Joanne Grant
Joanne Grant began her career in civil rights as an assistant to NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois. While working as a reporter for the National Guardian in the 1960s, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became a close associate of Ella Baker. She produced and directed Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, an award-winning documentary film nationally telecast on PBS. Ms. Grant is the author of Black Protest, a classic documentary history, and Confrontation on Campus. She lives in New York City.
Robert Goffin
Robert Goffin (b.1898 d. ??) was a Belgian poet, music critic, and Avocat a la Cour d'Appel in Brussels. He was called "the first serious man of letters to take jazz seriously enough to devote a book to it." His books include poems (Jazz Band); critical studies (Aux Frontieres du Jazz; Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong; Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan); works on Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; and The White Brigade (on the German occupation of Belgium, 1940-45). The Best Negro Jazz Orchestra is taken from Nancy Cunard's anthology Negro, published in 1934. It will be reprinted in the forthcoming Beckett in Black and Red (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1999), a collection of translations done by Samuel Beckett for that anthology edited by Alan Friedman.
Ernst Moerman
Ernst Moerman (b. 1897 d. 1944) was s Belgian lawyer; Surrealist poet (Oeuvre poetique, Vie imaginaire de Jesus-Christ), playwright (Tristan et Yseult, Le mari sarcastique), and writer of a Surrealist film script (M. Fantomas). Louis Armstrong is a poem taken from Nancy Cunard's anthology Negro, published in 1934. It will be reprinted in the forthcoming Beckett in Black and Red (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1999), a collection of translations done by Samuel Beckett for that anthology edited by Alan Friedman.
Michael Bruner
Michael Bruner, founding member of the nationally recognized performance poetry troupes The Lost Tribe and the Carma Bums, is currently Assistant Professor of Communication at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He has published over thirty poems (most recently in Blue Satellite, Sic, and the forthcoming Outlaw Bible of American Poetry), as well as numerous scholarly articles in national and international communication journals.
After the Break In is the first long text collaboration between the authors whose friendship, performance & poetry exploration dates to pre-slam 1985. As founding members of two influential Los Angeles performance/poetry groups the Lost Tribe (1985 -1988) & the Carma Bums (1988-1996), they performed/ read in over 150 venues, toured the Southwest & West coast of the USA into Canada, & created a "Cyber Tour of Words" on the Net in 1996 which lived until their break-up. Carma Bums' adventures & writing is chronicled in Twisted Cadillac: A Spoken Work Odyssey (Sacred Beverage Press, 1996). A feature length documentary Luxurious Tigers of Obnoxious Agreement: The Carma Bums Film was released in 1998.
Michael Bruner can be reached at bruner@babson.edu.
Mike Mollett
Mike Mollett has worked primarily under-ground: producing a citywide DADA festival in the early 80's punk L. A.; co-directing ZTZU, "the ugliest gallery in L.A.", in the mid-80's; self-published nearly 50 books of poetry, short stories, art, mail-art and letters; his (AAV) alternative art vehicle with "Questions of The Week" was exhibited & considered a book; as co-host at a sleazy Hollywood bar, CLUB BLAB was "the best open mic"- the L.A. Weekly, '89. Mollett is now leader/ performer with the non-verbal improvisational group The L. A. Mudpeople. Find them: The National Geographic (June, 1992) & their own site HERE. He is currently developing & teaching a unique extended communication/ performing arts workshop as an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles.
After the Break In is the first long text collaboration between the authors whose friendship, performance & poetry exploration dates to pre-slam 1985. As founding members of two influential Los Angeles performance/poetry groups the Lost Tribe (1985 -1988) & the Carma Bums (1988-1996), they performed/ read in over 150 venues, toured the Southwest & West coast of the USA into Canada, & created a "Cyber Tour of Words" on the Net in 1996 which lived until their break-up. Carma Bums' adventures & writing is chronicled in Twisted Cadillac: A Spoken Work Odyssey (Sacred Beverage Press, 1996). A feature length documentary Luxurious Tigers of Obnoxious Agreement: The Carma Bums Film was released in 1998.
Mike Mollett can be reached at inmate@zippnet.net.
Jacqueline Herraz Brooks
Jacqueline Herraz Brooks was born in Havana, Cuba in 1968. She graduated from the Escuela Provincial de Fotografía in 1990 and is a member of the Associatión Hermanis Saíz. She is the author of Yo fuí a la guerra, a play, and several books of poetry: A quien dar mi maldad con humildad, Corrección del paisaje, El calificador de turno, El dragón se enrolla, Cuestiones metaclínicas, and Liquid Days.
Charles Plymell
Charles Plymell was born in 1935. He was a major part of the San Francisco literary scene starting in the 1950s, hosting both Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg in his apartment during their stay out west. He hand printed the first ever issue of Zap! comics and published many underground titles in the sixties. In 1971, City Lights brought out his hobohemian classic, The Last of the Moccasins. His poetry has appeared in many volumes and magazines over the years. He first appeared in Evergreen Review in 1970.
Philip Guichard
Philip Guichard was born in 1980 on the same day as Macaulay Culkin. He enjoys the musics of Thelonius Monk and Syd Barrett and lives in a basement in Seattle. He is quite happy, thank you, and enjoys mild pleasures like movies, making out, and hash. His favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov and his favorite poet is Arthur Rimbaud. If you write to him at Vsirin38@aol.com he will not respond, unless you pay or bribe him. His writings have appeared in The New York Press and The Stranger. This excerpt comprises the first ten pages of Daisy, a book which currently floats at around 80 pages but will soon (god and good drugs willing), when fleshed out, arranged, and combined with other assorted poems, will fill up a 200 pages book entitled Word Playground. Look for it at stores near you in the future.
Lee R. Haven
Lee R. Haven was born in New York but moved to Savannah in the third grade. A graduate of Savannah State College, he has worked as a cab driver, a U.S. Census counter, an insurance salesman, an educator and, for the past ten years, as a journalist. After working for four years as a staff writer for the Savannah News-Press, where he won the Georgia Press Association award for column writing, he moved to Atlanta to edit the Atlanta News Leader and the Atlanta Metro. His poems and short stories have been published in regional magazines. He currently does freelance writing in Atlanta where he lives with his wife. He is the father of two children and a grandfather of one.
Matt Cutugno
Matt Cutugno was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and educated at Penn State and Florida State Universites. For thirteen years he lived in Manhattan's east village and was an oft-produced playwright, both in New York and Los Angeles. He is a member of the Italian American Writer's Association, and several of his short stories have been published in Words, the fiction journal of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Matt and his wife, Chun Fang Lai, live in South Orange, New Jersey.
Richard Manton
Richard Manton is the author of many books written in the style of the Victorian era, including Bombay Bound, Deep South, and La Vie Parisienne. He is an expert on literature from that time period, with a focus on Charles Carrington, publisher and author (published under various names and the possible author of Suburban Souls), who was exiled by the British Government. He is the editor of The Victorian Imagination, published by Grove Press (1984) which includes his essay, Charles Carrington - The Man and His Books. Manton currenly lives in England.
James G. Ballard
James G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930. Susan Sontag refered to him as "one of the most important, intelligent voices in contemporary fiction." He is the author of many novels, including High-Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island. Empire of the Sun, which is based on Ballard's childhood experiences during the Second World War, was nominated for Britain's premier fiction award, The Booker Prize. His novel, The Unlimited Dream Company, was selected by Anthony Burgess in 99 Novels as one of the best English novels since 1939. Ballard now lives in Shepperton, England.
Alfred Jarry
Alfred Jarry, "eccentric to the point of mania and lucid to the point of hallucination", became the focal point of both outrage and awe during the riot which accompanied the 1896 opening of Ubu Roi , his obscene play based on and starring Pere Ubu, a malicious characterization of his pigheaded high school mathematics teacher turned politician, Felix-Federic Hebert. Through Pere Ubu Jarry discovered the "science of 'Pataphysics" and attributed it to a new personage, Dr. Faustroll, a calm and collected science fiction style adventurer in Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. In the variety of novels, poems, dramas, and speculative texts that make up Jarry's bibliography, he continued to find new ways to elaborate and apply his 'Pataphysics. Demonstrating that literature was not the extent of its application, Jarry himself began to emulate the ugly Pere Ubu. This particular behavior included drinking, hallucinating, shouting orders and cuss-words at friends, refering to himself in the third-person, and threatening pedestrians with pistols. It was the drinking that he died of on All Saint's Day, 1907. His other works include, Supermale, Visits of Love, and Ceasar Antichrist.
Benjamin Ivry
Benjamin Ivry is author of a new poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises Press) a sample of which may be consulted on www.poems.com. The book has been praised by Muriel Spark and Richard Howard and has been positively reviewed in Publishers Weekly and the Lambda Book Report. It contains poems that first appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Spectator, Ambit Magazine, and The New Republic. Ivry has also translated a book of poems from the Polish in collaboration with Renata Gorczynski, "Canvas" written by A, Zagajewski (Farrar Straus & Giroux/ Faber and Faber). These poetry translations won the Pushcart Prize and were first printed in, among other places, the London Times Literary Supplement and Antaeus. He is author of biographies of Francis Poulenc (Phaidon Press), Arthur Rimbaud (Absolute Press/Stewart Tabori and Chang) and Maurice Ravel (Everyman/ Knopf, forthcoming). He also translates from the French (Albert Camus: a Life/ Knopf). Ivry is a New York-based writer on the arts, broadcaster and lecturer.
Michael O'Donoghue
Michael O'Donoghue was a frequent contributor to Evergreen Review. He was an author, playwright and filmmaker. He was a major writer at National Lampoon as well as one of the original writers at Saturday Night Live and creator of some of its funniest black comedy sketches. He also occasionally appeared on camera, on sketches like Mr. Mike's Least Loved Bedtime Stories. His 1979 television special Mr. Mike's Mondo Video was dropped because of censorship concerns and became a theatrical film instead. Michael O'Donoghue died in 1994.
Aric Allen
Aric Allen is a poet raised in the suburbs of NYC and Washington. He has spent the last decade floating from L.A. to Arizona to New Orleans to Portland where he used Kinko's xerox machines to mix text and found images. Having recently acquired a scanner and Photoshop he has begun to publish his material on the web. Currently he is living in Boulder, Colorado where he is working the graveyard shift at Amoco.
Akbar Del Piombo
Akbar Del Piombo was the pen-name of Norman Rubington. An American painter in Paris on the GI Bill, Rubington was a major part of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, authoring eight books for the press. He also co-translated Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans lé Metro into English with Eric Kahane and illustrated The Olympia Reader, published by Grove Press and then by Foxrock Books, from which this piece is taken.
