Christine Hume was born in 1968 and has lived in sixteen different States and countries. She is the author of three books and a chapbook: Musca Domestica (Beacon Press 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize; Alaskaphrenia (New Issues 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense, a chapbook and CD (Ugly Duckling Presse 2007) ; and most recently Shot (Counterpath Press 2009). Lux Books in Berlin will issue a bilingual Selected Poems in 2010.

Her work has been translated into German, Dutch, and Slovenian. In 2002, she was one of two Americans invited to an international festival, “Days of Poetry and Wine” in Slovenia; in 2006, she taught a poetry workshop in St. Petersburg for Summer Literary Seminars. The Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, Valaparisio Foundation in Spain, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire have awarded her residencies.

Her work has been included in anthologies such as Best American Poetry 1997 (Scribner), American Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon 2000), No Crossing Guards (University of Iowa 2004), Isn’t It Romantic? (Verse 2004), The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse 2005), and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande 2006), Not For Mothers Only (Fence 2007), 12x12 (University of Georgia, 2008), and Best of Fence (Fence 2009). She has written reviews and critical essays for a number of journals--Contemporary Literature, Rain Taxi, Chicago Review, Constant Critic--as well as for the American Poets in the 21st Century series (three volumes by Wesleyan 2002; 2006; 2009).

The range of Carla Harryman's work includes essays, fiction, poetry, performance writing and plays. Adorno's Noise (2008) is a collection of experimental and conceptual essays that investigate "noise," poetry,  visual art, philosophy, political existence, and personal experience. She has published two novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: After Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) and numerous volumes of innovative poetry and prose. These include the long poem Open Box, Improvisations (2007) and Bab

y (2005), a collection in prose and poetry that features the sensual world and critical perspectives of a maverick baby. She has also published two volumes of selected writings: There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995) and Animal Instincts: Prose Plays Essays (1989). Her most recent writing  project is The Grand Piano, a collective autobiography in ten volumes by ten writers identified with the rise of Language Poetry in the Bay Area. She has also published a full-length play (Memory Play, 1994) and written a number of articles on poets' performances and on contemporary innovative writing by women. In 2006 she co-edited Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker.  A frequent interdisciplinary collaborator, she was co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1980-1986) and has written, produced, performed, co-directed and directed many works of interdisciplinary performance.  Recent productions include three distinct presentations of bilingual performances of her Mirror Play at the University of Montreal (2006), at "Music Unlimited 2005" in Wels, Austria, and at the Hölderlinturm in Tübigen, Germany (2005); three evenings of Poets Theater performances at Links Hall in Chicago with works by Kathy Acker, Barrett Watten, Frank O'Hara, and herself; and new stagings of her plays Third Man (Poets Theater Jubilee, San Francisco, 2008) and Memory Play (Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2008).  She has received numerous grants and awards including a Foundation for Contemporary Art Award (2004-05). Her work is widely anthologized and has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Danish, and Serbian. A native Californian, she has spent much of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived in the Detroit area since 1995.

Rob Halpern is the author of two books of poems, Rumored Place(Krupskaya 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), as well as several chapbooks, including Weak Link (Slack Buddha 2009) and Imaginary Politics (TapRoot Editions 2008). His new project, Music for Porn, is forthcoming next year (Nightboat Books). With Taylor Brady, he also co-authored the book length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus/Finch 2007), soon to be reissued by Displaced Press in an expanded edition.

In his poetry, Halpern's writing activates a lyric voice shot-through with linguistic debris and media fallout. In the confusion of our current geo-political conflicts, his poems make the fatal abstractions of crisis audible—finance, militarization, war—by implicating the lyric voice in the materialization of those abstractions. The short lyric poems that comprise Disaster Suites, for example, formally register the rhythms and affects of everyday life—longing and rage, lust and disgust—as they collide with the representations of many devastating events, from Hurricane Katrina to the war in Iraq.

In addition to writing poetry, Halpern is an essayist and a translator, as well as a scholar of modern culture and contemporary writing. His essay on Baudelaire's prose poems recently appeared in Modernist Cultures. A new essay entitled “Realism and Utopia: Writing, Sex, and Politics in New Narrative” will appear in Journal of Narrative Theory. Currently, he’s co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer, together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the second of which, “Commitment or the Crisis of Language,” can be found in the Review of Contemporary Fiction with an essay of his own on Perec.

His poetry and narratives also appear in a range of reviews, anthologies, zines, and journals. Most recently these include: The Poetic Front, The Swan’s Rag, Chicago Review, Bay Poetics, James White Review, Galatea Resurrects, Abraham Lincoln, P-Queue, Gam, Submodern Fiction, EOAGH, War and Peace, Switchback, Crayon, /nor, Vanitas, Little Red Leaves, West Wind Review, Aufgabe, Wheelhouse, Try!, and New American Writing. His essays can be found in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books), No Gender: The Work of kari edwards(Belladonna / Litmus Press, 2009), ON: Contemporary Practice, andJacket Magazine. Audio files of Halpern’s readings and talks are archived at PennSound.

Halpern received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2006), where he wrote a dissertation on the prehistory of literary modernism in nineteenth-century France. He’s held faculty positions at Bard College, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco University. He's also an active participant in the Nonsite Collective, whose commitment to self-organized pedagogy and collaboration across disciplines models some of the outreach and community work we seek to initiate in our program.