Saturday, January 1, 2011

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the recipient of a 2010 Whiting Award, and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of 2009 by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.

http://www.sayrafiezadeh.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/03/01/100301fi_fiction_sayrafiezadeh
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2009/04/22/segments/129579
http://www.foxbusiness.com/search-results/m/22279896/story-of-growing-up-socialist-in-america.htm#q=sayrafiezadeh

Mina Pam Dick

Mina Pam Dick (aka Hildebrand Pam Dick, Gregoire Pam Dick et al.) is the author of Delinquent (Futurepoem Books, 2009). Her writing has appeared in Tantalum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe #9, The Recluse, Everyday Genius and TRY!, and is forthcoming in EOAGH and Mrs. Maybe. Her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria). A native New Yorker, she received a BA from Yale University and an MFA in Painting as well as an MA in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. Currently she lives in New York City.

futurepoem.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/anna-moschovakis-responds-to-mina-pam-dicks-first-person-of-truth/
futurepoem.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/ken-l-walker-responds-to-mina-pam-dicks-first-person-of-truth/
futurepoem.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/david-brazil-responds-to-mina-pam-dicks-the-scrapped-book-of-minna-maude-ingvar/
poetryproject.org/tag/mina-pam-dick
news.mohawkpaper.com/2010/08/27/mohawk-show-11-finalist-delinquent/
www.aiga.org/content.cfm/exhibit-fifty-fifty-2009?searchtext=50%20books%2050%20covers
everyday-genius.com/2010/07/hildebrand-pam-dick.htm

SLAS Visiting Scholar Fred Moten

Fred Moten works at the intersection of black studies, performance studies, poetry and critical theory. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer Press, 2000), Poems (with Jim Behrle) (Pressed Wafer Press, 2002), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).

http://english.duke.edu/people?subpage=profile&Gurl=%2Faas%2FEnglish&Uil=fmoten

Mary Morris

Mary Morris's hilarious and critically-acclaimed travel memoir, THE RIVER QUEEN, moves between the outer landscape of the Mississippi River and the inner landscape of Morris' sense of loss over the death of her father. Previously, Morris published the riveting novel Revenge (PicadorUSA, 2005), a psychologically complex story of female friendship, art and obsession. Her fifth novel, Acts of God, the story of a girl whose father, an insurance claims adjuster, led a duplicitous life, was published in September 2000 by PicadorUSA. Born in Chicago in l947, Morris moved East to go to college. Though she never returned to the Middle West, she often writes about the region and its tug. In her first collection of short stories, Vanishing Animals & Other Stories, awarded the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters, Morris writes about childhood and adolescent memories. Morris's stories often deal with the tension between home and away. Travel is an important theme in many of the stories in her three collections, including Vanishing Animals, The Bus of Dreams, and The Lifeguard Stories. It is also a recurrent theme in her trilogy of travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, Wall to Wall: from Beijing to Berlin by Rail, and Angels & Aliens: A Journey West. In her five novels, including The Waiting Room, The Night Sky (formerly published as A Mother's Love) and House Arrest, Morris writes of family, its difficulties and disappointments, its iron grip and necessity, and ultimately the comfort family can bring. Her many novels and story collections have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and daughter and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

http://www.marymorris.net/index.php

Edwin Torres

Edwin Torres is a lingualisualist, rooted in the languages of sight and sound. He has performed his interstitial multi-disciplinary work across the world and has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He’s received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught his workshop, “Brainlingo: writing the voice of the body” at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD Holy Kid, (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. His books include, The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), The All-Union Day of The Shock Worker (Roof Books), In The Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books) and most recently Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books). Edwin was born in The Bronx, and currently lives upstate with his wife, Elizabeth, and 5-year old boy, Rubio Jett.

http://barzakh.net/site/
https://psa.fcny.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/qa_american_poetry/page_32/
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2010fall/torres.shtml

Michael Thomas

Michael Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. Man Gone Down, his first novel, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was one of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year. He teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

http://www.groveatlantic.com/grove/bin/wc.dll?groveproc~genauth~5177~5229~DESC
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/11/debut-novelist-impac-dublin-prize
http://www.danaroc.com/inspiring_031907michaelthomas.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/books/23thomas.html?_r=1
http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/1335495