Guest Bios
From monstrouspossibility
Rodrigo Toscano is the author of To Leveling Swerve, Platform, The Disparities and Partisans. His new manuscript, Collapsible Poetics Theater, was a National Poetry Series selection for 2007 (it be published by Fence Books). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, McSweeny’s Poets Picking Poets, War and Peace Anthology, and In the Criminal's Cabinet: An anthology of poetry and fiction, Junta, an Anthology of Experimental Latino Poetry, The Gertrude Stein Awards Anthology, and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (forthcoming by Palgrave/Macmillan). He was a 2005 recipient of a New York State Fellowship in Poetry. He is currently the poetry editor for Boog City, and recently edited Urban Cities (poetry from six cities in the U.S. and Canada, for Capilano Review), and an anthology of New York Experimental Poetry (Alfaseries, Barcelona, Spain). He has given seminars on poetry at Bard College, University of Pennsylvania, California Institute of the Arts, The Evergreen University, Mills College, and Naropa College. Toscano is also the writer and artistic coordinator for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His experimental poetics plays, body movement poems, polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, New Langton Arts Space (San Francisco), Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (Alexandria, Virginia), KSW Vancouver, Canada, Links Hall (Chicago), Teubingen University, Germany, and Poet’s Theater Jamboree 2007 (California Center for the Arts, San Francisco). His radio poetics pieces have appeared on WPIX FM (New York), WNYU FM (in the tri-state area), KAOS Radio Olympia, and PS.1 Radio (New York). His writing has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian. Toscano is originally from San Diego, California. He has been based in Brooklyn for over nine years, and works in Manhattan at the Labor Institute.
Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist, and translator who is working in the tradition of Charles Olson’s Curriculum of the Soul in both her writing and teaching projects. Born in Denver and raised by her mother, a radical feminist Catholic nun, Prevallet's literary focus is to integrate political and personal consciousness into radical poetic forms.
Prevallet was a student of Edward and Jenny Dorn, Stan Brakhage, and Lorna Dee Cervantes at the University of Colorado, Boulder (B.A. 1990). She studiied French at the Sorbonne and then moved to New York City where she studied with Bernadette Mayer at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, then to Buffalo where she participated in the Poetics Program with Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe. For her masters thesis at the University of Buffalo, she worked in the Poetry / Rare Books Collection cataloguing the archive of Helen Adam.
Prevallet has published a number of chapbooks and has four full length collections: I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press, 2007); Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School 2006); Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation, and Image-Text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2002); Perturbation, My Sister: A study of Max Ernst's Hundred headless woman (First Intensity Pr., 1997)
She has taught poetry and poetics, critical thinking and politics at NYU, The New School, Bard College, and Naropa University. She is currently teaching in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John's University in Queens, NY. She received a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry and a 2004 PEN translation fund award.
SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED HERE: an empire has gone to seed, another country goes on strike, some begin eating dirt and flowers, and a couple lives on a riverboat to avoid the ground. In MINE, Tung-Hui Hu makes myths out of the personal. He speaks of desire and awkwardness and of the earth that contains both. Resonant, blunt, this is writing that excavates. As history unfolds over and over the same soil, these poems become, Hu writes, "practice for the living." He lives in San Francisco, where he writes on film and new media. He is also the author of The Book of Motion (2003), and recent poems have appeared in The New Republic, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Tung-Hui Hu has worked as a political consultant and computer scientist. He holds an AB from Princeton University and a MFA from the University of Michigan. He is writing a book on emptiness in film, as well as a collection of poems titled Greenhouses, Lighthouses. This spring, he was a resident at MacDowell and Millay Colonies; later this summer, he will release the inaugural vintage of his pinot noir from Anderson Valley, California.
Laura Elrick’s book Fantasies in Permeable Structures is forthcoming this fall from The Factory School Press, as part of the “Heretical Texts” series. She is also the author of sKincerity (Krupskaya, 2003) and is one of the featured writers on Women in the Avant Garde, an audio CD produced by Narrow House Recordings (2004). Recent poetry and essays have appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail, Tripwire, Crayon, and War and Peace. Elrick lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Mark Wallace is an important contemporary North American poet who is unique not only in his own poetic style but also in his stance on contemporary American poetry and the shifts we observe. He teaches poetics at George Washington University and has 4 major verse collections to his credit. Mark's most talked about books include "Nothing Happened, and Besides I Wasn't There", "Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner" and "Every Day Is Most Of My Time". He has also been featured in The Gertrude Stein Awards In Innovative North American Poetry: 1993-94. Mark Wallace began surfacing as a new voice in North American poetry towards the end of the 1980's. He belongs to a generation of poets who have written a new kind of poetry that could be vaguely described as "post-language poetry" (in his own words).
--from Green Integer Press
John Bellamy Foster is an American journalist, sociologist, essayist and eco-socialist, as well as editor of the Monthly Review, a prominent Marxist journal. Foster is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as an environmental sociologist and eco-socialist.
Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand: In 1997, the Tangent, a zine of politics and the arts was conceived over a few Rainier Pounders at Dot's Cafe in Portland, Oregon. Max Boykoff suggested naming the zine after a tangent, so it could spin off in myriad directions.
The first issue was created in an all-night session on SE Tenth Avenue in Portland, Oregon, by Max Boykoff, Jules Boykoff, Jenny Brinkley, Joseph Neal Sand and Kaia Sand. Just before dawn, we photocopied the inaugural issue, and just after dawn, Jenny Brinkley disappeared into the streets of Portland, and we've never seen her since (Jenny, where are you?). It was in the first issue that Joseph Neal Sand, under his various aliases, launched his "Jobs from Hell" column, and in Issue #3, his "Film Geek" column. Another popular column was Jeff Betts's "Rose City Thug," which ran through issue #5. Tina Patricelli Betts collaged the first cover.
Issue #2 featured guest editors Chris "Fuzz" Foster and Donald "Dixie" Gramenz, who were wintering in Portland from Minneapolis. They joined Jules, Kaia, and Neal, while Max Boykoff worked as the foreign correspondent based in Southern Honduras for the next couple issues. Erika Weaver began designing the Tangent covers at this point, and now her artwork is a cornerstone of the Tangent.
Fuzz and Dixie returned to the Twin Cities, and that's when Jeff McAlpine and Erika Petersen joined the editing crew for Issue #3. With Issue #4, the editorship stablized into the core four (Jules, Kaia, Max, and Neal), and has remained the same since, although at this point the Tangent relocated its homebase to Washington, DC. The first poems in the Tangent history were published in Issue #4 by the authors Jeff Male, Carol Mirakove, and Mel Nichols.
We launched our Pamphlet series during the presidential election in 2000, when Susana Gardner lined up an interview with Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Winona LaDuke. The pamphlet seemed the perfect form for the Tangent, because its content and use could also spin off in myriad directions. The first play published as a pamphlet was Tina Darragh's Opposable Dumbs in 2002. With the publication of Dan Gutstein's Craft & Edge Primer in 2003, we've begun to publish chapbooks.
The Tangent was located in Washington DC and Southern Maryland through issue 14, which was a special New York City issue, published collaboratively with Boog Publications. Beginning with issue 15, the Tangent is published from Walla Walla, Washington, where we also have begun to broadcast tangentradio.
The word "tangent" derives from "touch"; mathematically, a tangent is a line that touches a circle at one point. To seem tangential is to seem unfocused. For instance, activists are often accused of representing "too many issues." This seeming lack of cohesiveness frustrates those who want to sum up movements into a Movement. Through our publications, we've celebrated the arrow-like force of tangents, confident that this is how we can touch the circles, the sources. We are interested in tangents that catapult us toward cogent complexity in both politics and art.
