Poetry | Prose | Visual Arts | Theater | Composing | Current Juries

Past Juries: 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Poetry Jury : 2007 Season

 

Serge Gavronsky is a poet, editor and translator living in New York City and in Paris. He was Chair of the French Department at Barnard, in which he still teaches, for 25 years. He is the author and editor of numerous books of poetry in French and English. He has translated—among other poets—Prevert, Cendrars, Ponge, Jacob, Fremon and Hocquard into English. Translations from English to French include the poets Oppen, Zukofsky and Padgett. He has published his own poetry in America and in France, and his novels in Italy and France. He has also edited several comprehensive volumes of French poetry in translation. His work has also been included in numerous anthologies and magazines in Europe and the United States.

Prageeta Sharma teaches in the creative writing program at the New School, and is faculty in the low-residency BA and (the newly-formed forthcoming) BFA program at Goddard College. She is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress), The Opening Question (Fence Books), winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Infamous Landscapes (forthcoming from Fence Books). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Rebecca Wolff is the author of two books of poems, Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004). She is the founding editor and publisher of the literary journal Fence and its publishing arm, Fence Books, as well as of The Constant Critic, a monthly poetry-review website. She teaches at the New School and was a Writer in Residence at the University of Idaho, Boise. Born and raised in New York City, she has relocated up the Hudson River as far as Athens with her husband, the novelist Ira Sher, and their two children, Asher and Margot.

Fiction/Non-Fiction Jury : 2007 Season

Joshua Furst is the author of Short People, a collection of stories. For many years, he worked in the theater as a director and playwright and his plays include Whimper, The Ellipse, Myn, and The Distant Cathedral, among others. A recipient of a Michener Fellowship and a Nelson Algren Award, he lives in New York, where he teaches at The Pratt Institute. His novel The Sabotage Cafe will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2007.
 

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003 and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003.

Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, GQ, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in Body Electric (Norton), From Poe to the Present: Great American Prose Poems (Scribner), and Isn't It Romantic? (Verse Press), among other compilations. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she edits her own magazine, Explosive, and serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence Magazine. Her honors and awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, fellowships from Yaddo (2001; 2004; 2005) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2005-2006), and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Program.

Marion Roach is a contemporary non-fiction writer whose work spans many fields of research. Her books include Another Name for Madness and The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair (2005). She is also the coauthor of Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers with Michael Baden, MD.

Along with her books, Roach's writing has also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Discover, Prevention, and Newsday. She also works as a professor at the Arts Center of the Capital Region and works as a commentator on National Public Radio on the show "All Things Considered." She is currently heard on Martha Stewart Living Radio Sirius 112 with her spot called "The Naturalist's Datebook". Daily, Marion has facts, websites, books, poems and more concerning nature and Naturalists. She starts each piece with the how many days of the year have elapsed since New Years, and quotes how many days since the new moon.

Jill Schoolman is the publisher and editor of Archipelago Books, a not-for-profit literary press based in Brooklyn. She founded Archipelago Books in 2003 after working with Seven Stories Press for four years in the editorial department. She graduated from Yale University with a BA in Literature in '92, and studied English literature at Oxford University in '89-'90. Her novel Down to the River was published by Philippe Hunt, Editeur in '97. She was selected to participate in editors' exchange programs in France, Germany, and Sweden. Archipelago Books is a non-profit press devoted to classic and contemporary international literature. Archipelago has published 27 titles to date and is supported by Lannan Foundation, NYSCA, the NEA, the International Institute of Modern Letters, among others.

Visual Arts Jury : 2007 Season

Eric Brown has been president and co-owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery since 1993. The gallery presents contemporary painting, works on paper, and photography from the New York School to the present. It exhibits 20th Century American artists including Nell Blaine, Joe Brainard, Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Dickinson, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell, along with a group of contemporary artists.

In 2001 Brown established the Tibor de Nagy Foundation, a not-for-profit dedicated to discovering and promoting writers and visual artists joined across disciplines. Its most recent publications include Postcards to Donald Evans by Takashi Hiraide, and Frank O'Hara: the Tibor de Nagy Editions, published this month.

Brown is currently a board member of the Flow Chart Foundation, a nonprofit organization started by poet John Ashbery, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. He has served as a Morgan Fellow at the Morgan Library, and as a board member of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, from which he graduated with a B.A. in art in 1990.

Judy Glantzman is a painter who has had solo exhibitions at galleries including New York City venues such as the Betty Cuningham Gallery, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, Gracie Mansion Gallery, P.S. 1, and Hirschl and Adler Modern in New York City and venues outside the City including the Carol Getz Gallery in Miami, Kuntsverein Anna in Anna, Germany, Hester Gallery in Amherst, MA and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Her work has also been in group exhibitions at venues including The Cleveland Museum of Art, Exit Art in New York City, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, Seibu Department Store in Tokyo, the Saide Bronfman Center in Montreal and the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina.

Her work is in the private collections at venues including Franklin Furnace Archives in New York City, the Frye Art Museum, in Seattle, the Grey Art Gallery in New York City, The Progressive Collection in Cleveland, OH, the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida and the Art Museum of the University of California at Santa Barbara in California.

Her awards and grants include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a grant from Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant.

Nicholas Kahn was born in New York City in 1964 and now divides his time between Coxsackie, N.Y. and Brooklyn, New York. Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick have been collaborating for over fifteen years on panoramic photographs, sculpture, video, painting, documentation and writing that blur the line between history and fiction in often unsettling ways. The worlds they sometimes inhabit include 1945 Siberia; 1936 Devon, England; Scotland sometime in the future after an apocalypse; and the Near East in a time between the wars and now.

During the filming of The Apollo Prophecies, Kahn had a very vivid dream that he was on the moon driving the lunar rover but was running out of oxygen quickly and had to return. He still maintains the rocks he returned with are from the moon.

Kahn & Selesnick's work is in public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, the L.A. County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Numerous solo exhibitions of their work have included shows at the Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, Focus Gallery London, Carl Hammer Gallery Chicago and Pepper Gallery Boston, MA. Their artists' books include The Apollo Prophecies and City of Salt, both from Aperture Press.

Born in Wuhan, China in 1963, Christophe W. Mao came to the United States in 1986. After graduating from Drexel University in 1993, he worked for several years as a financial analyst before deciding that his interests lay elsewhere. In 2000 he opened Chambers Fine Art in the Chelsea district of New York, focusing on classical Chinese furniture and contemporary Chinese art. Since 2003, however, recognizing that the contemporary side of his activities demanded his full attention, the gallery has concentrated on contemporary Chinese art. Exhibitions of such established figures as Lu Shengzhong and Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen have alternated with group shows of the work of younger artists organized by leading Chinese scholars and curators. In 2005 Mr. Mao was one of the sponsors of the first ever Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale curated by Cai Guo Qiang. Today he travels frequently in China and elsewhere in Asia and is recognized as one of the leading authorities in this rapidly growing field.

Frances Richard is a writer, editor, and educator. Her poems have appeared in journals including Conjunctions, The Boston Review, and The Brooklyn Rail; her book, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. As an art critic, Richard has contributed to magazines including Artforum, Bomb, and The London Review of Books, and to exhibition catalogues produced by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Creative Time, Inc., and Independent Curators International.

Four Way Books and See Through were awarded a 2002 Greenwall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; other awards include the 2000 Marlboro Prize in poetry, chosen by Brenda Hillman, and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Foundation. Richard is a member of the editorial team at Cabinet, a founding editor of the literary journal Fence, and teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005 she curated and edited, with Jeffey Kastner and Sina Najafi, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates." She lives in Brooklyn.

Theater Jury : 2007 Season

James Farrell is the author of plays including In the Recovery Lounge; Bing and Walker; Migrant Moon; Correspondence; A Believer in Those Things Which Cannot Be Proven to Be True; and Transplant. His plays have been produced at Circle Repertory Company in New York City; South Coast Repertory in Los Angeles; Northlight Theatre in Chicago; The Cleveland Playhouse; Jewish Repertory Theatre in New York City; Seattle Public Theatre; Theatre of the Riverside Church in New York City; City Theatre of Miami; City Playhouse in Los Angeles; Peterborough Players in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and Stageworks/Hudson Theatre Company in New York.

He has been a resident playwright at Circle Repertory Company in New York City and has served as Literary Manager for Circle Repertory and for the New York State Theatre Institute in Albany. Mr. Farrell is the recipient of a Drama League of New York Playwriting Grant and a New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant and has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, and the Sundance Playwrights Laboratory. He has also served as a script reader for the Royal Court Theatre in London and currently teaches Playwriting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program and at the University at Albany/SUNY. Mr. Farrell is an active member of The Dramatists Guild and of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas and is the resident Literary Advisor/Dramaturg at Stageworks/ Hudson Theatre Company in New York and a Playwright in Residence at the Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights Unit in New York City.

He lives in New York City and Stuyvesant, New York.

Patricia Ybarra received her B.A. from Columbia University in 1994 and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Theatre History and Criticism in 2002. She is a Ford Foundation Minority Fellow and a founding member of the Latino/a Focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Her recent and forthcoming publications include reviews, chapters, and articles in Text and Presentation, Gestos, Theatre Journal, The Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, and Theatre and Nationalism. Her area of specialization is theatre historiography of the Americas, with emphasis on the relationship between theatre, nationalism, and American identities in North America.

She is currently writing her first manuscript, Performing Conquest: Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico 1538-2003.

She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University. She is also a director, dramaturg and the former Managing Director of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

She lives in Providence, Rhode Island

Composing Jury : 2007 Season

Born in England, Andrew Massey has lived and worked in the USA since 1978, when he moved from London to Cleveland as the Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra. He was in Cleveland with Lorin Maazel for two years, during which time he conducted the Orchestra in Bruckner's 8th Symphony on short notice in the Brucknerhaus, in Linz, Austria. In 1980 he moved to New Orleans, and over the years has lived also in San Francisco, Rhode Island, Toledo OH, and the north of Vermont. He was Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the New Orleans Symphony, as well as Music Director of Orchestras in Providence, RI., Toledo OH, Fresno CA, Eugene, OR, Racine WI. Most recently he was Resident Conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony and splits his time between his Milwaukee apartment and the house in Vermont where his wife is a leader of the Mountain Fiber Folk co-operative.

As well as conducting many orchestras throughout the years, Andrew was already working as a composer before moving to the United States. Many of his early performances were of music for theater, including Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Shakespeare's King Lear and A midsummer Night's Dream. His cantata Marina was premiered in London on the south bank by the London Sinfonietta. After moving to the US, most of his time was occupied with conducting, but he has been spending more time on composing recently, completing the orchestral work Early Mourning in 2003, spending a month at the Millay Colony in 2004 and working on a variety of new pieces and writings. Early Mourning is due to be performed by the Munich Symphony next year, and his Violin Concerto, Another Spring—a companion piece to Vivaldi's Spring is to be premiered in Racine, WI on March 24th, 2007 with Merwin Siu as the soloist.

Sheila Silver has written in a wide range of mediums: from solo instrumental works to large orchestral works; from opera to feature film scores. Born in Seattle, Washington in 1946, Silver began piano studies at the age of five. Silver's compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the United States and Europe including: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the RAI Orchestra of Rome, the American Composers Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Stockton Sympony, the Chicago String Ensemble, the Richmond Symphony, the Illinois Symphony, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Hartford Chamber Orchestra, Alexander Paley, Gilbert Kalish, Timothy Eddy, the Guild Trio, Heidi Lehwalder and the Muir Quartet, and the Ying Quartet.

Ms. Silver's honors include: a Bunting Institute Fellowship; the Rome Prize; the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award; twice winner of the ISCM National Composers Competition; and awards and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Residency), the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, New York State Council of the Arts, the Barlow Foundation, the Paul Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cary Trust.

Her opera, The Thief of Love, A Lyric-Comic Opera in Three Acts, was featured in New York City Opera's Showcasing American Composers, May 2000 and received its fully staged world premiere in March 2001 by the Stony Brook Opera with David Lawton, conductor, Ned Canty, director, and sets by Phillip Baldwin. A film of that production will be released shortly by Hummingbird Films.

Sheila Silver lives in Spencertown, New York, with her husband, film writer and director, John Feldman, and their son, Victor Feldman. Silver is Professor of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her music is published by MMB Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels.

Albin Zak is Chair of the Music Department at the University at Albany (SUNY). He holds degrees in composition and performance from the New England Conservatory and a Ph.D. in musicology from the City University of New York. His research specialties are popular music studies (especially post-1945 repertories) and the history of technology. He is the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (University of California Press), and editor of The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (Schirmer). He is currently working on a book entitled "I Don't Sound Like Nobody": Remaking Music in 1950s America (University of Michigan Press). He is active as a songwriter, performer, and record producer. His most recent album of songs is entitled An Average Day (Insatiable Records).