September 2012: Bios
POETS:
Brandon Amico is a writer from Manchester, New Hampshire whose poetry has been featured in magazines, including Word Riot, > kill author, elimae, and Amethyst Arsenic. While in school, Brandon was an editor of Aegis, the University of New Hampshire’s student literary magazine. He is the 2012 recipient of the Richard M. Ford Writing Award for poetry.
Elaine Briney is a dog trainer in Savannah, Georgia. She also writes poems. She has an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and teaches creative writing workshops for DEEP, a local non-profit. Her poems have appeared before in Unmoveable Feast. She does not potty train cats, so please stop asking.
Cave Canem Fellow Mahogany L. Browne is the author of several books, including Swag and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution and listed as About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs, including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada's The Word and UK's MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Brown Girl Love and Up The Staircase. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. She is the publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists and owns PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets. Mahogany is the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and curator of their famous Friday Night Slam.
Fiona Chamness is a writer, poet, and performer from Ann Arbor, MI. She was part of the 2008 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam team featured on HBO's Brave New Voices and is coauthor (with Aimée Lê) of the poetry collection Feral Citizens, published in 2011 by Red Beard Press. She has performed in Ann Arbor, Chicago, St. Louis, and Hanover, NH. She has also performed on the WU-Slam team at NPS 2011. She has poems published in PANK and Blood Lotus magazines and attends Oberlin College in Ohio.
Megan Falley's first full-length collection of poetry, After the Witch Hunt, was published by Write Bloody in 2012. Her work has also been published in PANK, Vinyl, decomP, >kill author, The Legendary, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre and more. She is an active slammer and is currently on the 2012 LouderArts Slam Team.
Vievee Francis is the author of two poetry collections, Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University, 2006) and Horse in the Dark (Northwestern Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including, Best American Poetry 2010 among others. Work is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award and a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently an Associate Editor for Callaloo.
Sophia Holtz grew up in New York and lives in Somerville, MA. She graduated from Hampshire College in 2011, where she first became interested in performing poetry, and has featured throughout the Northeast. She is currently working on expanding her thesis: a collection of poems about nuclear weapons testing, radioactivity, and atomic kitsch.
Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet Amanda Johnston has performed internationally for various causes and events. Honors include multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts. Currently, Amanda is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast through the University of Southern Maine. Her website is: www.amandajohnston.com.
Marty McConnell is the author of wine for a shotgun, forthcoming on EM Press in October 2012. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard, Salt Hill Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Muzzle Magazine, Rattle, Rattapallax, Booth Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Thirteenth Moon, Boxcar Poetry Review, Pedestal, 2River View, and Qarrtsiluni. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been a featured reader at numerous literary festivals including the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Connecticut Poetry Festival, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. After ten years in New York City, during which she co-founded literary nonprofit the louderARTS Project and co-curated its renowned weekly reading series, she returned to Chicago in 2009 to establish its sister organization, Vox Ferus, through which she runs a bi-monthly poetry workshop series.
Karissa Morton hails from Des Moines, Iowa, & is currently working under Larissa Szporluk as an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also teaches courses in creative writing & freshman composition & works on the staffs of Mid-American Review & Revolution House. She spends most of her rare free time watching NCAA sports & searching for Frank, her perpetually missing pet spider.
Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood award for playwriting. Her work has appeared in Callaloo as well as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.
Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades and Drunken Boat. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.
Metta Sáma is author of Nocturne Trio (YesYes Books 2012) and South of Here (New Issues Press 2005 (published under her legal name)). Her poems, fiction, creative non-fiction, and book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, bluestem, The Drunken Boat, Esque, hercricle, Jubilat, Kweli, The Owls, Pebble Lake Review, Pyrta, Reverie, Sententia, and Vinyl, among others. In addition to her creative work, she has published scholarship on Dionne Brand, Terrance Hayes, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison, and is a burgeoning photographer and painter.
Danez Smith is a poet, performer, and playwright from St. Paul, MN. Danez, A Cave Canem fellow, is published in PANK, Illumination, Orange Quarterly, and elsewhere. Danez earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a founding member of the First Wave Hip-Hop Theatre Ensemble. A rising slam poet when not working on page, recently placing 6th in the world at the Individual World Poetry Slam, he enjoys the occasional dance battle with his roommate.
Colin Winnette is a writer and performer living in Chicago, IL. He was a finalist for the 1913 First Book award, and has published one novel, REVELATION (Mutable Sound Press 2011), and one collection of short prose, ANIMAL COLLECTION (Spork Press, forthcoming 2012). More information and links to more work can be found at colinwinnette.com.
Matthew Zingg's work appears in or is forthcoming from Cider Press Review, The Madison Review, Blackbird, The Awl, Low Log, The Rumpus, and Opium Magazine. He currently resides in Brooklyn and is a founding member of the 1441 collective.
ARTISTS:
Laura Davis is a Chicago based artist whose work examines and reconfigures our psychological relationships with the material world. Through sculpture, drawing and installation she teases out historical associations, material contradictions and emotional triggers in the objects are where art, design and craft intersect. Davis was recently awarded a year long residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition’s BOLT studios where she will use the space to create a series of installations culminating in a self published catalog. She has exhibited at the Evanston Art Center, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; SPACES, Cleveland; The Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO; and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI. Davis teaches in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds a MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parson’s School of Design. Angela has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, the Flat Iron Building (Chicago), and the MC Gallery (New York). She has been featured in Muzzle Magazine’s "Best In Print Issue," and her art has been selected as for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes and The Truth About Dolls by Jamila A. Woods. In 2011 Angela was selected to be a member of the Chicago Artist Coalition's Hatch Project, where she is exhibiting in three group shows over the course of a year. She will begin Columbia College's interdisciplinary MFA program in book and paper arts in the fall of 2012.
Hans Gottsacker is an artist, designer, and maker with a background in woodworking and furniture design. He is currently attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison working on a Master of Fine Arts. Most of his work is inspired by the function and design of furniture and how it affects us in our daily lives. Some of his work is presented as prototypes for possible designs while other work is sculptural and confronting issues related to furniture and how it may or may not be utilized.
Fabio Sassi has had several experiences in music, photography and writing. He has been a visual artist since 1990 making acrylics using the stenciling technique on canvas, board, old vinyl records and other media. Fabio uses logos, icons, tiny objects and shades to create weird perspectives. Many of his subjects are inspired by a paradox either real or imaginary and by the news. He lives in Bologna, Italy.
Jude le Tronik is a visual artist, tattooist and writer. She is currently working and living in Vancouver, Canada. Her recent series of work are investigations into the concept of home and subcultures she has been involved with in her travels. Drawing a lot of inspirations from the riot grrrl movement, underground music, graffiti, and other forms of street art aesthetics, her drawings bridges the unfamiliar and unorthodox communities with the everyday world.
Brandon Amico is a writer from Manchester, New Hampshire whose poetry has been featured in magazines, including Word Riot, > kill author, elimae, and Amethyst Arsenic. While in school, Brandon was an editor of Aegis, the University of New Hampshire’s student literary magazine. He is the 2012 recipient of the Richard M. Ford Writing Award for poetry.
Elaine Briney is a dog trainer in Savannah, Georgia. She also writes poems. She has an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and teaches creative writing workshops for DEEP, a local non-profit. Her poems have appeared before in Unmoveable Feast. She does not potty train cats, so please stop asking.
Cave Canem Fellow Mahogany L. Browne is the author of several books, including Swag and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution and listed as About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010. She has released five LPs, including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada's The Word and UK's MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Brown Girl Love and Up The Staircase. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. She is the publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists and owns PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets. Mahogany is the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and curator of their famous Friday Night Slam.
Fiona Chamness is a writer, poet, and performer from Ann Arbor, MI. She was part of the 2008 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam team featured on HBO's Brave New Voices and is coauthor (with Aimée Lê) of the poetry collection Feral Citizens, published in 2011 by Red Beard Press. She has performed in Ann Arbor, Chicago, St. Louis, and Hanover, NH. She has also performed on the WU-Slam team at NPS 2011. She has poems published in PANK and Blood Lotus magazines and attends Oberlin College in Ohio.
Megan Falley's first full-length collection of poetry, After the Witch Hunt, was published by Write Bloody in 2012. Her work has also been published in PANK, Vinyl, decomP, >kill author, The Legendary, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre and more. She is an active slammer and is currently on the 2012 LouderArts Slam Team.
Vievee Francis is the author of two poetry collections, Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University, 2006) and Horse in the Dark (Northwestern Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including, Best American Poetry 2010 among others. Work is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award and a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship. A Cave Canem Fellow, she is currently an Associate Editor for Callaloo.
Sophia Holtz grew up in New York and lives in Somerville, MA. She graduated from Hampshire College in 2011, where she first became interested in performing poetry, and has featured throughout the Northeast. She is currently working on expanding her thesis: a collection of poems about nuclear weapons testing, radioactivity, and atomic kitsch.
Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet Amanda Johnston has performed internationally for various causes and events. Honors include multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is the founder and executive director of Torch Literary Arts. Currently, Amanda is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast through the University of Southern Maine. Her website is: www.amandajohnston.com.
Marty McConnell is the author of wine for a shotgun, forthcoming on EM Press in October 2012. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard, Salt Hill Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Muzzle Magazine, Rattle, Rattapallax, Booth Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Thirteenth Moon, Boxcar Poetry Review, Pedestal, 2River View, and Qarrtsiluni. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been a featured reader at numerous literary festivals including the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Connecticut Poetry Festival, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. After ten years in New York City, during which she co-founded literary nonprofit the louderARTS Project and co-curated its renowned weekly reading series, she returned to Chicago in 2009 to establish its sister organization, Vox Ferus, through which she runs a bi-monthly poetry workshop series.
Karissa Morton hails from Des Moines, Iowa, & is currently working under Larissa Szporluk as an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University, where she also teaches courses in creative writing & freshman composition & works on the staffs of Mid-American Review & Revolution House. She spends most of her rare free time watching NCAA sports & searching for Frank, her perpetually missing pet spider.
Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, where she won a Hopwood award for playwriting. Her work has appeared in Callaloo as well as The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South.
Brynn Saito is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press (March, 2013). Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades and Drunken Boat. Brynn was born in the Central Valley of California to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. Currently, Brynn lives in the Bay Area and teaches in San Francisco.
Metta Sáma is author of Nocturne Trio (YesYes Books 2012) and South of Here (New Issues Press 2005 (published under her legal name)). Her poems, fiction, creative non-fiction, and book reviews have been published or forthcoming in Blackbird, bluestem, The Drunken Boat, Esque, hercricle, Jubilat, Kweli, The Owls, Pebble Lake Review, Pyrta, Reverie, Sententia, and Vinyl, among others. In addition to her creative work, she has published scholarship on Dionne Brand, Terrance Hayes, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison, and is a burgeoning photographer and painter.
Danez Smith is a poet, performer, and playwright from St. Paul, MN. Danez, A Cave Canem fellow, is published in PANK, Illumination, Orange Quarterly, and elsewhere. Danez earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a founding member of the First Wave Hip-Hop Theatre Ensemble. A rising slam poet when not working on page, recently placing 6th in the world at the Individual World Poetry Slam, he enjoys the occasional dance battle with his roommate.
Colin Winnette is a writer and performer living in Chicago, IL. He was a finalist for the 1913 First Book award, and has published one novel, REVELATION (Mutable Sound Press 2011), and one collection of short prose, ANIMAL COLLECTION (Spork Press, forthcoming 2012). More information and links to more work can be found at colinwinnette.com.
Matthew Zingg's work appears in or is forthcoming from Cider Press Review, The Madison Review, Blackbird, The Awl, Low Log, The Rumpus, and Opium Magazine. He currently resides in Brooklyn and is a founding member of the 1441 collective.
ARTISTS:
Laura Davis is a Chicago based artist whose work examines and reconfigures our psychological relationships with the material world. Through sculpture, drawing and installation she teases out historical associations, material contradictions and emotional triggers in the objects are where art, design and craft intersect. Davis was recently awarded a year long residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition’s BOLT studios where she will use the space to create a series of installations culminating in a self published catalog. She has exhibited at the Evanston Art Center, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; SPACES, Cleveland; The Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO; and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI. Davis teaches in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds a MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parson’s School of Design. Angela has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, the Flat Iron Building (Chicago), and the MC Gallery (New York). She has been featured in Muzzle Magazine’s "Best In Print Issue," and her art has been selected as for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes and The Truth About Dolls by Jamila A. Woods. In 2011 Angela was selected to be a member of the Chicago Artist Coalition's Hatch Project, where she is exhibiting in three group shows over the course of a year. She will begin Columbia College's interdisciplinary MFA program in book and paper arts in the fall of 2012.
Hans Gottsacker is an artist, designer, and maker with a background in woodworking and furniture design. He is currently attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison working on a Master of Fine Arts. Most of his work is inspired by the function and design of furniture and how it affects us in our daily lives. Some of his work is presented as prototypes for possible designs while other work is sculptural and confronting issues related to furniture and how it may or may not be utilized.
Fabio Sassi has had several experiences in music, photography and writing. He has been a visual artist since 1990 making acrylics using the stenciling technique on canvas, board, old vinyl records and other media. Fabio uses logos, icons, tiny objects and shades to create weird perspectives. Many of his subjects are inspired by a paradox either real or imaginary and by the news. He lives in Bologna, Italy.
Jude le Tronik is a visual artist, tattooist and writer. She is currently working and living in Vancouver, Canada. Her recent series of work are investigations into the concept of home and subcultures she has been involved with in her travels. Drawing a lot of inspirations from the riot grrrl movement, underground music, graffiti, and other forms of street art aesthetics, her drawings bridges the unfamiliar and unorthodox communities with the everyday world.