Elissa Favero teaches visual arts histories at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and writes about art, architecture, landscape, and books. She is currently studying creative nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program.
Carmen Firan, born in Romania, has published 28 books in her native country and in the United States. Since 2000 she has been living in New York. Among her recent publications are The Lost Shadow (New Meridian Arts), Changing Your Sign, Changing your Destiny—An Immigrant’s Horoscope (New Meridian Arts), Interviews and Encounters (poems/dialogue with Nina Cassian, Sheep Meadow Press), Rock and Dew (poems, Sheep Meadow), and Words and Flesh, (essays, Talisman House). Firan edited Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House), and co-edited the anthology Stranger at Home. Contemporary American Poetry with an Accent (Numina Press). Her work appears in translation in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Poland. The Romanian Academy granted her the collection One Hundred and One Poems (preface by Andrei Codrescu).
Fiona C. Hankenson is currently studying for her MFA through the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her work for Cable Street is nuanced memoir presented in a flash photo-couplet, and was inspired after perusing volumes of photo albums from her childhood in Pennsylvania. Fiona’s work has been accepted to 50-Word Stories and Eastern Iowa Review and she resides in Philadelphia, PA.
Stephanie Johnson is a poet and speculative fiction writer living with type 1 diabetes. She has published in many literary magazines such as Authora Australis and Orion’s Belt. She was a 2022 judge for NYC Midnight and is currently an editor at Novel Slices. She is originally from Toledo, Ohio, but now lives in Sydney, Australia. Stephanie reads too much and is currently working on her first full length novel.
Kimberly Lyons is the author of the poetry collections Approximately Near (Metambesendotorg, 2016), Calcinatio (Faux Press, 2014), Rouge (Instance Press, 2013), The Practice of Residue (Subpress, 2012), Phototherapique (Ketalanche Press/Yo Yo Labs, 2007), Saline (Instance Press, 2005) and Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000). Lyons attended Columbia College where she studied poetry with Paul Hoover, and Bard College where she studied with Robert Kelly. She moved into the NYC’s East Village in the early 1980s, where she was a part of the poetry community at the Poetry Project, the Ear Inn, Biblios Bookstore, the Zinc Bar, and the Bowery Poetry Club. She assisted Mitch Highfill with his press Prospect Books; a series of perhaps the last poetry books printed on a mimeo machine. Lyons served as the program coordinator at the Poetry Project from 1987 to 1991 She now lives in Chicago where she publishes Lunar Chandelier Press.
Patrick Pritchett’s most recent book of poems, Refrain Series, appeared in 2020 from Dos Madres Press. His other books of poems are Orphic Noise, Song X, Gnostic Frequencies, and Burn. Scholarly work includes essays on Lorine Niedecker, Ronald Johnson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael Palmer. He has taught at Harvard, Amherst College, and Hunan Normal University.
Ian C. Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy (Ginninderra Press). Smith writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria and on Flinders Island, Australia.
Portfolio
Agnes Sioda de Vito was born in 1965 in Jena, a town in the South of East Germany. She lived in New York with her family for two years as a young teenager, learned Russian and English and some Beatles as well as young Pioneer songs, visited the Metropolitan Museum a lot, decided to become a painter and never changed her mind.
Life in the GDR intervened here and there, so she studied irrigation & agriculture first from 1982-85, drove bulldozers and excavators a lot, finished college, experimented with hand-weaving for a year, gave birth to her two children and then studied at the Fine Art School of Berlin-Weissensee from 1989-1996, finishing her masters in fine art with Professor Görner. Subsequently she lived in Paris for ten years, also a bit back in New York, and now in Berlin. She exhibits her work in various galleries, does costume and stage-design for theaters, circuses, street-performers, and teaches art to young humans.
For more information on the artist and her work, visit http://agnessioda.com.
Authors of books reviewed in this issue
Tisa Bryant makes work that traverses the boundaries of genre, culture, and history and is on the faculty at CalArts. Unexplained Presence is her first full-length book. Bryant’s writing has also appeared in Evening Will Come, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, and in the catalogues and solo shows of visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Cauleen Smith. She is co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology of Black gay male desire and survival, from AIDS Project Los Angeles. She is also co-editor/publisher of the cross-referenced literary/arts series, The Encyclopedia Project.
Tina M. Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Campt began her career as a historian of modern Germany and scholar of Black European Studies. Since Listening to Images, she has received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagement with Vernacular Photograph, with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis. In 2021, she published A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer and author of eleven books, including My Life as a Godard Movie, Girl Online: A User Manual, and Miss-Communication, all from 2022. She also works as a critic, editor, teacher, and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundations fellow and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. Walsh founded and ran #readwomen (2014–2018), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers.” She currently runs @noentry_arts.
Editors
Eric Darton’s books include Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). Other of his writings may be found at bookoftheworldcourant.net, ericdarton.net and tupeloquarterly.com. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in the award-winning feature Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, directed by Bill Hayward. Darton teaches literature, writing, urban design and Ba Gua Zhang, a Chinese internal martial art. He leads Writing at the Crossroads, an interdisciplinary prose workshop.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator from Missouri. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in After the Art, Bluestem, The Confluence, Linden Avenue, Moria, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Slippery Elm, and Riverside Quarterly. She has published translations in Apple Valley Review, Ezra Translations, Presence, and US Catholic. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, author of a 2020 Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and a 2023 Best of the Net nominee for translation. Visit her at danadelibovi.wordpress.com and on Twitter.
Hardy Griffin’s novel, Broken Kismet, has just won the Eyelands Book Awards grand prize and is coming out in Greek from Strange Days Press. He has published writing in Fresh.ink, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury). His translations can be found in Words Without Borders, The Istanbul Biennial, and for the award-winning EU-sponsored study Ermeniler, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Novel Slices, dedicated solely to the publication of novel excerpts of all genres.
Bronwyn Mills’ books include Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. She was mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. An Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Witty Partition and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker’s Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than two dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, E.E. Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. For Witty Partition (now Cable Street) he translated Salvador Dalí’s prose poem, “San Sebastien,” and several other works. Book translations include work by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca, Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. The inaugural issue of Wet Cement Magazine has new work by the author: www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag. Night Suite, his newest book of poems, was just published by Talisman House. Other books include, Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018), Remission (Talisman House, 2016), and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014). He has written librettos for Thomas Adès (America: A Prophecy Part I), Faber Music/Warner Classics CD, 2011, and for Andrey Kasparaov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle in Five Acts. Alyscamps, 2022). Until retiring he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Many of his books are on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
Jan Schmidt has had fiction published in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story, IKON and New York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals and their brushes with salvation. Her short story collection Everything I Need and Other New York Stories was a semi-finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2021. Her unpublished novel Sunlight Underground was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website contactprod.com/janschmidt.