“My work is about looking at where performance lives in people’s lives. I have always loved the idea of recipe cards and have a modest collection of vintage cards from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. At first I was drawn to them because of the wonderful food photos, and because of the implications of how women lived their lives in years past. After a while I began to think of them not as cooking instructions but as miniature plays intended for you to perform yourself, in your own home. One side of a recipe card is the recipe and the other is the image of the food that the recipe makes possible; another way to imagine them is that the recipe side is a series of performance instructions you must follow in your own kitchen, and the image side is the set, an idealized representation of the successful staging of the text. I decided to commission my own series of recipe plays, inviting 31 writers to create their own performance instructions in a recipe format. And, just as recipe cards are even to this day disseminated in such magazines as Martha Stewart Living and Ladies’ Home Journal, the cards are inserted in the magazine, perforated and detachable, waiting to be staged.” —Suzanne Bocanegra
CONTRIBUTORS:
Kim Rosenfield is a New York-based writer, poet, and psychotherapist. Her latest book, re:evolution, was released in February 2009. Good Morning-Midnight, Rosenfield’s 2001 release, won Small Press Traffic’s 2001 Book of the Year Award. She has collaborated with visual artists Jean Foos, Cheryl Donegan, Yedda Morrison, and with choreographer Sally Silvers.
Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of nine books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which provided the foundation for Trans-Warhol, an opera that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. He is the host of a weekly radio show on New York City’s WFMU and teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professor at Princeton University for 2010.
Monica de la Torre is the author of Talk Shows (2007) and Public Domain (2008), in addition to being the co-author of Appendices, Illustrations, and Notes with the artist Terence Gower and co-editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. She edited and translated Poems by Gerardo Deniz, and has translated the works of various other Spanish-language poets. Born and raised in Mexico City, she moved to New York in 1993, where she has been the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail since 2001 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish Literature at Columbia University.
Bob Holman is a poet and poetry activist who has been instrumental in the development of slam culture in New York City, having helped reopen the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1987 and served as its original slammaster. In 2002, he founded the Bowery Poetry Club, where he continues to be the proprietor and occasional host. He is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and at New York University.
Jena Osman’s collections of poems include An Essay in AsterisksThe Character, which won the 1998 Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize. Her book The Network was a 2009 winner of the National Poetry Series and will be published in the fall of this year. Osman received a 2006 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fund for Poetry. She currently teaches seminars on creative writing, contemporary poetry, and poetics at Temple University.
Suzanne Snider lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Believer, Tokion, Legal Affairs, Columbia, and the Oklahoma Review. She pseudonymously published a book with Grove Press in 2004 and has worked as an oral historian and interviewer for the New York Academy of Medicine, HBO Productions, The Guardian, Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office, the Newtown Creek Health and Harms Narrative Project, and the Judd Foundation. She teaches nonfiction/documentary at the New School, and is finishing up a book about a divided commune.
Charles Bernstein is one of the most prominent of the Language poets and holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His next work, titled All the Whiskey in Heaven, will be published this spring by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (2006), La Medusa (2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, which she wrote with Robert Fitterman. She will release a nonfiction book, titled The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, in the near future, in addition to her trilogy Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument.
Robert Fitterman is the author of ten books of poetry. His Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon New American Poetry Award in 2000 and Metropolis 16-29 received the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2003. With Rodrigo Rey Rosa, he co-authored the film What Sebastian Dreamt, which was part of the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and the 2004 Lincoln Center LatinBeat Festival. He is a full-time faculty member in New York University’s creative writing program and also teaches poetry at the Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies at Bard College.
Dare Clubb is an associate professor of playwriting at the University of Iowa. He has taught playwriting at Princeton University, Barnard College, and the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English at Middlebury College. He was playwright-in-residence at the Juilliard School from 1985 to 1987. His plays have been performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Juilliard, and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. His original play Oedipus received an Obie in 1999.
Jennifer Moxley is the author of Clampdown (2009), The Middle Room (2008), The Line (2007), and three other books. She has published multiple chapbooks of poetry and has translated two books by the French poet and scholar Jacqueline Risset. She teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.
Elena Rivera was born in Mexico City and grew up in Paris. She is the author of Mistakes, Accidents, and the Want of Liberty (2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (2005), Unknowne Land (2000), Wale; or, the Corse (1995) and a pamphlet titled Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (2005). She is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her translation of poems by Bernard Noel and was awarded a residency at the Fundacion Valparaiso in southern Spain in 2009.
Nada Gordon is the author of Folly, V. Imp., Swoon (with Gary Sullivan), Foreign Body, and Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker Than Night-Swollen Mushrooms. She lives and works in Brooklyn and coordinates the Certificate of English Proficiency Program at Pratt Institute.
Diana Hamilton lives and works in Brooklyn. She has published two collections of her works, Cat Eats (2007) and Soft Snap (+ Other Salutations) (2008).
Christopher Renino is the author of a novel (The Way Home Is Longer), texts for dance pieces by Susan Marshall & Company (The Most Dangerous Room in the House and One and Only You), and articles that have appeared in Shakespeare Magazine, English Journal and other publications.
Stuart Krimko was born in Great Neck, NY and was the Director of Exhibitions at Max Protetch Gallery for several years. In 2006, he received a grant from the Fund for Poetry for Not That Light. He has recently moved to Los Angeles, where he is working on a novel tentatively titled I Died So Far East It Was West, in addition to translations of the works of Argentinean writers Osvaldo Lamborghini and Hector Viel Temperly. Krimko also writes about art and wine and serves as the food and wine editor for Embury Cocktails.
Kyle DeCamp is an adjunct lecturer at Barnard who has developed a unique body of work via research, creation, touring and teaching in the world of experimental performance. Her interdisciplinary theatre works have been produced in New York City at the Kitchen, PS 122, Creative Time, Dance Theatre Workshop, St. Marks Danspace, and Artists Space. Her current project, Urban Renewal, is in development for production at PS 122. She has collaborated and performed with many artists in theatre, dance, performance, film, sound and media including Todd Haynes, Sheila McLaughlin, Chris Kondek, and the Builders Association, among many others.
Quang Bao is a writer whose fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Threepenny Review, NPR, Open City, and The New York Times, and various other publications. Until 2008, he served as the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Jean-Philippe Antoine is a philosopher and artist who teaches aesthetics at the Jean Moulin-Lyon 3 University in France. His work focuses on the relationship between image, memory, and the modern status of art. He has published several books, including Gerhard Richter: Landscapes and La traversée du XXe siècle: Joseph Beuys, Image, Mémoire.
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez is a reporter for Southern California Public Radio who focuses on education and the arts. He has been the recipient of the LA Press Club Radio Journalist of the Year award and the Edward R. Murrow and Ruben Salazar awards. In 1994, he co-founded the performance group The Taco Shop Poets, and his poetry was included in Geography of Rage, an anthology about the L.A. riots, and Chorizo Tonguefire.
Charlotte Meehan is a playwright-in-residence and associate professor of English at Wheaton College (MA). She was a 2008-09 Howard Foundation Fellow in playwriting and recently completed a new play, titled 27 Tips for Banishing the Blues. Previous stage works have included a multimedia play, Sweet Disaster, and other works that have been developed and produced at New York City’s Flea Theatre, the Culture Project, Dixon Place, and Pratt Institute, among others. She is currently working on a memoir, a mytho-poetic, online collaboration with Sarah Gambito, and a sculptural installation with Holly Laws.
Judith Goldman is a collegiate assistant professor in the humanities at the University of Chicago. She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation for publication, titled Visible Hand: “System,” Method, and Suasion in the Human Natural Science of Adam Smith. She is the author of two books of poetry, Vocoder (2001) and DeathStar/Rico-chet (2006), and the co-editor of War and Peace, a yearly anthology of experimental writing against the war.
Melissa James Gibson is a playwright who is currently working on commissions for the La Jolla Playhouse and the Adirondack Theatre Festival. She has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and won an Obie in 2002 for playwriting.
John Jesurun is a writer, director, and multimedia artist who lives and works in New York City. His work Chang in a Void Moon is a live serial running since 1983. Since 1984 he has written, directed, and designed more than 25 pieces.
Rachel Cohen has been choreographing and performing in New York City since 1997. She created racoco productions in 2003. In 2008, Ms. Cohen was invited give a presentation on her work with dance and clay at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Museum School. She also performed in a two-day workshop exploring the intersection of dance and clay with dancer Christine Dakin and potter and writer Paulus Berensohn at Harvard University. In 2007, Ms. Cohen was a resident artist at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Arts Institute, with clay artist Patty Rosenblatt.
Cathy Park Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong has also been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. She lives in New York City and is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.
Jocelyn Saidenberg is the author of Mortal City and CUSP, which was the winner of the Frances Jaffer Book Award and a grant from the Academy of American Poets. In 1998, she founded KRUPSKAYA Books. She has been the director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, a creative writing teacher in the California prison system, and a curator for New Langton Arts.
Barry Schwabsky has been the art critic for The Nation since 2005. His essays have appeared in many other publications, including Flash Art (Milan), Artforum, the London Review of Books and Art in America. His books include The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art, Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting and several volumes of poetry, the most recent being Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail).
John Haskell is the author of two novels, American Purgatorio and Out of My Skin, in addition to the story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock. He lives and works in New York City.
Mark Dow was a 2010 finalist in the New Issues Poetry manuscript competition. He is author of American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons (California, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, PN Review (UK), SLAM! Wrestling, and on killingthebuddha.com.
John Yau is a poet and critic who lives in New York City. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism. His most recent books are Exhibits (2010), A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2009), and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (2006). He has been the Arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail since March 2004 and currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.