Leila Wilson’s The Hundred Grasses is out from Milkweed Editions.  Poems from the collection have appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, A Public Space, Court Green, and American Letters and Commentary.  She teaches at the School of the Art Institute and University of Chicago.

Peter Thomas is a playwright whose short works have appeared at the American Theatre Company, The Artistic Home, Second City, and as a part of the Small Fish Radio and Thespanarium podcast.  He is a founding member of the Courier 12 Collective and teaches at the School of the Art Institute.

Michael Heller has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. His most recent books are This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 (2012), Beckmann Variations & other poems (2010) and Eschaton (2009). His collection of essays on George Oppen, Speaking the Estranged (2008), was republished in 2012 in an expanded edition. Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics, was reissued in 2012. His memoir, Living Root, published by the State University of New York Press, appeared in 2000. Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, a collection of fiction, was published in 2009. Among his many collaboration with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson are the libretto for the opera, Constellations of Waking, based on the life of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, and the multi-media work, This Art Burning, both of which premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Harpers, New Letters, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Jewish American Poetry, Pequod, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and many others. His prize-winning critical study, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry, was published by Southern Illinois University Press. His many awards and honors include prizes from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for Poetry. He has given many poetry readings in America and Europe at such places as Yale, CUNY, SUNY Purchase and Buffalo, Temple, Rensselaer, NYU and the University of Wyoming, the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Warwick and Durham Universities. For many years, he was on the faculty of New York University and has taught at The Naropa Institute, The New School, San Francisco State, Notre Dame and other universities. More information on Michael Heller is available at www.michaelhellerpoetry.com.

Devin King is a writer, musician, and teacher working in Chicago. A long poem, CLOPS, is out from the Green Lantern Press and a chapbook, The Resonant Space, is out from Holon Press. More at http://dancingyoungmenfromhighwindows.com/.

Michael O’Leary is the co-editor of Flood Editions and founding editor of LVNG. He has published poems in magazines here and there. He lives with his family in Chicago and works as a structural engineer. He just got back from a Smiths concert when this photo was taken.

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007) and Arbitrary Tales (2005). His translations include Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl, among others. His work has been anthologized in, among others, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; Seriously Funny; and Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesía iberoamericana Made in USA. Journal publications include Fence, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, and many others. Chapbooks include Failure in the Imagination and One Size Fits All. He lives in Chicago.

James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art History of Chicago. An extensively travelled and prolific writer, his many works include What Painting Is, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, How to Use Your Eyes, and Paintings and Tears. He has coordinated several book series including The Stone Theory Institutes, after the eponymous program. Jim is the author of the literary essay, What Photography Is, against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. His current work abandons art historical writing in favor of experimental fiction. Jim’s interests include microscopy, stereo photography, piano playing and (whenever possible) winter ocean diving.



Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and of several chapbooks of poetry, including the bilingual Thing Ode/Ode oggettuale (La Camera Verde, 2008). Her critical study, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, is forthcoming in 2013 from Columbia University Press, and Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, is in progress for Atelos Press. Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which she translated and edited, was awarded the biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize by the Academy of American Poets. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Nathanaël is the author of a score of books written in English or French, including Carnet de somme, We Press Ourselves Plainly, and Paper City. Je Nathanaël exists in (self-)translation, as does the essay of correspondence, Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book), first published in French as L’absence au lieu. Some texts exist in Basque, Slovene and Spanish (Mexico), with book-length translations in Bulgarian and Portuguese (Brazil). Nathanaël’s translations include works by Édouard Glissant, Danielle Collobert, Catherine Mavrikakis and Hilda Hilst, the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo. She lives in Chicago.

This even was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from Poets & Writers, Inc. Chicago.

Whit Griffin is the author of Pentateuch: The First Five Books (Skysill Press, 2010) and The Sixth Great Extinction (Skysill 2012).  Along with Andrew Hughes he co-edits the journal Bright Pink Mosquito.  He currently resides in western Tennessee.

Chuck Stebelton is author of The Platformist (The Cultural Society, 2012) and Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005). Recent print objects and chapbooks include Asterisk (Number 13, Fewer & Further Press), ‘Tis (John Riepenhoff Experience), A Maximal Object (Mitzvah Chaps), Flags and Banners (Bronze Skull Press), and Precious (Answer Tag Home Press). He works as Literary Program Director at Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee.

Sally Delehant is a graduate of St. Mary’s College of California’s MFA program in poetry. Some of her work can be found in Calaveras, Columbia Poetry Review, The Cultural Society, Catch Up: Emerging Writers Issue, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, and OnandOn Screen. Her first book of poems, A Real Time of It, was recently published by The Cultural Society. She lives in Chicago.

Vocations to poetry and religion have committed Peter O’Leary to the pursuit of what St. Bonaventure named an itinerarium mentis in deum, or the journey of the mind to God, with particular attention devoted to the mystagogical-initiatic and the mytho-poetical. Luminous Epinoia, published by the Cultural Society, is his most recent book. He lives in Berwyn, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and for the Committee on Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.