Clark Coolidge (b. 1939 in Providence, Rhode Island) is an experimental poet and jazz musician. Coolidge has been connected to both the Language movement and the New York School. His poetry utilizes syntactical and sonic patterns to engage and generate meaning. In a 1968 poetics statement, he noted, “Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.” Coolidge’s numerous collections of poetry include To the Cold Heart (2021); The Land of All Time (2020); Selected Poems: 1962–1985 (2017); Book Beginning What and Ending Away (2013); The Cave (2009) with Bernadette Mayer; The Crystal Text (1986); Sound as Thought (1990), which was chosen for the New American Poetry Series; Own Face (1978); and Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric (1966). His work is included in An Anthology of New York Poets (1970) and The Young American Poets (1968). He is the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (2010) and Heart of the Breath: Poems, 1979–1992 (1996) by Jim Brody. Coolidge lives in Petaluma, California.
Philip Guston (1913-1980) was the seventh child of Russian immigrants. Born in Montreal, Quebec, raised in Los Angeles and largely self-taught, Guston found inspiration for his early murals in the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Early acclaim as a figurative painter and years spent teaching in the mid-West were followed by a Prix de Rome in 1948-49, after which he moved permanently to New York and turned to abstraction, joining contemporaries Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and Rothko. In the mid-1960’s, Guston withdrew from the New York art scene to work on his late figurative paintings in Woodstock until his death in 1980, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective.
Olivia DiVecchia (b. 1987 in Argyle, Texas) is an artist working across drawing, sculpture, photography, video, sound and text. DiVecchia’s often recursive practice is interested in developing systems whose logics are followed through multiple points of translation and mutation. In 2020, she received an MFA in studio art from Hunter College. Her work was included in NOTHNG OF THE MONTH CLUB, an exhibition ‘under the sign’ of Ray Johnson at Off Paradise (2021). She was recently an artist in residence at Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency (2022). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Natasha Tiniacos (b. 1981 in Maracaibo, Venezuela) is a US political refugee; a poet, researcher, and educator. She has published Historia privada de un etcétera (2011 and 2016), and Mujer a fuego lento (2007) awarded the National University Prize in Literature in Venezuela. Tiniacos has been poet in residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, Vermont Studio Center, and CAMAC in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. She has been invited to read in the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Pa Gya! A literary festival in Accra, the US Library of Congress, New York University, Bogotá International Book Fair, and many others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, and now pursues a PhD in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Tiniacos teaches poetry in Spanish to senior citizens of Manhattan, and is writing her fourth manuscript and a libretto for opera.
J Grabowski is an artist from New York, whose work includes writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, movement and music. He has exhibited at Off Paradise (The Secret Show, 2021), The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, The NYPL Jefferson Market Library, Gallery Ex-Libri, Gathering of the Tribes, Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, and Fuse Gallery; and had work published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Bird & Beckett, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Grabowski cofounded PUSH Press with Jason Morris, the Heliopolis Project (2010-2015) and POMPEI.
Jason Morris (b. 1977 in Vermont) is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Low Life (Bird & Beckett Books, 2021); Different Darknesses (FMSBW, 2019); Levon Helm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018); From the Golden West Notebooks (Allone Co., 2011), and Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Presse, 2010). From 2007 – 2014, he founded and edited the magazine “Big Bell,” and, along with J. Grabowski, cofounded PUSH Press. In addition to poetry, he has written essays on Clark Coolidge’s Crystal Text, Bernadette Mayer’s interest in Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Kafka. Morris lives in San Francisco.
Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945 in Brooklyn, NY) is the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as the The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (2015), Sonnets (2015, 1989), The Helens of Troy, New York (2013), Studying Hunger Journals (2011), A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Cave (2009) with Clark Coolidge, and Work and Days (2016) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. In 2020, Siglio Press published Mayer’s seminal project Memory, which brings together text and photographs made shooting a roll of 35mm slide film and from writing a journal every day for the month of July 1971. Memory was also installed as an installation at Canada Gallery in 2017 and 98 Greene Street—an art and performance space run by Holly Solomon—in 1972. She has been the recipient of numerous other grants and awards, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and Creative Capital. Mayer is also known for her teaching and has led classes and workshops in experimental poetry at Naropa University, The New School for Social Research, and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, she is also recognized in the art world for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.
Colter Jacobsen (b. 1975 in Ramona, California) is an artist living in Ukiah, Cedarville, and San Francisco, California. He plays music in the band Coconut and DJs as Coco for Nomadic Nightcap on KZYX community radio. He has contributed covers to numerous books of poetry and recently took part in helping to organize the annual ukiaHaiku Festival. He is represented by Tibor de Nagy in New York, Corvi-Mora in London and Anglim/Trimble in San Francisco. His work can be found in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and KADIST, both in San Francisco, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; and The Museum of Everything, London. He lives with the writer Andromeda Laer and their fourteen children.
Cedar Sigo (b. 1978 in Winslow, Washington) was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Sigo is the editor of Joanne Kyger’s There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera and author of Guard the Mysteries, Royals, Language Arts, Stranger in Town, Expensive Magic, All This Time, and two editions of Selected Writings. Sigo’s work was included in Good Clean Fun at Off Paradise in 2021. Sigo lives in Lofall, Washington.