Laynie Browne is a poet, prose writer, teacher and editor. She is the author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels. Her most recent collections of poems include You Envelop Me (Omnidawn, 2017) P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel, 2015), and Scorpyn Odes (Kore Press, 2015). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, selected by Alice Notley, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Catalan. Her writing has appeared in many anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Post Modern Poetry (second edition, 2013), Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013), Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008). Her critical writing has appeared in journals including Jacket2, Aufgabe, Open Letter and Talisman. She co-edited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2012) and is currently editing an anthology of original essays on the Poet’s Novel. She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.
Simon Smith was born in 1961 in Redruth. He worked at The Poetry Library in The Royal Festival Hall from 1991-2007, and was its Librarian from 2003 until 2007. He has taught Creative Writing at the University of Kent since 2009, where he is a Senior Lecturer. His previous four collections of poetry are Fifteen Exits (Waterloo Press, 2001); Reverdy Road (2003), Mercury (2006) and London Bridge (2010), all with Salt Publishing. Poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Stand, fragmente, OR, FENCE, Shearsman magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Molly Bloom and Tears in the Fence, among other periodicals. In 2004 he was a judge of the National Poetry Competition; in 2009 he was a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle. Carcanet will shortly publish his versions of Catullus, and he is currently working on several projects relating to the oeuvre of American poet Paul Blackburn.
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. He also writes regularly for such publications as New Left Review and Artforum (where he is co-editor of international reviews). He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College (University of London), among others. Recent books include a collection of critical essays on art writers and art writing, Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013) and a collection of poems, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, New York, 2015) and The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, a selection of Schwabsky’s art criticism from The Nation (Verso, 2016).
Curated by Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow, Lee Ann Brown (lab83@cam.ac.uk)
