Poet Biographies

Charles Alexander has taught at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the University of Airzona, Pima Community College, The Learning Curve, and Chax Press. He is the founder and director of Chax Press, one of the nation's premier small literature and book arts publishers, and the co-founder of POG, Tucson's premier presenter of innovative writers. His several books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, 1990), Arc of Light/Dark Matter (Segue Books, 1992), and Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse Press, 2004).

Kathleen Fraser: Kathleen Fraser has published sixteen books of poems, most recently DISCRETE CATEGORIES FORCED INTO COUPLING (2004). Apogee Press, Berkeley, and hi dde violeth i dde violet (2004). Nomados Press, Vancouver). A book of essays, Translating the Unspeakable, Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (2000), was published in the Contemporary Poetics Series. Univ. of Alabama Press. Fraser's Selected Poems, 1970-1995, il cuore : the heart, is available from Wesleyan University Press, 1997. In 1973, Fraser founded The American Poetry Archives, during her tenure as Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where she taught as Professor of Creative Writing from 1972-1992. Between 1983 and 1992, she published and edited HOW(ever), a journal for poets and scholars interested in modernist/ innovative directions in writing by 20th century women. This has continued as the electronic journal How2. Fraser is winner of both Guggenheim and N.E.A. Fellowships in Poetry, as well as the Frank O'Hara Award (for innovative achievement in poetry). She currently teaches a graduate seminar at CCA in the Fall and lives for five months of each year in Italy, lecturing on American poetry and translating Italian poets.

David Shapiro: David Shapiro began writing and publishing poetry when he was thirteen. David has received fellowships from Cambridge University in England, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Book of the Month creative arts fellowship, is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters l977 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Poetry, and has been nominated for the National Book Award. Shapiro is considered a member of The New York School of poets, which was an avant-garde arts movement started in the 1950's following the earlier beat generation of poets and artists. The New York School included the painter Jackson Pollock, and the poets Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. In 1970 David Shapiro co-published An Anthology of New York Poets with Ron Padgett. He has written over twenty volumes of poetry and prose, including the first book on Ashbery, the first book on Jim Dine's painting, the first book on Johns' drawings (the last two from Abrams) and the first study of Mondrian's much tabooed flower studies. He has translated books from French and Spanish and recently edited a book on aesthetics: Uncontrollable Beauty, ranked second among the best 1998 books on art by Amazon.com. David says that before he goes to sleep he will ask for lines of poetry to come to him, and in the middle of the night they come to him in dreams. Once, in a dream it was revealed to him that poetry is a form of painting.

Tenney Nathanson: Tenney Nathanson is the author of the book-length poem Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) (O Books, 2005) and of the collection Erased Art (Chax Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Jacket, Kenning, Social Text, The Massachusetts Review, Antennae, Ironwood, Caterpillar, and RIF/T. His critical study Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass (NYU, 1992, rpt. 1994) is still in print. Nathanson is currently at work on a book-length poem, "Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (After Rilke The Fortune Cookie Poems The Jolly Corner) (Globalization)," and a critical book about the contemporary poets John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Norman Fischer, and David Shapiro. He teaches American Poetry in the English Department at the University of Arizona.

Heather Nagami: Heather Nagami´s first book, Hostile, will be published by Chax Press in Fall 2005. Her poems have appeared in Antennae, Rattle, and Xcp (Cross-Cultural Poetics). Heather received a B.A. in Literature/Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. at University of Arizona, where she also taught poetry and edited Sonora Review. With her fiancé, Bryan, she runs overhere press, a small press that publishes hand-bound chapbooks with an emphasis on poets of color and other underrepresented voices.

Will Alexander: Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, and educator who lives in Los Angeles. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, A Kiss from the Lips of a Woman, and The Stratospheric Canticles. He has three works forthcoming: a trilogy of novels, Sunrise and Armageddon, from Spuyten Duyvil; a novella, Alien Weaving, from Green Integer; and a book of poems, Sri Lankan Loxodrome, from Canopic Press. In March of 2003 Georgetown University held a reading with TOHYF Lead Artist Will Alexander called, Vanguards in American Letters. The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England named Will Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century and he was also recognized by the Whiting Foundation for exceptional literary achievement in New York. In 2002 Will received a fellowship for poetry from the California Arts Council.

Patrick Pritchett: Patrick Pritchett is the author of two books of poetry, Reside (1999) and Burn (2005). His poems and book reviews have appeared in Colorado Review, American Book Review, New American Writing, Rain Taxi, Hambone, Jacket, Shiny, 26, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Critical essays on Ronald Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, and Edgar Allen Poe are forthcoming from scholarly journals. A contributing editor for the poetry journal Facture, he has taught at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Marlon Evans: Marlon Evans is a Native of the tribal people of the Gila River Community and the Tohono O'odham of the San Xavier district of the Tohono O'odham Nation. In 1975 he attended Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York,
and graduated with an Associate and Bachelor of Science degrees in Graphic Arts. In his own words, "I grew up on the rez and didn't want to get a dead end tribal administration job or work at a casino. I got tired of feeling sorry for myself every time I fell off my barstool and I got tired of walking five miles to Circle K for a 40 oz. bottle of beer. So I took Professor Tapahonso's poetry analysis course and decided to write poetry the rest of my life and I am a senior at the University of Arizona, majoring in creative writing - poetry and Media Arts."

ArtsReach: ArtsReach was incorporated in 1986 in response to ongoing educational needs among southern Arizona's Native American students. Nationwide and locally, Native students have the highest drop out rate of any minority. ArtsReach works to increase students' reading, writing, and critical thinking skills, and to instill in them a love of literature. Students have the opportunity to have their work selected for inclusion in our literary anthology, Dancing with the Wind, now in its 14th year of printing. Selected poems are translated into Tohono O'odham and Yaqui in order to assist with Native Language preservation and maintenance efforts. Each issue is edited by a prominent Native American authors such as Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, and Joy Harjo. Our student poets come from Indian Oasis Baboquivari schools, Richey Elementary, Mission View Elementary, and Ha:San Prepatory. Our artists instructors are Sherwin Bitsui, Mac Hudson, Madeline Kiser, Rita Magdaleno, Kit McIllroy, and Marge Pellegrino.

Katherine Josten is an artist, poet, educator and Founder/Director of the Global Art Project for Peace involving over 67,000 participants on seven continents. Josten holds a B.S. Ed. in English from Ohio University, a B.F.A. from the Atlanta College of Art and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Tucson Museum of Art and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Josten has had ten solo presentations of her work in locations including the University of Arizona Museum of Art, and has participated in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions internationally.

She has taught art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pima College, and has lectured and led workshops internationally, including Syracuse University, the University of Washington, and the Bangkok Artgroup, Thailand.

She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her art including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, International Friends of Transformative Art, the Cultural Exchange Council of Tucson, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Josten was an Arizona Arts Award Nominee in 1999.

In recognition of her work as Founder/Director of the Global Art Project for Peace, Josten was nominated for a 2002 UNESCO Peace Prize. In 1999 she served on the Arts and Culture Commission for the International Summit on Peace at the University for Peace, San Jose, Costa Rica.

Katherine merges her poetry and her paintings in a large installation titled "Origins" that was first exhibited in Tucson at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Her poetry for "Origins" is placed on the wall between her large sets of paintings and the words are also incorporated within the paintings, functioning as a visual element of the paintings.

Josh Goldberg was born in Philadelphia and educated at Michigan State
University and the Tyler School of Fine Arts. He is a longtime Tucson
resident who worked as Director of Education at the University of Arizona Museum of Arts until recently. He is represented by the Davis Domiguez Gallery. He is a recipient of the Sally Star Memorial Award for painting, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson Pima Arts Council, and the Japan Foundation. Art critic Pamela Portwood characterizes his recent abstract paintings as blossoming "in a spectrum of saturated colors." One work, "Soft Nubbed, Dusk Fending," is described as "a long, narrow acrylic-on-paper work… almost like an abstract sunset on a Japanese scroll. Gold from the setting sun and burgundy from the coming nightfall hover above the bleached sea foam of the ocean. Colors substitute for words in the work of an artist who is always inspired by poetry and literature.