Publishing-in-Transit: Wendy’s Subway

Rachel Valinsky is a writer, editor, and translator based in New York and Paris. Rachel is co-founder and Artistic Director of Wendy’s Subway and an editor at Primary Information, a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing new and archival artists’ books and writings. Rachel’s criticism appears in publications including Artforum, Art in America and , BOMB, and she has written for the Berlinale International Film Festival and Danspace Project, among others. Rachel has translated literary and critical texts for Semiotext(e) and Éditions Lutanie, and curated exhibitions, performances, and public programs at The Kitchen, The Queens Museum, BAM, and elsewhere. Rachel teaches art history, performance, art writing, and critical thinking at New York University and The New School.

Marian Chudnovsky is an archivist and art worker from Queens, NY. She is the Librarian at Wendy’s Subway and Program and Administrative Assistant at CARA (Center for Art, Research and Alliances). Her work focuses on archiving independent publishing and activist movements. Her first book, Peer Review 2: Publishing the Present, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2022.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer from Dearborn, Michigan, with roots in Jibbayn and Shmistar, Lebanon. With an MA in English from Wayne State University and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, she currently teaches poetry at the City College of New York, edits poetry manuscripts, and co-facilitates Habibi Futurism, a generative workshop for collective futurist imaginings.

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.