery, Alabama. This work received a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and organizes a bi-annual three-dimensional poetry exhibit which features poetry and visual art including original paintings, photography, installations and film.
Chris Fritton is the former Studio Director of the Western New York Book Arts Center. A poet, printer, and fine artist, Fritton has over a decade of experience writing, printing, and making his own books, in addition to collaborative efforts with other authors and artists. Recently (2014) he was selected as a panelist to judge the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship in Drawing, Printmaking, and Book Arts. He co-founded the highly-acclaimed Buffalo Small Press Book Fair with Kevin Thurston in 2007, and has been organizing the fair solo since 2009 (the Fair is now in its 10th year). Currently Fritton is working on a brand new project called The Itinerant Printer, where he plans to visit over 100 letterpress print shops throughout 2015 & 2016.
As a former designer and printer for Mohawk Press at the Western New York Book Arts Center, Fritton was lucky enough to create gig posters for dozens of bands, including Sleater-Kinney, Waxahatchee, Dead Kennedys, Bonnie Prince Billy, Okkervil River, Wu Tang Clan, Ice Cube, Rasputina, Deerhoof, of Montreal, Mastodon, Dillinger Escape Plan, GWAR, First Aid Kit, Tegan and Sara, as well as international events like the World Maker Faire. He has also had the good fortune to make work for artists like the eccentric Crispin Hellion Glover.
Fritton has collaborated directly with influential American artist Richard Tuttle, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carl Dennis, esteemed printer Amos P. Kennedy Jr., and renowned type designer Richard Kegler. His books are in various collections throughout the U.S. including The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, Fleet Library Special Collections at the Rhode Island School of Design, The Poetry Collection SUNY at Buffalo, University of Wisconsin at Madison Rare Books Collection, Special Collections at Harvard Library, and the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Collection.
He has been an artist-in-residence at AS220 in Providence, RI and an instructor at numerous institutions, including the Penland School of Crafts. He holds a BA in Philosophy (1998), a BA in Poetics (2000), and a BA in Art History (2010) from SUNY at Buffalo, as well as an MA in Poetics from the University of Maine at Orono (2005).
Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), a required book for Experimental Literature, and the chapbooks Inherit (Bloof Books) and Comorbid (Lark Books). Sidebrow will be publishing her second, currently unnamed full collection of poetry. Ginger is currently a PhD student at the University of Georgia’s creative writing program. She is a contributing editor for The Wanderer and an editor at smoking glue gun. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com
Experimental Poetry Performance
Julie Ezelle Patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, artist, and sculptor. Her poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, and site-specific installations.
Patton's performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and otherworldly chora-graphs, and bridges literary and musical composition. She has performed at many international venues and festivals including the Stone, Jazz Standard, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia; The Kitchen, La Bâtie-Festival de Genève. Patton is also a frequent collaborator with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, and composers including Uri Caine, Henry Hills, Don Byron, Henri Grimes, Sally Silvers, and Anne Waldman.
With the support of her 2015 FCA grant, Patton participated in readings at the Page Poetry Salon, Poets House, and the New School. Her writing was also featured in the anthologies What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (University of Alabama Press, 2015), Please Add to This List: A Teaching Guide to Bernadette Mayer Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press, 2015).
Patton is the author of Teething on Type (1996), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?) (1999), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), and Using Blue To Get Black (2008), B(Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Writing With Crooked Ink (Belladonna, 2015). Her work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)) (2010), Critiphoria, I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2005), and other publications. The Building by the Side of the Road (2012), chronicles Patton's adventures creating Let It Bee Ark Hives on the Glenville edge of Cleveland, Ohio's University Circle cultural district. This living, breathing, D-I-Y home-ec[o]arts INNstallation houses visiting and resident creatives and scholars, a number of Patton's own projects in visual and performance art, as well as permaculture. As a Green Horizons Fellow at Bates College, Patton created a sculpted library called “Room for Opal," an eccentric take off of 19th century naturalist laboratories.
Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at UAB, where he is director of the English Honors Program and editor of Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the author of The Coal Life and coauthor of According to Discretion.
POETRY OUT LOUD PERFORMANCES
The Indian Springs School winner and runner-up will present six poems from memory as they performed at the Regional Poetry Out Loud Competition in Tuscaloosa.
erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she is a fine arts publicist and curates the john oates house reading series. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Apartment, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Bombay Gin, Boog City, clinic, Coconut, Dusie, Little Red Leaves, New American Writing, Octopus, P Queue, The New Megaphone, and With+Stand, among others. Books include the precipice of jupiter (Queue Books) and camera obscura (BlazeVox Books), both collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein, and the solo project murmur in the inventory (Shearsman Books, 2013).
Heidi Lynn Staples’ debut collection, Guess Can Gallop, was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is author of three other collections, including Noise Event (Ahsahta 2013) and her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. With the poet Amy King, she is editor and founder of Poets for Living Waters, begun as an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Big Energy Poets: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, forthcoming from BlazeVOX. Staples holds the MFA from Syracuse University and the PhD from the University of Georgia. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.
Ann Fisher-Wirth is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She received her bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and continued her studies at Claremont Graduate School, where she earned master’s and doctoral degrees. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
A Pushcart Prize nominee, Fisher-Wirth’s poetry has appeared in some of the most prestigious creative writing journals. Her books include Five Terraces (Wind Publishing, 2005), Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003), Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll (The Drunken Boat, 2005) and The Trinket Poems (Wind, 2003). She is editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, required reading for Wilderness Literature.
CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) (required reading for Wilderness Literature) is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross. For his books and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
