James Barickman
James Barickman is a bookseller, mover, & sound tech; he co-hosts the Mascot reading series with Cori Hutchinson.
Staff
Will Farris
Will Farris is a writer and visual artist concerned with language and poetics across and between artistic disciplines. Their work has appeared in conversation with movement and poetry by artist and creative collaborator Molly McLaughlin of ATTN: Dance, most recently in the presentation “Make it Up.” Will has also collaborated as scenographer with dancemaker Heather Stewart on her piece “against hard air.” They live in New York City.
Kyle Dacuyan
Dacuyan is a poet, performer, and translator. His poems appear in DIAGRAM, Lambda Literary, Foundry, and Best New Poets, among other places, and he is the recipient of scholarships from Poets House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Academy of American Poets. Prior to joining The Poetry Project, he served as Co-Director of National Outreach and Membership at PEN America, where he led the launch of a nationwide community engagement fund for writers. Before that, he served as Associate Director at the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.
Marwa Helal
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
John Rufo
John Rufo has been a reviews editor for The Poetry Project Newsletter since 2017. Work has been published, or is forthcoming, on Poets [dot] org, Ploughshares, The Offing, The Capilano Review, Tagvverk, Entropy, The Journal Petra, NOO, and Dreginald. Links and contact at johnspringrufo.tumblr.com
Mirene Arsanios
Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015). She has contributed essays and short stories to The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017), as well as in various artist books and projects. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She holds an MA in Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and an MFA in Writing from Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace resident.
Rachel Valinsky
Rachel Valinsky is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, BOMB, East of Borneo, Millennium Film Journal, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She was a curator for the Segue Reading Series in 2015 and has presented projects at Judson Memorial Church, Lisa Cooley, Spectacle Theater, and elsewhere. Rachel is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit library and writing space in Brooklyn and a contributing editor at Éditions Lutanie, Paris. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and currently teaches Art History at Hunter College.
Simone White
Simone White is the author of Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, House Envy of All of the World and the chapbooks Unrest and Dolly (with the paintings of Kim Thomas). She teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.
Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek is a poet, and arts administrator/organizer, and teacher. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where in 1999 she started working for Woodland Pattern Book Center. She founded and edited seven issues of GAM, a free magazine featuring the work of poets living in the upper midwest. In 2005, she moved to NYC to work for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where she served as Executive Director from 2007-2018. Szymaszek is the author of the books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, and A Year From Today (2018 ). She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in poetry. She is a regular teacher for Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and mentor for Queer Art Mentorship.
Szymaszek is the 2018-19 Hugo Visiting Writer at the University of Montana and was a Poet-in-Resident at Brown University in fall 2018.