Publishing-in-Transit: Chax Press

Charles Alexander is an artist, poet, bookmaker, professor, and founder/director of Chax Press. He is the author of 6 full-length books of poetry, 13 chapbooks, and multiple essays and reviews. Pushing Water III is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press. Alexander has taught literature and writing at Naropa University, University of Arizona, and elsewhere. From 2014 through 2018, Alexander directed the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston-Victoria and managed the UHV Center for the Arts. He is a recipient of the Arizona Arts Award, and was named the 5th winner of the Lord Nose Award for outstanding lifetime achievement in literary publishing in 2021, among other recognitions. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, Cynthia Miller.

Cynthia E. Miller is a professional visual artist. She lives, works, and teaching painting and writing about it in the desert Southwest. She enjoys collaborations with other art and artists and writers from Chax Press poetry & publications, OTO Dance Theatre, Sony Music album covers, Bioneers’ Dreaming New Mexico Project, and many others.

Writer and editor David Abel is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its twenty first year, he was also a cofounder of Thirteen Hats, a collective of Portland writers and artists; and a member of the Four Wall Cinema collective. His recent publications include a chapbook of poems, Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill in Albuquerque, NM; and two artist’s books based on verbal performance scores —XIV Eclipses, published by Couch Press in Portland, and Selected Durations, published by the Black Rock Press at the University of Nevada in Reno. The first volume of an ongoing hybrid genre work entitled Sweep is forthcoming from Chax Press.

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, 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 the LA Times 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 twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation.