This special issue of Aster(ix) has evolved. When Angie, Marta, Saretta and Jenelle brought us together, the plan was to solicit work in a variety of forms—per Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson’s unique modernist aesthetics (inseparable from the pair’s collaborative editorial method). Everything more or less went according to plan (sans, regrettably, Heap and Anderson’s signature swinging divan), but, in a curious twist of fate, our attentions became concentrated in the poetic. To put it bluntly, this issue has become all poetry. One hypothesis—a provocation— to explain our focus: The issue has become all poetry in the early twenty-first century because the absorptive genre has retained and fine-tuned its capacity to assume the shape of any and all other genres with which it comes in contact. Thoughts? Affirmations? Repudiations?
Vidhu Aggarwal: At various points, I have made a temporary move away from poetry in favor of other genres such as science fiction, but I keep coming back to poetry as a pivot into mediums such as pulp fiction, Bollywood movies, and video games. My own poetic practice involves multi-media combos, such as visual collage, video, photography, and performance. I have also collaborated with graphic artists, choreographers, and sound artists in making poems. The very permeability of poetry allows me to settle, if only briefly, into these alternative spaces. Lately I’ve been meditating on poetic forms as “clouds” that can grow, dissipate, descend, ascend, penetrate, be penetrated, be digital, be deus ex machina, be epic, be lyric, be archive, be monstrous, be almost transparent. The mobility of poetry is a stealth trick in an atmospheric package. Think of Wordsworth’s lyric, lonely wandering in a dispersed, ephemeral cloud unit. In conceptualizing a “cloud poetics,” I’ve been reading Tung-Hui Hu’s book The Prehistory of the Cloud, an examination of the metaphor of the “cloud” for the networked, amorphous, decentered spaces for our online activities, archives, and ghostly footprints. How does the poem function as an expanding, dissipating, non-sovereign, intra-penetrable archive? What enters and exits a poem over time? “Locust Formation,” a poem I started many years ago, has undergone numerous permutations, begun as an approach to Martha Graham’s choreography, and may evolve into other vaporous transformations.
Raquel Gutiérrez: Poetry is taking me to a space of alliteration as my proclivity for poetry lies in its porous promiscuity. It’s possibility to spill my truth in all of its slippage right off the page. Poetry is a performance. It’s not like I can push my hand through the space-time continuum and meet the histories I speak of that help and hinder my ability to fully avow my shadow. And yet poetry might be where it does something that looks like the ignition of a history otherwise left dormant in the libraries we don’t frequent enough or the JSTOR vaults we can’t access. The absorptive genre, poetry is the pill.
Global attention to the movements of people and goods (and the consequences of those movements) is crucial to understanding how we exercise power in our own lives. If you were to think of your poem as a map, what are the economies and/or geographies (cosmological, terrestrial, subterranean, etc) that it connects?
VA: “Locust Formation” is part of a manuscript Daughter Isotope that maps out coordinates between ancient and contemporary cosmologies, which speaks to my own gaps in knowledge across various U.S. and South Asian cultural archives. As a 1.5 generation immigrant, I access the fantasy space of India and the U.S. through multiple, disparate “texts.” “Locust Formation” interacts with a line from the Rig Veda that describes the beginning of the world as “seven half-embryos portion out the semen of the world at Vishnu’s command” (translated by Wendy Doniger). To me, this cosmic command animates a series of strange militaristic dance formations that ultimately decenter male desire, and go rogue—as in a biblical plague of “It Girls.” In “Locust Formation,” I attempt to address economies of desire though evoking generations of women whose presence on the world stage conceals/ reveals gendered violence, whether mythological (say, Draupadi from the epic Mahabharata) or historical—the millions of women who have responded to the #metoo hashtag.
최 Lindsay: The work has its roots in a historical investment in the source material, which is coming from early 20th-century Korea, during the Japanese colonial occupation—specifically 1936, about 21 years after the start of the occupation and just short of a decade before the end. The historical problem that I think about in Heliotrope isn’t as explicitly stated in the excerpt published in this journal, but it takes shape around the Japanese colonial government’s policy regarding leprosy—the short of it is that the Japanese government selected an island off the southeastern coast of the peninsula to convert into a national leprosium, and evicted all of the original occupants. The government enforced a strict quarantine policy in Korea, such that by the 1940s, over 6,000 Koreans with leprosy were incarcerated on this island, called Sorokdo. Various accounts by people who were quarantined on Sorokdo testify that the colony was the site of forced sterilization, medical experimentation, torture, and enslavement, as the incarcerated lepers were forced to labor toward the Japanese war effort without pay. People were forcibly quarantined on Sorokdo until 1963, and the island has been accessible to outsiders only since 2007. The work I’m doing is trying to trace the threads of this history and the problems of historiography. In attempt to be brief—if this poem were a map, it would be invested in tracing the lines that flow between Korea, America, and Japan, primarily, though there seems to be no containment within a world-system, and across a long swath of time with a particular intensity knotted around the early 20th-Century to the present. And it would be invested in the interplay between pathology, religion, and colonial power, which leads to many times and places. But it would probably have to be a map with an arrow pointing to a dot at the exact space and time where I am, with a bubble saying: “You are here”—I doubt my ability to make a map of this poem—at best, I imagine I’m standing with a compass, writing an attempt to find orientation.
Aldrin Valdez:: If this poem were a map it would trace the migration of families from the Philippine archipelago to the U.S.
It would show flights from Manila to Anchorage to New York City. That is how my siblings and I got to JFK International Airport, finally being reunited with our parents after eight years apart. Remittances are critical to the economy and they come from all over the world. My parents had come to work in NY in the mid-to-late 80s in order to provide for family back home. Our reunion, however, also separated us from my grandmother in Manila. My last day in the Philippines was the last day I saw her. A map of migration can provide context for a person’s loneliness and fear of abandonment. It would show what happens to family photographs and letters that survive their writers.
Elisabeth Frost and Dianne Kornberg: These works address the mass extinctions that are underway due to human desecration of the environment, including man-made global warming. In this way, a “map” of economies in “Remains” primarily would include vectors or relationships among human and nonhuman animals. The geographies vary, but the two pieces here both refer to ocean habitats. The time span referenced over the course of the full series ranges from seconds to millennia.
Jamie Gray Gillette: “Drive safe” emerges from a pictorial vision of American pastoral geography, one historically imagined and produced by landscape paintings of the Industrial Revolution and environmentalist writers like John Muir (wherein nature is a geography of leisure, separate from labor, a symbol of white national identity). The poem takes place on Interstate 95 heading North out of Philadelphia, towards New York, but it attempts to challenge the utopian visions of the traveling poem genre a la Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” The WANTED billboard springs from an economy of fear, splicing the barn/ cattle/sunrise with its mega-size production, its garish proclamation of danger and evil. The lobster dinner exists in a space of nostalgia and domesticity, born from my own coastal New England background. Just as violence is woven into the picturesque tradition of the land the poem traverses, the consumptive tradition of the lobster dinner is also laced with assault and carnage. The image of milk poured into eyes is, finally, connected to a geography of resistance, drawn from photographs of pepper sprayed protestors during the 2015 Baltimore protests for Freddie Gray. The substances of blood and oil (in the margin of the road), and milk, remain to evidence the violence that produced them.
RG: This poem traffics in celestial geographies as it is from where the reader can see the vicissitudes of violences that have ravaged the land, the concept, and its attending material landscapes. A poem speeds up and slows down time, finding points in history’s spectrum and its false linearities, for a reader to imagine by their own method for image—realist or abstract—the series of skirmishes and massacres that metabolize in memory. The poem is divining ancestral memory.
Christina Olivares: (Economy of memory) Global memory or personal memory: her body an organ along which befores-and-afters travel. What does a good ——— in the americas want? Of touching her face, her hair. Of wearing her. Of wearying her. Of leaving her everywhere I go. An economy of language communicating, among other confusions, silences. Geography, terrestrial: everything I can know is this body I inhabit. Many bloods, many earths, but not all of them. Temporary, energetic.
(A child’s cosmology) Tarmac. Bus route. Calle Jovellar. Heath Avenue. 193rd and Bainbridge. All the terrestrial that permeates skin.
(If a map) I’d draw a line from the Bronx to Havana to New Orleans to Santiago de Cuba to Guantanamo. End in the ocean, which I draw as us. Or I ask us all to stand together, all the children in my generation in my family, as children, with our hands open. I match up the routes in our palms side-by-size like puzzles. When they get wet with rain or tears or spit or blood or syrup, wetness rivulets between us.
Alternately, or additionally, describe your writing space/s. (Hint: at the close of Chapter 6 of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa describes the altar above her desk.) We’re talking literal space/s here.
Kimberly Alidio: Activated, humming boundaries; some tolerance for an autonomy that looks like loss of so-called status and opportunity; tourmaline, black kyanite, obsidian; access to emotional info; the Nap Ministry IG; a raised eyebrow at the literary star system, hustler culture, normative arts institutions, academia.
LC: I usually write at my desk, in my apartment in Berkeley. I live in a studio, and from my window I can see the screen covering the metal hull at the back end of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; I often write very early in the morning, around 4 or 5 a.m.—before sunrise—and I remember that for a time, in the early days of working on this manuscript, I would look out the window to see the glow of the screen briefly glinting against and coloring the morning rain. Every time the image on the screen changed, all of the drops would seem alight with color, for a moment so brief you could imagine that you’d imagined it—like pixels, falling through the air. I loved the quiet and the privacy of the phenomenon—that it was so ephemeral I could imagine that there was at once no possibility of sharing it with anyone, and grace from the closure of impossibility. Above my desk, I have a poster of Simone Weil’s mugshot which I took from a Danish magazine I stumbled across in Copenhagen, and a print of the first two stanzas of §3 of “I. Remembering Into Sleep,” a part of Rosmarie Waldrop’s long poem The Ambition of Ghosts.
I’ve also written parts of this project in the English graduate library at UC Berkeley, several cafes in the East Bay, Assistens Cemetery in Nørrebro, Stockholm, and a bit in New York—I tend to work in notes, for a long period of time, until I feel a need to write, so much of the work happens in transit, until I need to sit and be quiet for hours.
AV: I write on the subway on my phone. Or on this laptop in my room when I can stay emotionally present long enough. My journal/ sketchbook is a hybrid space, more immediate and full of crossouts, a space for drawings and collage that obscure & articulate, become part of the writing and vice versa. Text and texture.
Dianne Kornberg: My studio has been an 800 square foot building that my husband and I built on an isolated outer island in the San Juan archipelago in Washington State. It’s been a peaceful place to work with few interruptions, and provided space for making large works. Since I moved to a ferry-served island, my workspace is more restrictive and I have scaled down the size of my prints. The biggest obstacle to our collaboration is that we live on opposite coasts of the country. Elisabeth visits my studio annually, and otherwise we work via email and phone.
Elisabeth Frost: My desk is a massive, apparently DIY wood creation, which I found in the basement of the apartment building where I live. My previous desk was a battleship gray clunker, which I bought for $25 and a pizza in Pennsylvania. I held onto it for almost 20 years because I didn’t feel entitled to purchase something I actually loved. I am grateful that this gigantic wood desk found me. In terms of our collaboration, I have been thrilled to work often in Dianne’s studio. I have learned from her persistence and tenacity as an artist with a dedication to her practice that has been a gift to me. The time that we share in her space is crucial to our process.
JGG: The carrel desk assigned to me in the Bard College library, for the purposes of writing my senior thesis, is pressed up against the carrel desk of another student: a squash player from Turkey, who is double majoring in literature and economics. Ever squeamish about the threat of someone spying on my works-in-progress, I initially recoiled from the idea of keeping my writing space in such close company. I’ve made a habit of writing alone, occupying a comfortable rhythm of producing and unveiling, producing and unveiling, a rhythm that relies on the strict demarcation between a private creative space and the products of that space deemed acceptable for other ears/eyes. If my neighbor shared these feelings, he didn’t let on. Most days when I arrive at our desks, he pulls his head from Finance Capitalism and its Discontents to ask me how my writing is going. Sometimes, in his rare absence, he leaves me a book (the latest, a collection of Nabokov’s short stories, with a sticky note listing his favorites). I recently left him In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass as thanks, and he returned it within a few days, having already finished most of it. Much like our shelves of books that lean against each other, we share our respective generative spaces with generosity and quiet collaborativity. Sometimes, as we sit side-by-side typing away at our projects, it feels as though we are co-creating, breeding kinetic energy between us, helping the other gain momentum. My relationship with my desk-mate is transforming the way I think about the function of a creative community: not just as a round table of people to whom you can bring polished drafts, but as an ongoing conversation, which of course requires more uncertainty, humility, and vulnerability than the model of producing and unveiling, but in turn forms circuits that allow creative electricity to transmute, and spark.
RG: I have a not-terrible Ikea knotty pine workshop-style table in the kitchen nook with a photograph of the kiosk you encounter when you arrive to Slab City near the Salton Sea. “Almost There” is crudely spray painted on the kiosk which helps me feel like I might soon arrive to my destination even if that destination is a site of chaos. Do I want to get there? That’s the anxiety that animates my writing. Within that nook space there’s light from a big window and on its sill I have photographs of family from my childhood, postcards from Monument Valley, feminist art buttons, art flyers that speak to a life engaged with a world outside. Writing is where these vectors come together.
CO: My grandmother bought me a kitchen table and four wavering chairs from a furniture store uptown about a decade ago. I’d left town for a month to work, and when I returned I found she—worried that I’d lived there for a year without a proper table—had used my spare key and secretly deployed my aunt to place her gift in my living room. The table is a dark brown color that releases stain when wet. I’ve fed so many people I love on it, and it’s seen everything I’ve written since 2009. I also write on the train for an hour plus on my way to work, though hardly ever on the way home: my favorite seat is to the immediate left of the center door, and I work on my phone or in a notebook and put my bag at my feet between my legs. I rarely use the desk in my bedroom, a soft raw pine that still smells like earth, selected for writing but stacked with books.
In the 1980s, Lone Justice sang, “Nobody knows about inspiration.” Tell us about yours.
LC: The project I’m currently working on started to develop when I became aware of an already present obsession with a poem by modernist Korean poet 서정주 (Seo Jung-Joo), called “문둥이” (“The Leper”). I think I encountered it for the first time during my freshman year in college—around 2014, maybe—and it took until the summer of 2018 to realize the psychic space it was taking in my life. By the time I’d noticed that this was something I’d been doing, I’d spent years translating the poem, over and over again, nearly every day and often multiple times a day, on various scraps of paper and my academic notebooks, intentionally playing with it and distorting it as I tried to understand what it was about the poem that fascinated me—and as I tried to understand the poem. I was at the Kundiman retreat that summer, and thinking about the relationship between poetry and research in my life, and my orientations towards and within both of these things—this is when I decided to begin to take up the work of this fascination intentionally, and the threads began to weave together.
In terms of textual inspirations and influences—I was thinking about “compromised translation,” having just co-edited and released a journal of collaborations and, in some cases, deliberately “distorted” translations between Swedish and American poets. This work was inspiring to me. And I was thinking particularly about Anna Moschovakis’s “compromised translation” in her poem, “Flat White (20/20),” in They and We Will Get Into Trouble For This, as well as Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color. As the process has gone on, more and more inspirations have accreted—many of them are directly cited in the work, but some more subterranean influences are coming from the Nag Hammadi Library, and from the practice of exegetical commentary in Alexandrian literature—Origen’s commentaries on the Gospel of John and on the Song of Songs are particularly beautiful examples.
EF/DK: In our collaborative work, we have developed ideas that have led each of us into new territory. The challenge for Dianne has primarily been incorporating text into images in such a way that the words become a visual element in the work, as well as having verbal meaning. For Elisabeth, the work has not only helped sustain a creative
practice but also led to completely new material and approaches—most broadly, the natural world as subject, and often with specific reference to the tools of collectors, botanists, and marine biologists.
JGG: An incomplete list: lobsters and their exoskeletons (specifically their ritual of shedding, in which the lobster builds a copy of her exoskeleton inside her current shell, then ruptures the membrane between carapace and abdomen and crawls out of herself ); a photo album of my mom age twenty through forty, that I keep by my bed; “Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm,” a poem by Carl Phillips, that I keep at my desk; a few new books of poetry: A Sand Book by Ariana Reines; Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Ngyuen; Sight Lines by Arthur Sze; an older book of poetry: Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara; images of the island where I grew up (the shore that fringes into docks along Narragansett Bay to receive quahogging dinghys and ferries of tourists); stores of water, oceans, bays, reservoirs, estuaries, floodplains; photographic archives of memory and the personal mythologies that photographs enable us to build, the materials with which we fabricate our self-narrative (see: album of mom age twenty through forty); and the acts of circuitous disassembly and reincarnation of the body in nature that destabilize these narratives of the singular, linear self (see: the lobster continually giving birth to herself, then eating the shell she just escaped for calcium, constantly reallocating the materials of her skeleton to form and reform her body).
RG: The impulse to defend oneself. How institutions convince you that you need them to produce knowledge. The way a group of people might be called together to participate willingly in the shared experience of grief. Walking. The young people of Chile and Lebanon.
This poem/work is in conversation with whom, with what?
LC: I’ve been thinking often of this passage in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project—it’s in Convolute N, [N2a, 3]:
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what-has-been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has- been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. []Awakening[]
Much of the project takes place in and out of increasingly distorted translation, and the rest I’ve started to think of, in shorthand, as a practice of citation and commentary. While I usually say in the body of the project who and what I’m in conversation with, it’s too many to say, and probably includes many people and things I’m not aware of. The Arcades Project is one text I don’t cite very frequently, though it’s been a presiding spirit. The other is a fragment of Ludwig Wittgenstein— “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.”
AV: One conversation is with Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I borrow a line from the beginning of the book: “latches of being”.
EF/DK: Remains is a series of sixteen paired images and texts that are in conversation with one another, as we were in producing the work. As in most of our other series, Remains engages with visual and verbal idioms of specimen collection and preservation, while also challenging the assumptions and conventions of some Western scientific methods. We were concerned with “remains” on both the individual and the species level. What is left, post-mortem? And what will “remain” (survive) in the Anthropocene? Each pairing evolved differently, but in the two pieces included here, the image inspired the text. The tubeworm’s mineral remains prompted a text that explores humans’ contamination of the planet’s oceans. The humor and the almost Baroque lines found in the image of a skate (aka a “mermaid’s purse”) led to a more playful piece about gender, embodiment, and sexuality.
KA: Poets who write poems that know things and care little for whatever in poetry and the world distracts and detracts from that knowing’s essentially autonomous power.
Speaking of literal space/s, in your praxis, how do poems occupy pages? How do poems interact with images, grow into themselves as images?
AV: I think of the page as a field. How and where I position the text, how I shape it, is connected to the breath and pace I want the writing to have, and to the imagistic quality of words, lines, and stanzas. I want it to feel and look good, look right. As in: OK, this poem needs to float away from the left, closer to the right. It belongs right there.
EF/DK: Because visual language and poetic language “read” so differently, some argue that verbal language incorporated in or adjacent to visual art limits the visual experience by limiting an open-ended visual interpretation of the work. As we have collaborated to create numerous text/image series over the past decade, we have challenged this idea, considering image and text alike not just as inter-dependent but also as “legible” in two ways: as abstraction and as symbolic content. Remains is unlike most of our projects because the text is not visually incorporated into the image itself. In this regard it is more traditional, or more bound by the “rules” of visual image vs. poetic text as separate entities. As we move forward, we may or may not make more work in this mode.
JGG: I like the possibilities for metaphor between the mechanics of the skeletal system and the operative form of a poem. A beautiful example of a form that feels functional, that produces meaning in and of itself, happens in Ngyuen’s Ghost Of, in which she writes in and around the shape.
RG: Aren’t poems just images rendered with care and reverence? Or rather that’s what they are for me. The poem is the frame, the saturation, the subtext, the rainwater barrel in a thunderstorm, a collector of textures, inhaling and exhaling. The poem is a site responsive performance of the image. The poem helps reveal the way the image might constellate with nature, violence, aggression, bravery, history, witness, philosophy, ideology, space and affect.
CO: I aim for — relational and electric — in the poems. If I fuss at them long enough, usually something catches. They talk to each other. I write groups (books) of poems at the same time and only rarely independent poems one at a time. They arise in me as if they have kinship networks. An image starts here and ends over there or not at all. Also I’m working on not privileging images over other forms of sensory perception, including the near-sensory somethings of premonition and intuition, and memory, forgetting, wanting.
A question that you wish someone would ask you. An answer for that question.
AV: “How do we heal centuries of colonial damage?” I don’t have an answer that solves or fixes the damage, but the image that comes to my mind in response to the question, is of foreheads touching. I want someone to ask the question as a way to begin an unraveling of silences. And maybe as we speak, there is also silence as a necessary space for however our bodies need to move.
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, and draw mythic schemas from popular culture and ancient texts. Her poetry book The Trouble with Humpadori (2016) imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Poems from Humpadori were listed in the top 25 from Boston Review in 2016 and appeared on Sundress Publications Best Poetry of 2016 list. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.
Kimberly Alidio is the author of why letter ellipses (selva oscura press, 2020), After projects the resound (Black Radish Books, 2016), and the chapbooks, a cell of falls (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2019) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, Sinister Wisdom, and wildness. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan and an MFA candidacy in poetry from the University of Arizona.
최 Lindsay is based in Berkeley California and is the author of Transverse (FuturePoem, 2020), and a chapbook, Matrices (Spect! Books, 2017). They are a Kundiman Fellow and a Ph.D student in English Literature at UC Berkeley. More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Amerarcana, Apogee, The Felt, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2, and elsewhere. Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy in Korea.
Elisabeth Frost’s books include All of Us: Poems, Bindle (in collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg), and The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry. She is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, where she edits the Poets Out Loud Prizebook series from Fordham Press.
Jamie Gray Gillette is from Jamestown, Rhode Island. She began writing for the Newport Mercury Newspaper in high school, but discovered a love for poetry through community workshops with Frequency Writers in Providence, RI, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where she later interned. She is currently in an undergraduate writing student at Bard College in New York.
raquel gutiérrez writes personal essays, memoir, art criticism, and poetry. A child of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants, raquel was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. She/they completed MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. raquel runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects, which publishes works by QTPOC poets. Her/their poetry and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Open Space, and elsewhere. Her/their first book, Brown Neon (Coffee House Press), will be published in the Spring 2021 and her/their first book of poetry, Southwest Reconstruction (Noemi Press), will be published in 2022.
Visual artist Dianne Kornberg has had more than thirty-five solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in the collections of multiple museums. She has been featured in a number of books including Contemporary Art in the Northwest. Her own books include Field Notes (2007), India Tigers (2009), Madonna Comix (2014, with poet Celia Bland), and Bindle (2015, with poet Elisabeth Frost). Kornberg is a Professor Emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.
Christina Olivares is the author of No Map of the Earth Includes Stars, winner of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, of the chaplet Interrupt, published by Belladonna* Series, and of DSM/Partial Manual, winner of the 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Competition . She is the recipient of a 2015-2016 LMCC Workspace Residency, two Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants (2010 and 2014), a 2008 Teachers and Writers Fellowship, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy writer and visual artist. They grew up in Manila and Long Island and currently live in Brooklyn. Aldrin has been awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/Mentorship and Poets House. Their poetry & visual art appear in The Felt, Femmescapes, Nat Brut, Poor Claudia, and The Recluse. Aldrin has also presented work at Dixon Place, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Poetry Project. Collaborating with writer & organizer Ted Kerr, Aldrin co-organized Foundational Sharing (2011-2015), a salon series of readings, performances, & visual art. Most recently, they’ve co-curated two seasons of the Segue Reading Series with fellow poet Joël Díaz.
