From the Threshing Floor: A Critics Page Conversation

Dale Martin Smith lives in Toronto, Ontario, and teaches at Ryerson University. With Robert J. Bertholf, he edited An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (2017), available from the University of New Mexico Press.

Writer Susan Briante’s most recent book The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. A translator, she lived in Mexico City from 1992-1997 working for the magazines Artes de México and Mandorla. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She serves as the faculty liaison and educational facilitator for the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. Briante also produces and hosts the radio program Speedway and Swan, an hour of free-form poetry and music on KXCI 91.3 Tucson.

Poet, novelist, playwright, aphorist, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist Will Alexander has produced 30 collections in the above mentioned genres. Both a Whiting Fellow and a California Arts Council Fellow, he has been recipient of an Oakland PEN Award, an American Book Award, and winner of the 2016 Jackson Prize for Poetry.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, poet Laura Moriarty grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Northern California where she has lived since 1964. She attended UC Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. Her recent books include Personal Volcano, Who That Divines, A Tonalist, and A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007. Last February she had her first show of visual art, rapt glass, at Right Window in San Francisco. Her Witch Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat.

Poet Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions) and The Real Horse (Univ. of Arizona Press). Redolent, his book-arts collaboration with Colombian artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, is now available for pre-order from Singing Saw Press. Matuk is the co-editor and co-translator of a new edition of Juan Felipe Herrera’s seminal poetry collection Akrílica, forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2022.

Susan Gevirtz is an author. Her books of poetry include Hotel abc (Nightboat, 2016) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street, 2010). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996) and Coming Events (Nightboat, 2013). She is based in San Francisco.

Steve Seidenberg’s most recent works are plain sight (Roof, 2020) and Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018). His collections of photographs include Pipevalve: Berlin (Lodima, 2017) and Imaging Failure: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South (Contrasto, 2020). He lives in San Francisco.

Erín Moure’s most recent poetry is The Elements (Toronto: House of Anansi) and most recent translation is Uxío Novoneyra’s The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (El Paso: Veliz Books) from Galician. She folds paper in Montreal.

Poet and essayist Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020). Other works include Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (2012) and King of Shadows (2008). A pioneer in both LGBTQ+ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist and translator. Her most recent book of poetry is Fate News. Other books include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, Spinoza in Her Youth, To Be at Music: Essays & Talks and Actualities, her collaboration with Marina Adams. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, and Jean Daive’s White Decimal. Her visual work has been shown at the Miami University Art Museum, [2nd floor projects] in San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum, and most recently her film “By the Turning Bridge” at Arion Press and NIAD. A book of her drawings called Drawings just appeared from Further Other Book Works.