Publishing-in-Transit: Tender Buttons Press

Poet Cole Swensen is the author of 17 volumes of poetry and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over 20 volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.

Poet, book publisher, and founding editor of Tender Buttons Press, Lee Ann Brown is the author of Other Archer (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015), In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She has taught at Brown University, Naropa University, Bard College, and elsewhere, and held fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and others. From 2017–18, she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University.

Poet, curator, professor, performer, cultural activist Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa Institute. She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for nuclear warheads. Author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press) which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism among several others. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music and the Levy-Gorvy Gallery. NEW WEATHERS, Poetics from the Naropa Archive , Nightboat 2022 has just gone to press.

Interdisciplinary artist and writer Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s time-based practice develops through ephemeral gestures that result in a corpus of text-based, visual and sound pieces. She’s the artistic director of diSONARE, an experimental editorial project from Mexico City. She recently co-founded Rizoma, a series of performance workshops led by an international poet collective for the imprisoned women of Santiaguito de Almoloya de Juárez, Estado de México. Her book The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons Press) is forthcoming.