Contributor Bios & Liner Notes

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he organized public programs at Centre Pompidou, hosted shows on French national radio, and ran Tangier’s International Book Salon. His translations (into French) include books by Jalal Toufic, Stanley Cavell and Joan Retallack. His poetry was published in Wave Composition, Asymptote, Seedings, and the University of California Book of North African Literature, among others. He recently edited The Africans, a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco, and curated exhibitions centering on the work and archive of writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, at the Marrakech Biennale and at Witte de With in Rotterdam. Omar was the guest curator of the 2017 Abraaj Group Art Prize and is a co-editor of Sharjah Biennial’s web journal tamawuj.org. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union.

“Little Luminous Objects that Fall from Heaven – Of Language and the Sky”, a collaboration between Omar Berrada and Sarah Riggs, was published in the Sky volume of Elements for a World (Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016). Elements for a World is a series of five publications specially produced in conjunction with the exhibition Let’s Talk About the Weather: Art and Ecology in a Time of Crisis. The publications were edited by Ashkan Sepahvand, in conjunction with Nora Razian and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.

Kristin P. Bradshaw conducts poetic investigations and observations through writing, letterpress, collage, photography, and sound recording. Her current critical inquiries converge around fragmentation, the tension between immediacy and accessibility in the experience of poetic and visual works, and the state of the word in contemporary visual culture. Her poems have appeared in the New Orleans Review, New American Poetry, Chase Park, and No: a Journal of the Arts. She is a graduate of Brown University’s Literary Arts MFA program, and holds an MA in Religion from the Divinity School at Yale University. She the Lead faculty of the BFA Creative Writing program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Burning Deck’s release of her first book, Apologies, in October 2014, followed the 2005 chapbook, “The Difficult Nature of Contemplation” (Percival House).

Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (U of California Press 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago 2003), and Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (U of Michigan 2008). His most recent critical book, Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions 2002). He is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press 2013). He is the co-author, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press 1991).

Susan Gevirtz's books of poetry include Hotel abc (Nightboat 2016); AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street 2010), BROADCAST (Trafficker 2009), Thrall (Post Apollo 2007), Hourglass Transcripts (Burning Deck 2001). Her critical books are Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang 1996), and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat 2013). She was an Affiliate at Headlands Center for the Arts from 2016-2017. She lives in San Francisco.

Collaboration with Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner with text from the book AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street Press):

Andrew and I sat side-by-side listening and re-listening to recordings of my voice reading the poetry. I had a strong sense of the sound-rhythm embedded but not heard in the work. He had the technical ability to implement and hearings of his own. Together we made the pieces, bar by bar, minute by minute.

Peter Gizzi is the author of Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016), In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014), Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011), The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998), and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM), and Tamaas. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships in poetry from The Fund for Poetry (1993), The Rex Foundation (1993), Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005), and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at The University of Cambridge (2011, 2015-16). He currently works at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Ted Hearne's "Katrina Ballads," an hour-long work about the media response to Hurricane Katrina, premiered at the Spoleto Festival in 2007. His oratorio, "The Source," about Chelsea Manning, sets text from leaked military documents, and premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014. His most recent recording is Sound from the Bench (Cantaloupe Records, 2017). For more information, see tedhearne.com

Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck 2007), which received the 2008 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing 2013), which received the 2013 Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, First Intensity, New American Writing, No: A Journal of the Arts, Petri Press, Pleiades, Web Conjunctions and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press, 2004). She is a recipient of an Untermeyer fellowship in poetry and a fellowship (2011) and a merit award (2000) in poetry from the RI State Council on the Arts. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

Janet Kauffman’s collection of prose poems, Five on Fiction, was published by Burning Deck Press in 2004. Her most recent book of poems is Eco-dementia (Wayne State University Press 2017). Eco-dementia, def. – “condition of humanity; a love of the living world while causing and suffering its destruction.”

Andrew Klobucar is an Associate Professor in the Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark New Jersey. His writings, research and teaching continue to focus on the important role media technology plays in contemporary cultural practices, with a specific emphasis on electronic literary criticism, programmable poetics, and theories in computationalism and writing. http://www.andrewklobucar.com/

Damon Krukowski is a musician (Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500), publisher (Exact Change), and writer. His most recent book is The New Analog (The New Press, 2017).

Steve Layton is a composer, performer, recordist, connector, facilitator and editor of Sequenza21.com, a long-running website reporting on contemporary classical music. In his work, traditional and "imaginary" modern classical mix it up with electronic, historical, and world vernacular influences. His music operates on a number of different levels, making an often dense, but rich and colorful music.

Lissa McLaughlin has published four books with Burning Deck Press (the latest, Quit, in 2015). Years ago she was featured in The Best American Short Stories: 1982. Even earlier, she wrote film criticism. She lives in Wisconsin and works as an expressive arts therapist with kids with autism.

Sawako Nakayasu is a transnational poet and translator who has lived in Japan, France, China, and the US. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press) and Texture Notes (Letter Machine), and recent translations include Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), which won the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Other books include Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck) and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals, which is a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. Her translation of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions) received the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. Nakayasu has also appeared on Japanese television as a poetry judge, performed in a re-enactment of Yvonne Rainer’s Grand Union Dreams (dir. Yelena Gluzman) as well as in Cornelius Cardew’s Paragraphs 4 & 7 from The Great Learning (dir. Tomomi Adachi).

Gale Nelson’s three books were each published by Burning Deck: stare decisis, ceteris paribus and This is What Happens When Talk Ends. He and his wife, the novelist, Lori Baker, live in Rhode Island.

Gale Nelson’s performance of “Decomposing Stick” was recorded by Adam Tobin in May 1999 at Elmer M. Blistein House; it was included as the seventh of 21 tracks that comprise “Issues Wordsound” which was produced in Providence, RI later that summer. The text was written by Nelson in response to “Composing Stick,” a poem by Rosmarie Waldrop.

At the time of the release of this issue of Textsound, Jena Osman's publishing career has been book-ended by Burning Deck publications: most recently, Corporate Relations (2014) and most long ago, the chapbook Twelve Parts of Her (1989). She sends love and appreciation to Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. The track called "(Ch)oral argument" is from Sound from the Bench by Ted Hearne, which uses the "Citizens United" section from Corporate Relations for its libretto; it was performed by The Crossing, with Taylor Levine and James Moore on electric guitars, and Ron Wiltrout on drums. The full album can be found at http://bangonacan.org/store/music/sound_from_the_bench

Sarah Riggs is a writer and artist, born in New York where she is now based, after having spent over a decade in Paris. She is the author of Waterwork (Chax 2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street 2007), 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling 2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (Burning Deck 2012), and Pomme & Granite (1913 Press 2015). She is the author of the book of essays Word Sightings (Routledge 2002), and has translated and co-translated seven books of contemporary French poetry into English. Before directing Six Lives: A Cinepoem, she produced The Tangier 8 at the Cinémathèque de Tanger in Morocco, which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the Tate Modern Museum among other international venues. She is the director of the international arts organization Tamaas (www.tamaas.org), and co-directs with Cole Swensen and Omar Berrada the yearly translation seminar READ in Paris with a corresponding publication in English, French & Arabic. She has taught for Columbia and NYU in Paris, as well as Pratt in Brooklyn.

Robin Rimbaud, alias Scanner (1964, London, UK) is a composer whose work traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, and image, creating absorbing, multilayered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways, connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations, and recordings, the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and The Garden is Full of Metal (1998) hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music. http://www.scannerdot.com

Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City, and spent her formative years in Paris. She has also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, Montréal and Providence, Rhode Island. She now resides in New York City. Eléna's most recent books of poetry are Scaffolding (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets 2017), Atmosphered (Oystercatcher Press 2014), On the Nature of Position and Tone (Fields Press 2012) and The Perforated Map (Shearsman Books 2011). She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of Bernard Noël’s The Rest of the Voyage (Graywolf Press 2011). Burning Deck published her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath.

Elizabeth Robinson works with homeless defendants at Boulder Municipal Court. In the fall of 2016, she was a fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France. Her book, Rumor, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions, and the anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry (co-edited with Jennifer Phelps) is forthcoming from University of Akron Press. Burning Deck published a letter press chapbook, My Name Happens Also, and a full length collection, Under That Silky Roof. Elizabeth thanks Keith and Rosmarie for their generosity as publishers, writers, and translators.

Brian Schorn is an interdisciplinary artist. He received a MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University where he studied with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop and CD Wright. In addition, he received a MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College, a MFA in Photography from the University of Michigan and a MFA in Graphic Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Brian’s full-length book of poems, Strabismus, was published by Burning Deck Press. His writing has also appeared in the Burning Deck Press anthologies One Score More: The Second 20 Years of Burning Deck1981–2001 and Reft and Light (translations of Ernst Jandl). Text•ure, his collection of electronic, text-sound compositions, was released by the internet label Cyclene Records and his graphic musical scores were published in Notations21: An Anthology of Innovative Notation and Deep Listening Anthology II. https://brianschorn.com/

Possible Compositions (in memory of Pauline Oliveros)

0:00–0:24 title and instructions for listening
0:24–0:28 silence
0:28–1:20 The Physics of Desire (for one woman)
1:20–1:38 silence
1:38–2:24 Shipwreck (for one man and one woman)
2:24–2:39 silence
2:39–3:36 A Public Excision (for one man and one woman with a large group of extras)
3:36–3:49 silence
3:49–4:40 Magnification and Transportation (for one woman)
4:40–5:02 silence

Sébastien Smirou is the author of three poetry volumes from the Parisian publisher P.O.L : Un temps pour s’étreindre, Beau voir, and Mon Laurent. His prose meditation Un temps pour se séparer : notes sur Robert Capa was recently released by Éditions Hélium. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Bourse de découverte from the Centre national du Livre and a fellowship from the Conseil Régional d’Ile de France, Smirou participated in the Mission Stendhal sponsored by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. He founded éditions rup&rud, whose chapbook series has been reprinted as rup&rud: l’intégrale, 1999-2004. A psychoanalyst, Smirou has authored prefaces to new translations of Winnicott’s La haine dans le contre-transfert, Ferenczi’s Un petit home-coque, and Freud’s Le petit Hans. His translations of Italian psychoanalytical texts include Antonino Ferro’s Rêveries and Domenico Chianese and Andreina Fontana’s Immaginando. Smirou was a 2016-17 literary fellow at the Villa de Medici in Rome.

Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His publications include the books Airport music (Burning Deck 2013), and Euclid Shudders (Litmus Press 2004), and The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press 2017). A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his wife and two dogs in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.

“Tone” and "Interior (after Lee Bontecou)" can be found in print in Airport music (Burning Deck 2013). The "Clown Songs" and the excerpt of "Attribution Error" can be found in print in The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press 2017).

Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Videotape, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings. His translation of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, received a French Voices Grant, and his translation of Smirou’s See About earned an NEA Translation Fellowship and a fellowship from the Centre National du Livre. A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, Zawacki edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Fellow in Poetry.