SMALL TIME Participants
Winter 2018
Alex Baker grew up in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco, and studied food access and creative writing in New York. The past year she has been working at a wood-fired bread bakery in Brooksville, Maine. Currently, she is based in Oaxaca City and Mexico City, and attended a multi-disciplinary artist residency, investigating water.
Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015) a book-length lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma that’s been praised by the Kenyon Review, Feministing, and the Huffington Post. She’s contributed to anthologies including Feast (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness (Uprooted, 2015); her submission won the Uprooted Essay Contest. Her writing has been published on websites including the VIDA blog, Dusie, and ENDPAIN, and in print journals including Sparkle + Blink, Model Homes, and Explosion-Proof. In 2014, she was the inaugural Writer in Residence at Alley Cat Bookstore & Gallery in San Francisco; she is now the volunteer administrator of the residency program. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Writing Award. Passionate about fostering community, Berkowitz hosts a bimonthly reading series called Amy’s Kitchen Organics and co-organizes events such as 2016’s Sick Fest, a day of performances by chronically ill and disabled writers and artists. Additionally, she’s the founding editor of Mondo Bummer Books, an experimental small press. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s working on her second book. More at amyberko.com.
Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is the author of the books Letters to Kelly Clarkson (a Lambda Literary Award finalist) and Valley Fever, and of the recent chapbooks Hollywood Forever and Like Fur. She has recently published essays and reviews in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and The Volta and poems in Supplement, The Sonnets: Rewriting Shakespeare, Dusie, and Bedfellows. Her poem on ovulatory time and environmental crisis is forthcoming in the Wesleyan anthology Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene. She received her MFA in poetry at Mills College and her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Bard College and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship, an unrestricted $75,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage that recognizes ongoing generative potential for creative excellence and supports artists who “think ambitiously and innovate boldly.” Her other honors include: Finalist, Omnidawn Poetry Prize (2013); William Carlos Williams Prize from the Academy of American Poets (2006); Finalist, Bakeless Prize (2004); Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation (2003); Finalist, California Voices Award, (2003); Mary Journal Poetry Award from Saint Mary’s College (2003); Semi-finalist, Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation Fellowship, 2002); Alumnae Scholarship in poetry, Mills College (2001). She lives in Philadelphia, where she works as Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania and as Coeditor of Jacket2.
Marisa Crawford is a New York-based writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections Reversible (2017) and The Haunted House (2010) from Switchback Books, and the chapbooks Big Brown Bag (Gazing Grain) and 8th Grade Hippie Chic (Immaculate Disciples). Her poetry has appeared in publications including Prelude, Bone Bouquet, Glittermob, and No, Dear, and she's written about feminism, art, and pop culture for Hyperallergic, BUST, Bitch, Broadly, The Hairpin, and elsewhere. Marisa is the founder and editor-in-chief of Weird Sister, a website and organization that explores the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture.
Whitney DeVos was born and raised in Southern California, where she attended Pomona College. Afterwards, she received an MFA from the University of Arizona, where she was co Editor in Chief of Sonora Review. She is currently a PhD student, with a creative/critical concentration, at UC Santa Cruz, where she studies documentary and investigative poetics in North, Central, and South America. Her poems have appeared in Spork, elimae, South East Review, Whiskey Island, lo-ball, & elsewhere.
Timo Fahler was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1977 and lives and works in Los Angeles where he co-runs the artist-run space BBQLA. Recent exhibitions include forward, ltd Los Angeles and A most imperfect understanding, A most slanted manner, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA. His collaboration with Rafa Esparza at Club Pro Los Angeles, titled In, received critical acclaim and their primary work from the exhibition has been brought in for a special installation at Art Contemporary Los Angeles.
Garin Hay writes poetry and criticism about human and nonhuman ecologies, persistent or nascent human affects, predividual and individual aspects of perception and thought, capitalism and its others, language and its uses, and material and energetic culture. Hay earned an MFA in poetry at Mills College in 2015, serving as the poetry editor of the Mills graduate literary journal, 580 Split, for the 2014-205 issue. Hay currently resides in Oakland, California.
Kamala Puligandla is a fiction writer who lives in Oakland. She has earned many distinctions in her day, including Most Likely to Be Bribed With a Snack to Walk Up a Hill, and Best Impression of Robin Williams’ Hotdog Impression. She earned a BA in Creative Writing at Oberlin College and her MFA at UC Riverside. Her work has been featured in The James Franco Review, The Establishment, The Tusk, and is included in Loose Lips, the show anthology of Shipwreck SF. She has attended residencies and workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, The Vermont Studio Centers, and The Home School. She is currently collaborating on an experimental audio art project with Nicole Kelly and Phoebe Unter.
Angela Roberts lives and works in Oakland. She is a cello improvisor, writer, and performer whose work explores the intersection of text and sound. She is currently active in the Bay Area noise and improvisation scene as cellist and publishes a zine called Supertrooper. Angela's work has been exhibited in performed in Seoul, Chiang Mai, Brussels, and various bars, basements, and community centers in the US.
Matt Rohrer is the author two poetry chapbooks, Probability of Dependent Events, (Beard of Bees, Chicago, 2011), and The Shredders (Mondo Bummer Books, San Francisco, 2015) explore adolescence and young adulthood through the lens of the teenager as well as the high school teacher as well as a shared cultural experiences and rites of passage for teenage boys including drug experimentation, nascent sexuality, violence, self harm, skateboarding and graffiti communities.
Jocelyn Saidenberg is a writer, educator, and performer based in the Bay Area. Her books include: Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series, 1998), Cusp (Kelsey St. Press, 2001), Negativity (Atelos Press, 2007), Dead Letter (Roof Books, 2014), in addition to three chapbooks, Dusky, Dispossessed, and Shipwreck. kith & kin is forthcoming spring 2018 from The Elephants. Her work has been published in several journals and anthology such as SFMoMA Open Space, The Encyclopedia Project, and Bay Poetics. Since 1998 she has worked as the founding editor and publisher for Krupskaya Press, with 39 titles circulating to date, and has curated literary events through Bay Area arts organizations for over fifteen years. She teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley and the Prison University Project at San Quentin.
Lara Schoorl is a writer and art historian from the Netherlands and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she runs Close Distance Journal (forthcoming January 2018) and co-runs Meatgrinder, a teen art and social communion. Her writing vacillates between poetry and essay-style texts with an academic undertone, focuses on process rather than a finished product, and concerns a discourse on representation and meaning making, by way of text or visual art mostly. Often, she writes alongside the voices of others, incorporating ways and words of saying things differently than her own but which sometimes resonate more with her. It is because the difficulty of translation from thought or feeling to word, and being between two and sometimes more languages that she writes; being allowed to be in between instead of at the beginning or end of something never fully whole but always moving. She is influenced by C.D. Wright, Clarice Lispector, Mieke Bal, Cecilia Vicuña, Ai, Quinn Latimer and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev among others. Schoorl holds a bachelor in Art History from the University of Amsterdam, a master of Arts and Cultural Sciences also from the University of Amsterdam and a master in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the co-author of the end of may (2016, Untitled Art Society) and the editor of Institutional Garbage (forthcoming in 2018 from the Green Lantern Press). You can find her most recent writing on The University of Arizona Poetry Blog 1508, at the Los Angeles Review of Books, in fall issue of FOUNDATIONS Magazine.
Bitchface, the podcast and experimental audio project created by Nicole Kelly and Phoebe Unter, explores their obsessions and is a coping mechanism that reflects their constant rage. It has explored relationship anarchy & platonic intimacy, blackness shaped in proximity to whiteness, and protagonism as propaganda. Bitchface is queer and multicultural, and it’s full of smart, funny, creative, radical women.
Nicole Kelly received her MFA from the Programs In Writing at UC Irvine, has published literary fiction in ZZYZZVA, Fiction Southeast, Best Small Fictions 2016, and elsewhere, and has performed in SORORITY and at other venues. She is a 2013 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow at the Center for African-American Fiction. Phoebe Unter is a freelance graphic designer, visual artist, digital producer at American Public Media’s Marketplace and graduate of USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In winter 2017, after their Intersectional Brunch before the Women’s March went viral, Phoebe & NK received a programming residency at the Women’s Center for Creative Work. Under the name Intersectionality NOW, they produced 14 weeks of programming about feminist coalition building and organizing. They also published 8 zines (written by NK, designed by & Phoebe) including Solidarity Is Still For White Women & You Are Not An Intersectional Feminist. They documented the residency via a newsletter called Feminist Pizza.
Ari Vargas is a latinx diasporic writer, performer and community organizer. Her artistic practices and social engagements are rooted in her identities as a young Peruvian lesbian migrant of mixed ancestry coming from a mixed-documented status family and her ultimate belief in collective liberation. Her community and student organizing work exists in the expansive realms of hosting multi-generational dialogues and supporting fellow activists on campus through hosting socially engaged art showcases. Moreover, she is in the process of creating the first archive for UC Berkeley’s Multicultural Community Center, where she also functions as head librarian. As librarian, she has brought poets such as Aja Monet and Alan Pelaez Lopez to perform and has begun a Black & Brown writer’s room series. She has exhibited poetry and performances at Good Mother Gallery in Oakland, UC Berkeley’s Maude Fife Room, the UC Berkeley Multicultural Community Center, as well as at SOMARTS’ Night Light 2017, curated by Karen Seneferu and Melorra Green. She has been published in Yes Poetry, where she was the October poet of the Month. She recently completed her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on postcolonial literatures and lesbian/queer visual culture. While at student at Berkeley, she had the privilege to learn from artists Philip Gotanda, Mary Szybist, Anna Moschovakis and Asma Kazmi.