University of Arizona Poetry Center

Featured Writers

Caroline Bergvall is a poet and conceptual writer based in London. Her latest collection of texts and performance pieces is FIG (Salt, 2005). She has developed audioworks, visual textwork, net-based pieces, live readings and sited performances, both in Europe and in North America. Her work is widely available online. Collaborations include the sound-text installation Say: “Parsley” (Liverpool Biennial, 2004), Lidl Suga (Bury Text Festival, 2004), Voice-Fold-Feed-Wash-Pass (for COMA festival, 2008). She recently presented work at MOMA (NY, 2007) as part of their Modern Poets series. Her critical work is concerned with mixed-media writings and multilingual poetics. Director of Performance Writing, Dartington College of Arts (1995-2000); Co-Chair of the MFA Writing Faculty, Bard College (2004-2007). She is the recipient of an AHRC Arts Fellowship in Britain (2007-2010). website.

Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is the author of 39 books, ranging from large-scale collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, translations, and collaborations. Recent full-length works of poetry include Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PENNsound; and editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center. He is coeditor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press (1998 - ). In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Christian Bök

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Craig Dworkin

Craig Dworkin is the author of Reading the Illegible (Northwestern UP), Signature-Effects (Ghos-Ti), Dure (Cuneiform), Strand (Roof), and Parse (Atelos), and the editor of Architectures of Poetry (Rodopi) and Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writing of Vito Acconci (MIT). He teaches at the University of Utah and curates two on-line archives: Eclipse and The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

PETER GIZZI

Peter Gizzi is the author of The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-1992. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized here and abroad. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He is currently the poetry editor for The Nation. He works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor "I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews," which is the basis for an opera, "Trans-Warhol," premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, "sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith" premiered at the British Library in 2007. Kenneth Goldsmith is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, a online poetry archive. More about Goldsmith can be found on his author's page at the University of Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center.

Susan Howe

Susan Howe's most recent collection of poems Souls of the Labadie Tract was published by New Directions in 2007. This year New Directions also re-printed her earlier critical study My Emily Dickinson. Two CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth, and Souls of the Labadie Tract, were released on the Blue Chopsticks label in 2005 and 2007. She held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo, until her retirement in spring 2007.

Tracie Morris

Tracie Morris is an interdisciplinary poet who has worked extensively as a sound artist, writer and multimedia performer. Her installations have been presented at the Whitney Biennial and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. Tracie is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry and performance and has contributed to, and been written about in, several anthologies of literary criticism. She holds an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Dr. Morris is currently Visiting Professor of English at Temple University and the CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all), the most recent of which is Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005). Wittgenstein’s Ladder brought philosophy into the mix and Perloff has recently published her cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has been widely discussed. She has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and has just completed her year as President of the Modern language Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University.

Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is the author of eleven volumes of poetry; the most recent is The Glass Age (Alice James 2007). Her earlier book Goest was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, and other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon’s New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. Another book, Ours, will be published by the University of California Press in 2008. Also due out in 2008 is American Hybrid, a Norton anthology she has co-edited with David St. John. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and the Camargo Foundation and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. She’s also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon’s The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. She is the founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets. Writer-in-Residence at the Beinecke Library at Yale for the 2007-08 year, she is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Washington D.C., Iowa City, and Paris.