APRIL 5-7, 2006

This conference is the merger of the second annual Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF) with the second iteration of Notre Dame University’s &NOW festival for 2006.

We are pleased to announce that two-time National Book Critics’ Circle Award winner William H. Gass will be one of &NOW’s featured writers.

This three day festival will celebrate contemporary aesthetic practice in its most inventive forms: writing, visual, and multimedia art that is aware of its own institutional and extra-institutional history, that is as much about its form and materials—about language—as about subject matter. Such practices provide ways to express the world 200 years after Ivanhoe, 100 years after Freud, 50 years after Picasso, Elvis, and Faulkner, and 10 years after the birth of www….

&NOW/LFLF will bring together a range of artists interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of expression; artists working to emphasize text as a medium and as an influence; and artists articulating the material nature of expression.

&NOW/LFLF is also a festival invested in the idea that aesthetic choices are political, or otherwise pronounce convictions about the world.  While institutions tend to limit the definition of what counts as art or literature, &NOW/LFLF will feature work that deliberately keeps these definitions unresolved.

Sometimes called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, or alternative, the work of &NOW/LFLF shares an ethos with contemporary thought, taking its own medium as part of its subject matter, working against the assumptions of the status quo—especially as conceived in commercial terms:  the art of &NOW/LFLF will speak by employing a variety of games, slippages, puzzles, parodies, talking animals, historical disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, appropriations, spatial plays, collage techniques, and other strategies and constraints.

If traditional, mainstream art and literature are the equivalents of 19th century still-life, innovative production might be the sculpture that uses the medium of genetically engineered cells, assemblages more interested in using form to produce fantastic machines of art, rather than to create a transparent window to a world that no longer exists.

By bringing together innovative writers and artists concerned with the issues outlined above, &NOW/LFLF will take stock of this “other” tradition—and perhaps offer a glimpse of where it is going.

 

 

&NOW: A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art / Lake Forest Literary Festival is made possible by generous support of numerous campus groups, including the English Department, American Studies Program, Mojekwu Fund for Intercultural Understanding, the Center for Chicago Programs, General Assembly, Dean of the Faculty Office, and Writing Center. Additional underwriting was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

 

&NOW/Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF) Bios

Robert Adamson

William Allegrezza is editor of Moria, editor of Field Press, publisher of Moria eBooks and Books, and author of books, ebooks and chapbooks including the forthcoming Ladders in July and Covering Over, and chapbooksLingo, Temporal Nomads, and The Vicious Bunny Translations.

  

mIEKAL aND is a longtime DIY cultural anarchist & the creator of an infoplex worth of visual-verbal lit, audio-art, performance ritual & hypermedia for the Macintosh, all distributed by Xexoxial Editions. His hypermedia works reside at JOGLARS Crossmedia Broadcast (http://www.joglars.org). Recent work has focused on activating online collaborative workspaces where writers & media artists can create collective digital works in a real time environment.

 

Michael A. Antonucci comes to “&Now” with the Jimmy Wynn Ensemble. His poetry and prose, with and away from JWE, has appeared in Admit Two, The Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Near South. He teaches writing and literature at Marquette University.

 

Joe Amato is the author of Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (forthcoming in 2006 from University of Iowa Press); Under Virga (forthcoming in 2006 from Chax Press); Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (SUNY Press, 1997); and Symptoms of a Finer Age (Viet Nam Generation, 1994).

 

Dimitri Anastasopoulos is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester. His novel, A Larger Sense of Harvey, is published by Mammoth Books.

 

CamillE BacoS is a Romanian filmmaker. In Romania, she wrote & directed several short films. These included a documentary film, Provisory Lives, and three fiction films: Like Running Water, LA-LU, LU-LA, VI-VA, andZburatorul. She has produced and directed several TV shows in Romania, and recently, she relocated to Wisconsin/U.S.A. where she has started to work on several new projects with mIEKAL aND.

 

Mike Barrett is Creative Director of Anvil/lyre Studio multimedia arts collective, which produces homegrown avant-garde. He is a widely published poet and essayist.

 

Dale Barrigar’s fiction, poetry, and reviews have appeared in a number of journals and periodicals. He’s received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for fiction and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 

R.M. Berry is the author of two collections of stories, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and Dictionary of Modern Anguish. His novel,Leonardo’s Horse was selected as a New York Times “notable book” of 1998. His most recent novel is Frank(Chiasmus, 2005), and unwriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. His literary criticism has appeared inSoundings, Symploke, Philosophy and Literature, Narrative, The American Book Review, and numerous other places. Since 1999 he has been publisher of Fiction Collective Two.

A native of suburban Chicago, Raymond L. Bianchi lived and worked for most of the 1990s in Bolivia and Brazil. His book Circular Descent was published by Blaze Vox Press in 2004. He has edited an anthology of new Brazilian poetry in the spring Aufgabe Magazine and his work has appeared in 26, Antennae, Bird Dogand the Economist. He is the Publisher of Cracked Slab Books and editor of Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com.

 

Charles Blackstone is the author of The Week You Weren’t Here, a novel. His recent short fiction has appeared in Black Ridge Review. He lives in Chicago.

 

Elizabeth Block wrote the novel, A Gesture Through Time (Spuyten Duyvil). Her writing appears (or will) inChain, Black Ice, Fiction International, alt-x, etc. Her films have been screened in many festivals and museums.

 

Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Her recorded work seeks to introduce, set at play, and ultimately reconcile nature with artifice in the realms of music and sound.

 

Charlene Brooks is a Cabaret and Jazz singer who has performed across the Chicago area at numerous venues. She is also a cantorial soloist—her styles range from traditional Jewish repertoire to Broadway.

Trumpet virtuoso and conductor Stephen Burns is the Artistic Director of the Fulcrum Point New Music Project in Chicago. He has been acclaimed on four continents for his consistently and widely varied performances encompassing recitals, orchestral appearances, chamber ensemble engagements, and innovative multi-media presentations involving video, dance theatre, and sculpture.

 

Harmony Button is a Poetry MFA candidate at the University of Utah. She graduated (phi beta cappa, summa cum laude) from Middlebury College with a BA in English Literature. She has published in AfterImage: international media and cultural studies journal, Circle Magazine, and Blind Man’s Rainbow. She has participated in multimedia exhibits at the Visual Studies Workshop and the Sunken Garden Gallery in Rochester, NY.

 

Stacy Cartledge writes poetry about science and myth when not teaching English and writing courses. He has published one chapbook, Topography, with Wild Honey Press, and currently has a full-length collection in circulation. He welcomes feedback, and can be contacted at scartle@mc3.edu.

 

Lucy Corin is the author of Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2 2004). Stories appear in places likePloughshares, Conjunctions, Notre Dame Review, Southern Review, and Fiction International. She teaches at the University of California at Davis. 

  

Beth Couture is a first year MFA student in fiction at the University of Notre Dame where she is a Sparks Editorial Assistant on the Notre Dame Review. She has published in the Sea Oats Review and has a story forthcoming in the 2007 issue of the Georgetown Review.

 

mm cross grew up in a small city in western Canada, where she produced underground zines and lo-fi recordings. A graduate of York University in Toronto, she attends SUNY Buffalo as a graduate student. Her mixed race background includes the Zoroastrian Parsis of India and the Indian Muslims of South Africa. Her experimental interdisciplinary work appears on http://myemobook.com and she curates a collection of CB radio postcards (aka QSL cards) at http://myQSL.org.

 

Garin Cycholl teaches writing and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also works as co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction, and drama. His book-length poem, Blue Mound to 161, is available from Pavement Saw Press.

 

Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics of the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark God of the Street: Margins in America Vangard Poetry and co-author, with mIEKAL aND, of several books of poetry and online works. Her essays have been widely published and re-printed.

 

Catherine Daly is author of Secret Kitty (Ahadada, 2006), Paper Craft (eMoria, 2006), Locket (Tupelo, 2005), and DaDaDa (Salt, 2003). A former Illinoisan, former internetworking specialist, and former deejay, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer Ron Burch, and a parrot.

 

Edward Desautels is the author of the novel Flicker in the Portable Glass. He is currently at work on a novel inspired by French Dadaist, gigolo, and suicide Jaques Rigaut. Desautel works for Carnegie Mellon University and has a USGA handicap of 7.8.

 

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of three novels, In Heaven Everything is Fine, S&M and Peter: An (A) Historical Romance. He has also published a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction, and co-edited the “original” chick-Lit anthologies. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

 

Debra Di Blasi is (www.debradiblasi.com) received the 2003 James C. McCormick Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Books include The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions (forthcoming from FC2 Books in 2007), Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press), and Drought & Say What You Like(New Directions), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Award. She has taught experimental writing at Kansas City Art Institute and is now president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc, a transmedia corporation.

Writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, is the author of three chapbooks and one audio project which include Ichi-Ban and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladona Press) and Television. LaTasha has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Center, Naropa Institute, Caldera Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. LaTasha is the poetry curator for the online arts journal, www.exittheapple.com and teaches at Medgar Evers College. She is a Harlem Native.

 

Trevor Dodge lives and teaches in Portland, OR, and is an editor at Clackamas Literary Review. His novella,Yellow #10, was published in 2003 by Eraserhead Press. Chiasmus Press will publish his first collection of short fiction, Everyone I Know Lives On Roads, in spring 2006. He can be found online atwww.trevordodge.net.

 

Danielle Dutton is the Associate Editor for the Denver Quarterly. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming inNoon, Fence, 3rd bed, jubilat, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, Octopus, and elsewhere.

 

Seth Ellis is a writer, artist and designer who makes visual narratives based on computer-generated structures. He has degrees from Yale and Columbia Universities, and teaches digital design at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

 

Eric Elshtain is a poet-in-residence at Galileo Academy, a Chicago public school, and Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He also edits Beard of Bees Press, official home of Gnoetry0.2.

Brian Evenson is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently Altmann’s Tongue.  A new novel, TheOpen Curtain, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2007.  He is the Chair of Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

Kass Fleisher is the author of The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (nonfiction; SUNY Press, 2004); Accidental Species: A Reproduction (conceptual memoir; Chax Press 2005), and Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2006).

 

Sandy Florian holds an MFA from Brown University’s Creative Writing Program in Fiction and is a current candidate for a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her first book, Telescope, is forthcoming in October of 2006 with Action Books. Her work appears in many online and in-print journals, including 14 Hills, Bombay Gin, Indiana Review, Gargoyle, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Encyclopedia Project.

 

Gina Frangello is the Executive Editor of Other Voices Magazine/OV Books. Her first novel, My Sister’s Continent, came out from Chiasmus Press in January 2006. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines including Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Blithe House Quarterly.

 

Eugene K. Garber has published four books of short fiction: Metaphysical Tales, The Historian, Beasts in Their Wisdom, and the forthcoming Vienna ØØ. He is working with seven other artists on a hypermedia fiction entitled Eroica.

William H. Gass

 

Chris Glomski is the author of IL LA, a chapbook (Noemi Press 2002), and TRANSPARENCIES LIFTED FROM NOON (MEB/Spuyten Duyvil Press 2005), a full-length collection of poems. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Jennifer Rupert.

 

Laura Goldstein graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and from Temple University’s Masters in Creative Writing Program in 2002. Since then she has been published in COMBO, Xconnect, Mpersand andcanwehaveourballback with upcoming work in Xerolage 39 and the Primordial Review. She teaches composition at Loyola University and the International Academy of Design and Technology MFA in Writing.

Joanna Goodman is the author of Trace of One, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Fence, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.  A recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Ms. Goodman teaches creative writing at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

 

Rebecca Goodman’s first novel, Music for the End of Time, will be published this summer (2006) by Green Integer. She holds an MFA from Chapman University, and has taught Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge.

 

Matthew Guenette’s manuscript Sudden Anthem recently was a finalist at Tupelo Press and Saturnalia’s first book contest. His work has appeared recently in ACM, Passages North, The Greensboro Review, and Spoon River. He is currently teaching at MATC in Madison, WI.

 

Tim Guthrie is an Associate Professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is a multi-media artist who works with many forms of traditional media (painting, photography, sculpture, etc) as well as newer digital media (video, animation, etc). He has an extensive exhibition record and his work has been shown nationally and internationally and is in many collections, including several museums.

 

Steve Halle is a poet, teacher, and football coach from Palatine, Illinois and a Lake Forest College Alumnus, 2001. He will graduate in July from the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PFS Post, Ale House, and Tusitala.

 

Mark Hanner is an actor and former member of Schadenfreude.

 

Lynn Hassan is a virtual artist who has exhibited in California, Eastern Europe, and New York. Her images are featured in the forthcoming work Vienna ØØ by Eugene Garber, and exhibitions in NYC, opening in March 2006. Hassan’s role with the Eroica team has been the construction of imagery, graphics, and structure.

 

Kurt Heintz is founder of the e-poets network (e-poets.net), a Chicago writer and new media artist, and an advocate of aural literacy. Since the late 1980s, he has explored hybrid literary genres through combinations of poetry, video, hypertext, telepresence, and performance.

 

Lily Hoang is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame.

 

Gregory Howard is currently a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver. He worked at Dalkey Archive Press and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. His work has appeared in Square One and Hobart Magazine.

Shelley Jackson

 

Grant Jenkins teaches at the University of Tulsa and has published essays in the Journal of American Studies,Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Sagetrieb: Journal of the Objectivist Tradition, and in Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. His current book project is: Tracing Alterity: Ethics from Objectivist to Language Poetry.

  

Ralph Johnson is a founding member of the Tape-beatles, an experimental media collective formed in 1986 to explore making music with cast-off machines and media devices. They have produced five CDs, includingMusic with Sound (1990, 1997) and Good Times (1999), released on the Amsterdam-based label Staalplaat, and have performed in cities throughout the U.S. and Europe, including Prague, Berlin, San Francisco, and Iowa City. Mr. Johnson received his MFA in Electronic Music in 1997 from Mills College. He currently resides in Ypsilanti, MI.

 

Kirsten Jorgenson is a Burton Fellow and MA candidate in British and American Literature at the University of Utah. She graduated (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) from Lake Forest College with a BA in English and Creative Writing: Fiction. She won a second place award in the Nick Adams Short Story contest.

 

David Kasdorf feels that the work he does seems to find it’s parallel with the life he’s lived. He was born in Brazil, he has a Canadian passport but he’s lived most of his life in many different places in the United States. Drawing upon the use of visual and aural metaphor derived from current emotional states, family history and personal memory, Kasdorf’s work encompasses a wide range of media including works on canvas and paper, photography, audio and video.

 

Tsipi Keller is a novelist and translator. She is recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, of CAPS and NYFA awards in fiction, and is the author, most recently, of the novel Jackpot(Spuyten Duyvil, 2004). Her novel, Retelling, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2006.

Nambi Kelley

Dave Kress’ books Counting Zero and Martians are published by Mammoth Books.  A member of the spoken word band From Some Flounder, he also teaches at the University of Maine.

Stephen Lapthisophon is a multi media artist and writer living in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Strategy at Conduit Gallery Dallas TX and My Tradition My Heritage My Voice as artist in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, both in 2006. Shady Aftermath, a recent sound work, was produced at experimental sound Studio Chicago.

Karen Lebergott, associate professor of art at Lake Forest College, has a long time interest in mapping as a strategy in her work. She has recently exhibited in Berlin at Art M’bassy, Galerie Stella A and Ingan Kunstverein. Her travels and research have informed her work; she has an ongoing interest in history, geography and maps as a cultural record. In the last five years she has be a fellow at the VCCA in Virginia, a fellow in Malta, and an artist-in-residence in Berlin.

 

Trudy Lewis is the author of the short story collection The Bones of Garbo and the novel Private Correspondences. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, and others. She teaches at the University of Missouri.

David Lincoln is the author of a novel (Mobility Lounge, Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), two chapbooks of poetry (The Interloper and By The Way, Saltines Press), and has written travel essays, short fiction and poetry for a number of publications (including The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stock, Northwest Literary Forum, The Brooklyn Rail). He is a graduate of the San Francisco State Writing Program, and is currently living in New York.

 

Pepper Luboff is a Poetry MFA student at the University of Utah. She received a BA in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked closely with Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, and Robert Hass. She is a second place winner of the Ina Coolbrith poetry contest (2002). She tied for first place in the Academy of America poets prize (2002).

Lou Mallozzi is an audio artist in Chicago who dismembers and reconstitutes sound, language, gesture, and image in various media.  He works in live performance, music, radio art, sound installation, CD recording, soundtrack design, and visual art, and has presented works at numerous festivals, concerts, galleries, museums, and broadcasts in the US, Canada, and Europe, both in solo contexts and in collaboration with musicians, artists, and performers. He is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Experimental Sound Studio, a Chicago nonprofit sonic arts organization, and is on the faculty of the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Peter Markus is the author of The Singing Fish (Calamari Press), The Moon is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press), and Good, Brother (forthcoming from Calamari Press).

 

Bill Marsh teaches Communication and edits the “Heretical Texts” poetry series for Factory School.

 

Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen novels and collections of fiction. Her most recent books are the novelsDisability and Many Ways to Get It, many Ways to Say It. A native of Southern California, Mazza lived approximately 35 years in San Diego County. She now lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 

Tracy McCabe teaches English, gender studies, and American studies at Lake Forest College. For nine years in Madison, Wisconsin, she danced with the jazz company, Synergy!. She now studies modern dance at the North Shore School of Dance and performs at the North Shore Unitarian Church.

 

Michael Mejia is the recipient of a 2006 NEA Fellowship in Literature. His novel Forgetfulness was published by Fiction Collective 2 in 2005. He teaches creative writing at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.

 

Tom Miller is a second-year fiction student at Notre Dame. He has had stories published in Harper Palate andScience Creative Quarterly and is writing The False Histories: Seven Folk Tales, a popular edition of the life’s work of noted American anthropologist Marvin I. Berger.

 

Andy Mingo is the director of six short films that have appeared in festivals such as The Northwest Film Festival and the Seattle Poetry Festival. As an Editor for Chiasmus Press he helped compile Northwest Edge: Fictions of Mass Destruction. He now teaches, writes, and makes films in the People’s Republic of Oregon.

A para-literary agent provocateur since his teens, Gustave Morin is the proprietor of stained paper archive, a mostly invisible organization of dubious origin whose purpose continues to remain ill defined. His books include: the etcetera barbecue (2006), A Penny Dreadful (2003), p.mody’s dada boutique (1997), Sun Kissed Oranges (co-authored with Sergio Forest, 1995), and Rusted Childhood Memoirs (1994). His work has been anthologized in The Common Sky (2003), Pissing Ice (2004), and most recently, in Switch and Shift (2005).

Noam Mor’s work has been published in First Intensity Magazine, Prairie Winds, Downtown Brooklyn, Notre Dame Review, Visions International, Psychopoetica and Brooklyn Rail.  “Exile,” a video he produced and directed was adapted into a video under a grant from The Kitchen.  Arc:  The Cleavage of Ghosts, his first novel, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Press.  Noam is a professor of English and philosophy in the New York City area.

 

Martin Nakell is the author of poetry and fictions, including The Myth of Creation (Parenthesis Writing Series),Ramon (Jahbone Press), The Library of Thomas Rivka (Sun & Moon), Goings (Margin-to-Margin), Form(Spuyten Duyvil), Settlement (forthcoming, Spuyten Duyvil). He is the publisher of Jahbone Press.

 

Paul Nelson: Co-Founder Northwest Spokenword LAB/ author of epic poem re-enacting Auburn history: A Time Before Slaughter/ professional broadcaster since 1980/ studies Open Form in North American Poetry/ writes at least one American Sentence every day.

 

Lance Olsen is the author of eighteen books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novelNietzsche’s Kisses (FC2, 2006) and both the paper (Chiasmus, 2005) and hypermedia (Iowa Review Web) versions of the novel 10:01. An N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, former Idaho Writer-in-Residence, and finalist for the Phillip K. Dick Award, Olsen serves as Chair of the FC2’s Board of Directors.

 

Andi Olsen’s short film Where the Smiling Ends is currently on exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, and recently screened at the LA International Shorts Festival and Valley Film Festival. Her ongoing installation, Hideous Beauties: A Freak Show, consists of video/DVD, assemblages, and collage-texts that explore the notion of monstrosity. Her art has been exhibited and published around the country and abroad.

 

J.R. Osborn is a Ph.D. candidate in the Communication program at UC San Diego. His primary research examines the history of lettering and traditions of the book in the Arabic and Ottoman Middle East. He is also an online editor for Factory School (factoryschool.org) and a critical media producer, whose communicative experiments have ranged from calligraphic and textual art to video production to gesturo-haptic translation and dance.

 

Laurie Palmer’s interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, public projects, writing, and collaboration with the artists’ collective Haha. 3 Acres on the Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project was recently published byWhiteWalls, Inc., and is distributed by the University of Chicago Press. She is Associate Professor in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Aimee Parkison’s stories have appeared in North American Review, Quarterly West, Other Voices, and Santa Monica Review. She has won a Christopher Isherwood fellowship, a Writers at Work fellowship, and the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize. Her short story collection, Woman With Dark Horses, was published by Starcherone Press.

 

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel, _Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals), from Spuyten Duyvil Books. He has received an NEA fellowship for Fiction. He lives in Buffalo, where he is Executive Director of Starcherone Books and an Associate Professor of English at Medaille College.

The “writing” of Michael Peters—poetry, fiction, visual poetry, et cetera—has appeared in publications such asSpinning Jenny, Rhino, Lungfull, Word for Word, Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of Avant-Garde, and Xtant, to name a few. His visual poetry has appeared in numerous galleries and exhibits, and can also be found in various collections and libraries. As a musician, most notably in Poem Rocket, and also as a text-sound collaborator, both independently and with the Be Blank Consort, Peters has released recordings on numerous independent labels including Atavistic.

 

Rob Read grew up in Komoka, Ontario, and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His most recent books areAtone Neither Overflowing Clause (Produce Press, 2005)—two novellas in the shape of a guillotine (a collaboration with A.E.M.) and O Spam, Poams—a selection of Daily Treated Spam poetry made from spam e-mail.

 

Martin Riker’s critical writing has appeared in the Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi, and CONTEXT. He was Assistant Director of the Center for Book Culture from 2000-2004, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Denver.

 

Eli Robb is an inter-media artist based in Chicago. He completed his M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Lake Forest College. His teaching practice and his own artistic endeavors unite academic and intellectual concerns with an irreverent yet dark sense of humor and a playful disdain for categorization and certainty.

 

Matt Roberson teaches at Central Michigan University. His novel, 1998.6, was published by FC2.

 

Mary Russell is a Chicago based artist. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute and she is presently a full-time instructor at Robert Morris College in Chicago. For the past decade she has been collaborating with poet Gerard Wozek on videopoems which have screened at numerous conferences in the United States and at festivals abroad, including the Edgewise Poetry Video Festival in Vancouver, Canada; the 2003 papertigermedia poetry launch in Brisbane, Australia; and the Zebra Poetry Video Film Festival in Berlin, Germany

 

Michael Ryan received a BFA degree in 1979 from the Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia. Since 1994 he has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ryan’s “Roadstains and Travels” was presented at Gallery 312 in Chicago and the NOVA Young Art Fair. Currently he has work in “Perfect; a group exhibition,” organized by Marci McDade, which originated at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Jason Salavon

 

Elisabeth Sheffield is the author of a novel, Gone (published by FC2), and a critical book on James Joyce, poststructuralist and feminist theory. She has also published short fictions and edited a collection of short experimental fictions by American women writers No Chick Vics (published by FC2). She lives in Denver and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

 

Nina Shope’s collection of experimental fiction, Hangings: Three Novellas, was published by Starcherone Books in 2005. Her fiction has appeared in New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, Open City, and 3rd Bed. Her short story “Elevation” was awarded the Seremy Lake Memorial Prize and will appear inPP/FF: An Anthology, edited by Peter Conners.

 

Teresa Sparks is a researcher for Free Speech TV and sometime columnist for the American Book Review. Her first chapbook, String of Noun, was accepted by Projet Mobilivre for the 2004 season.

 

Mark Spitzer, Assistant Professor of English at Truman State University in Missouri, is a novelist and literary translator and murderer of fish. He will read selections from his new book of poetry, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, just published (or soon to be published) by Spuyten Duyvil in New York.

 

Trey Strecker teaches English at Ball State University, where he edits the peer-reviewed electronic English Studies Forum (ww.bsu.edu/web/esf). Some of his recent writing on Contemporary American fiction has appeared in Critique and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He is the editor of Dead Balls and Double Curves: An Anthology of Early Baseball Fiction (Southern Illinois UP, 2004) and the book review editor of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.

Stephanie Strickland is both a print and a new media poet. Her fourth book, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una(Penguin), has a Web component, http://vniverse.com. Her prizewinning works include V, True North, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, and Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. She has taught literary hypermedia as part of a tradition of experimental poetry at Brown, Hollins, U. Montana-Missoula, Boise State, Sarah Lawrence College, Georgia Institute of Technology, Columbia College Chicago, and Parsons. She serves on the board of the Electronic Literature Organization. http://stephaniestrickland.com.

Christian TeBordo’s novel, The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck, was published by Spuyten Duyvil.  He lives in Philadelphia.

 

Micheal Theune’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New Republic,Pleiades, and Verse. He teaches English at Illinois Wesleyan University.

 

Tod Thilleman moved to New York at the age of 18 and worked for a brief period with Pace Editions. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and the novel Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen. From 1991-1999 he was editor of Poetry New York: a journal of poetry & translation.

  

Steve Timm teaches ESL at University of Wisconsin, Madison. His e-book, Disparity, is due in 2006 on the Blazevox website. A chapter book, Averrage, was published by Answer Tag Home Press; another is due in 2006 from Bronze Skull Press.

 

Paul A. Toth’s first novel was Fizz. Regarding the novel, Fishnet, TimeOut-Chicago’s Jonathan Messinger said, “It’s astounding how much pathos Toth packs into this strange, short novel.” Toth’s short fiction and audio work have appeared in numerous publications, including The Iowa Review Web.

  

Steve Tomasula’s short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in McSweeney’s, The Denver Quarterlyand The Iowa Review. He is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press),IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy) and The Book of Portraiture (FC2). He teaches in the program for writers at the University of Notre Dame.

 

Jessica Treat is the author of Not a Chance (FC2, 2000) and A Robber in the House (Coffee House Press, 1993), both story collections. Her fiction has appeared in: Ms. Magazine, Epoch, Black Warrior Review,WebdelSol, 3rd Bed and Quarterly West, among others. New work can be found in Quick Fiction, Double Room, Outsider Ink, Gargoyle, and in anthologies: The Nine Muses and The PP/FF Anthology. She is completing a third collection of stories as well as a triptych of novellas centering on family and place. She lives with her son in Limerock, Connecticut. She is Associate Professor at Northwestern CT Community College and a recipient of a CT Commission on the Arts Award in Fiction.

 

Jon Trowbridge is a software engineer at Google.

 

Deb Olin Unferth’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, Noon,Fence, The Boston Review, StoryQuarterly, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

Wendy Walker is the author of The Sea Rabbit, The Secret Service and Stories of Omarie, all from Sun and Moon Press. Her poetic dossier Blue Fire was a finalist for the Fitzpatrick O’Dinn Award for the Best Work of Constrained Literature in English, sponsored by Spineless Books.  She can be found atwww.wendywalker.com.

Derek White is the editor of Sleepingfish and published his work and others through his Calamari Press.

Cortlandt Winters has a BA in Dramatic Literature from Vassar and an MS in Computer Sciences from the State University of New York. He has done illustrations for advertising, comics and educational software and has programmed for companies and educational institutions. He has a special interest and expertise in Flash development and in the emerging forms of hypermedia fiction. His role with the Eroica team has been with media mixing, programming and the navigational system and graphics.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. His book, c.c., was published by Krupskaya Books in 2002. AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004) and Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004), are recent publications.

Gerard Wozek’s first book of poetry, Dervish, won the Gival Press Poetry Award. His work has been widely published in journals and anthologies and translated into two stage productions produced through Lionheart Theatre in Chicago. With artist Mary Russell, he has produced award-winning video poems including Dance of the Electric Moccasins which won the 2005 Potenza Film Festival First Place Prize. He teaches creative writing and the humanities at Robert Morris College in Chicago.

Kelly Xintaris is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She received a BA in Linguistics and English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Post-Baccalaureate in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Her work has been exhibited nationally.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of three books of short fiction and the Editrix of Chiasmus Press, as well as a board member and editorial member of Fiction Collective 2 and an editorial member of Black Ice. Her work has appeared all over the place. She is currently completing her first novel, and lives in the woods with her husband the filmmaker Andy Mingo and her son the renaissance man Miles.