A Tribute to John Ashbery

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; the chapbook A History of the Bitch (forthcoming, Sputnik and Fizzle, 2020); and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her next poetry collection, Thingification is forthcoming from Ugly Presse, 2021. Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthetics and surveillance, is in development with support from a 2020 Creative Capital Foundation grant. A 2020-2021 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, Tonya holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. She was raised in New Orleans, and her family goes generations back in Louisiana.

Todd Colby is a Brooklyn-based poet and artist. Colby is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent book, Splash State, was published by The Song Cave in 2014. His writing and art have recently appeared in The Believer, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Dizzy Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Poetry Magazine.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut," and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands, Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in Spring 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017, and has taught creative writing at Yale University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, Poets House, the 92nd Street Y, and through Brooklyn Poets. She lives in Brooklyn.

A member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Olivier Brossard is an Associate Professor of American literature at Université Gustave Eiffel where he runs the Poets and Critics program with Vincent Broqua and Abigail Lang: www.poetscritics.org. In 2000, he co-founded the Double Change collective, an online magazine and reading series in Paris www.doublechange.org. Olivier Brossard is joca seria éditions American poetry series editor: his most recent translation is John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, in collaboration with Pierre Alferi and Marc Chénetier (joca seria, 2020). He has also translated Marcella Durand, Tonya Foster, Kevin Killian, Frank O’Hara, and Ron Padgett, amongst others.

Anselm Berrigan was born in 1972 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Brooklyn College. He is the son of poets Alice Notley and the late Ted Berrigan. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Something for Everybody (Wave Books, 2018), Come in Alone (Wave Books, 2016), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). With Alice Notley and his brother Edmund Berrigan, he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2011). Berrigan was a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry in 2007 and has received three grants from the Fund for Poetry. From 2003 to 2007, he served as artistic director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He is co-chair of writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and also teaches writing at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. He lives in New York City and is the Poetry Editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

Kyle 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.

Marcella Durand’s most recent books include The Prospect, just now out from Delete Press, https://deletepress.org, and Earth’s Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail’s book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, published this spring by Black Square Editions, https://www.blacksquareeditions.org. Other publications include Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017); Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.), with French translations by Olivier Brossard (joca seria, 2016); Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with Tina Darragh, (Little Red Leaves); AREA (Belladonna); and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem), written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is currently working on a new collection forthcoming from Black Square Editions.