Faculty
Director
Amaranth Borsuk
Amaranth Borsuk, Associate Director, is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater and Handiwork. She works at the intersection of print and digital media with an emphasis on artists’ books, installation and digital/ print hybrids. Her collaborative books include Abra, an artist’s book and iOS app created with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher; As We Know, an erasure collaboration with Andy Fitch; and Between Page and Screen, a book of augmented-reality poems, created with Brad Bouse. Her recently published volume The Book, from MIT Press, traces the interrelationship of form and content in the book’s development, bridging book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.
Amaranth Borsuk’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Hong, Cathy Park. Dance Dance Revolution. New York: W.W. Northon, 2007. Print.
- Kearney, Douglas. Patter. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2014. Print.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1962. Print.
- Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. New York: Claire Marie, 1914. Print.
- Strickland, Stephanie. V: WaveTercets / Losing L’una. Denver: SpringGun Press, 2014. Print and iOS app.
Faculty
Anida Yoeu Ali
Anida Yoeu Ali, Senior Artist-in-Residence, is an artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Raised in Chicago and born in Cambodia, she is a woman of mixed heritage with Malay, Cham, Khmer and Thai ancestry. Her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali’s artworks have agitated the White House (My Asian Americana, 2012), been attacked by anonymous vandals (1700% Project, 2010), and censored by Vietnam’s “culture” police (Pushing Thru Borders, 2003). From The Buddhist Bug (2009-2015) series to her anti-deportation videos with Studio Revolt, her interest with otherness and displacement informs her art and praxis. Ali’s pioneering poetry work with the critically acclaimed performance group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Her works are published in Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality, Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence, Troubling Borders, Queering Asian American Art, and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work.
Anida Yoeu Ali’s Faculty Profile
Recommended reading
- Ono, Yoko. Grapefruit, 1971.
- Lewallen, Constance. The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 2001.
- Hammad, Suheir. Born Palestinian, Born Black, 2010.
- Rich, Adrienne. An Atlas of the Difficult World, 1991.
- Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, 1984.
Naomi Macalalad Bragin
I am a dancer, writer and performance ethnographer. My forthcoming book, Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics, blends history, poetry, creative non-fiction and ethnography, to tell stories of extraordinary dances invented by everyday youth living in 1970s California. My writing is published in TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, Women & Performance, Tropics of Meta and the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance, and has won awards from Congress on Research in Dance and American Society for Theatre Research. My writing is deeply informed by my dance practice and early training as a classical violinist in Los Angeles. I founded a nationally touring streetdance company DREAM and produced cultural events throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. My current performance project is Little Brown Language, a dance-incantation which combines song, dance and ritual, to dream my ancestors’ stories, in and beyond the Philippines. I also co-organize with Professor Ali the annual Critical Acts Artist Residency and Alive! student performance festival.
Naomi Macalalad Bragin’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (1969-1980), 1987.
- Laymon, Kiese. Heavy: An American Memoir, 2018
- Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
- brown, adrienne maree. Pleasure Activism, 2019.
- Sword, Helen. “The Writer’s Diet”
Ching-In Chen
Ching-In Chen, Assistant Professor, is a hybrid writer, community organizer and performer. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; recombinant, which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and to make black paper sing. Their forthcoming Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters was a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance. Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Callaloo, Can Serrat, Storyknife and Imagining America and are a member of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation communities.
Ching-In Chen’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. Markham, ON: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002. Print.
- Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas. Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2017. Print.
- Miranda, Deborah. Berkeley, CA: Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday, 2012. Print.
- Phillip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2011. Print.
- Salah, Trish. Wanting in Arabic. Toronto: Mawenzi House/TSAR Publications, 2013. Print.
Jeanne Heuving
Jeanne Heuving, Founding Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics and Professor, won a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award for her cross-genre work Incapacity; more recently she published Transducer, a book of poetry. She has written widely on innovative and experimental writing, including her books Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore and The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics. She is co-editing a forthcoming book of essays, Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry in an Expanded Field.
Jeanne Heuving’s faculty profile
Recommended reading
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.
- Dickinson, Emily. Ed. Cristanne Miller. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 2016.
- Lispector, Clarice, and Giovanni Pontiero. Near to the Wild Heart. New York: New Directions, 1990. Print.
- Mackey, Nathaniel. Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington: U of Kentucky, 1986. Print.
- Williams Carlos William. Spring and All. New York: Contact Publishing Co. 1923. Print.
Ted Hiebert
Ted Hiebert is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist and theorist. His individual and collaborative art works have been shown in galleries around the world. Hiebert is the author of In Praise of Nonsense: Aesthetics, Uncertainty and Postmodern Identity, A formalized forum for informal inquiry, and a co-author of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture. His work has appeared in journals such as Performance Research, The Psychoanalytic Review, CTheory, and Technoetic Arts, among others. Hiebert is a founding member of Noxious Sector Arts Collective, a member of the experimental theory group The Occulture, and a member of the editorial board of the journal CTheory.
Recommended reading
- Baudrillard, Jean. The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, Chris Turner, trans., London: Berg, 2005. Print.
- Golding, Sue. The Eight Technologies of Otherness, London: Routledge, 1997. Print.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
- Jarry, Alfred. Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician, Simon Watson Taylor, trans., Boston: Exact Change, 1996. Print.
- Kroker, Arthur. Exits to the Posthuman Future, Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Print.
Joe Milutis
Joe Milutis, Associate Professor, is a writer and media artist. He is the author of Failure, A Writer’s Life; Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, and “Bright Arrogance,” a column on experimental translation in Jacket 2 as well as numerous chapbooks, media-literary hybrid works, videos and sound pieces. His work has appeared in Fence, Gauss PDF, Cabinet, Tripple Canopy, Leonardo and Film Comment.
Former Faculty
Abe Avnisan
Abraham has presented and exhibited his work at the Libraries at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, the Vild med ORD literary festival in Aarhus, Denmark, the &NOW Conference of Innovative Writing, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), The Electronic Literature Organization conference, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Word Weekend event. His work has been published in the ISEA Symposium Proceedings, Stonecutter, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Drunken Boat, New Delta Review, and others. He is the recipient of the Rosen and Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Fellowship for Emerging Artists and The School of the Art Institute’s New Artists Society Merit Scholarship.
Aeron Bergman
Aeron Bergman works with Alejandra Salinas as an artist duo producing media, performance, internet, sound and sculptural works and objects in an interdisciplinary, conceptual yet socially engaged practice. Their work has been exhibited extensively internationally.
Rebecca Brown
Rebecca Brown has published over a dozen books in the U.S. and in translation. She has exhibited visual work in museums and has lectured, read, and performed widely. She collaborates frequently with actors, artists, dancers, and musicians and also curates events. Her books include American Romances, The Last Time I Saw You, The Dogs, The Gifts of the Body and The Terrible Girls. She writes regularly for The Stranger. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian and Italian and has received The Boston Book Review Award, Lambda Literary Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Washington State Book Award, and the Stranger Genius Award.
Sarah Dowling
Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Selections from her work Hinterland B appear in ‘I’ll Drown My Book’: Conceptual Writing by Women and other journals.
Alejandra Salinas
Alejandra Salinas works with Aeron Bergman as an artist duo producing media, performance, internet, sound and sculptural works and objects in an interdisciplinary, conceptual yet socially engaged practice. Their work has been exhibited extensively internationally.