Following in the tradition of Open Readings and the mimeo logic of making poetry as available as possible to as many people as possible, Mimeo Microphone is designed to create a platform for poets to deepen their connection with The Poetry Project community, whether they are introducing their work for the first time or have been around from the beginning but want to participate in a new way. From an open pool of applicants we have selected the following ten readers for the first in this new Poetry Project series: Ama Birch, Janna Dyk, Stella Hayes, Adeena Karasick, Julia Knobloch, Diane Ludin, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Bob Rosenthal, Marina Temkina, and Peter Valente
Mimeo Microphone
Ama Birch
Ama Birch has been published by Apricity Press, dObally, Live Mag!, Fellswoop, Autonomedia, A Gathering of the Tribes, Vail/Vale, Les Figues Press, Ali Liebegott, Vitrine, Insert Blanc Press, CalArts Creative Writing Program, and the State University of New York. She has three books: Sonnet Boom! a collection of 88 contemporary poems, Faces in the Clouds, and Ferguson Interview Project, a book of twenty interviews about Mike Brown’s death.
Janna Dyk
Janna Dyk is an independent curator, artist, researcher, and collaborator based in Brooklyn. A Hunter MFA graduate, Dyk’s projects span a range of considerations, from images, poetry, and perception, to the relationship between the personal and political.
Stella Hayes
Stella Hayes is the author of One Strange Country, forthcoming from What Books Press in 2020. She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and in Chicago. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude, Small Orange Journal, The Hunger, Indianapolis Review, and Spillway.
Adeena Karasick
Adeena Karasick is a poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) “a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick’s signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
Julia Knobloch
Julia Knobloch was born and raised in Germany and has lived in France, Portugal, and Argentina. She is a former documentary filmmaker, a member of the Sweet Action poetry collective, and the recipient of a 2017 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship. Her debut collection Do Not Return was published in 2019 by Broadstone Books.
Diane Ludin
Diane Ludin is a Poet, Media Artist, and User Experience Designer. Born in New York, she studied Drawing and Installation at the State University of New York at Purchase (1989-1993), Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts in (1998-2000) and Integrated Digital Media (2009-2011) at NYU Tandon. She has exhibited her Internet and Media Installation work throughout the US, Europe and Australia.
Murat Nemet-Nejat
Murat Nemet-Nejat is the editor and translator of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman 2004). Poet, translator, essayist, his recent books include the poems The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman, 2011), Animals of Dawn (Talisman, 2016), Io’s Song (Chax, 2019); the translations Seyhan Erözçelik Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman, 2010), Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Green Integers, 2016), Birhan Keskin. Y’ol (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018); and the essays The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integers, 2004), “Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda” (Letters for Olson, edited by Benjamin Hollander, Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), “A Dialogue with Olga” (Olga Chernysheva/ Vague Accent, The Drawing Center, 2016).
Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on the poem “Camels & Weasels” (part six of the seven-part poem “The Structure of Escape”) and the translations of selections from the Turkish poets Sami Baydar and küçük İskender’s poetry.
Bob Rosenthal
Bob Rosenthal (b. 1950); Straight Around Allen: On the Business of Being Allen Ginsberg, Beatdom Books 2019, Cleaning Up New York, republished Little Book Room, 2016. Books of poetry: Morning Poems, Lies About the Flesh, Rude Awakenings, Viburnum, and Eleven Psalms; plays co-written with Bob Holman: The Cause of Gravity, The Whore of the Alpines, Bicentennial Suicide, Clear The Range.
Peter Valente
Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014), which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House, 2015), The Catullus Versions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), two books of photography, Blue (Spuyten Duyvil) and Street Level (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), two translations from the Italian, Blackout by Nanni Balestrini (Commune Editions, 2017) and Whatever the Name by Pierre Lepori (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Two Novellas: Parthenogenesis & Plague in the Imperial City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), a collaboration with Kevin Killian, Ekstasis (blazeVOX, 2017) and the chapbook, Forge of Words a Forest (Jensen Daniels, 1998). He is the co-translator of the chapbook, Selected Late Letter s of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and has translated the work of Gérard de Nerval and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as numerous Ancient Greek and Latin authors. His poems, essays, and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, spoKe, and Animal Shelter. His work has also been published online in Talisman, The Poems and Poetics Blog, Oyster Boy Review, Jacket2, Sibilia, The Recluse, Dispatches From the Poetry Wars, and the Verso Books blog. Forthcoming is his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2019), and a collection of essays, Essays on the Peripheries (Punctum, 2019). In 2010, he turned to filmmaking and has completed sixty shorts to date, twenty-four of which were screened at Anthology Film Archives in NYC.