Artists’ Biographies
Jinane Abbadi
Abbadi is a Moroccan-born visual artist residing in San Diego. Her interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, Orientalism, and the issues of colonial power dominance and their influence on identity and creativity. Abbadi received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts and interdisciplinary studies from San Diego State University. She serves on the board of Karama, San Diego, an independent nonpartisan organization that seeks to promote greater understanding of the issues facing the Arab and Islamic worlds. She has been working in the areas of painting, printmaking, and bookmaking and has been associated with Brighton Press since 2004.
Merilyn Britt
After working for many years in commercial book publishing, Britt began creating limited-edition books by hand and dyeing paper with plant-derived pigments. Her paintings, books, and woven paper compositions have been exhibited in the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. They are included in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Brian Cohen
Cohen is an educator, artist, and writer. He graduated from Haverford College and completed his master’s degree in painting at the University of Washington. In 1989 he founded Bridge Press to further the association and integration of visual image, original text, and book structure. As a printmaker, Cohen has shown in forty individual exhibitions, including a retrospective in 1997 at the Fresno Art Museum, and he has participated in over 150 group shows. Cohen’s books and etchings are held by major private and public collections throughout the country. www.bridge-press.com
Robert Cremean
Cremean was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1932, and was educated at Alfred University and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1954 he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, and he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale 34. With the exception of the pieces in process in his studio, all of his work is held either in private or public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum, and Stanford University Library, Special Collections. Comprehensive bodies of work are held at the Fresno Art Museum and the Crocker Art Museum in California. A catalogue raisonné THE ART OF ROBERT CREMEAN—An Encyclopedic View was published by Manuscript Press in 2017. Cremean lives and works in Burgundy, France.
Miya Hannan
Hannan is a visual artist who combines sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional media. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Hannan worked as a radiation technologist in her native Japan until 1998, when she moved to the United States to pursue her art education and to learn English. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently an assistant professor of art at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Eric Lindbloom
Lindbloom is an independent photographer who has had solo exhibitions at Gallery 292 in New York City, the Driskel Gallery in Provincetown, and the Center for Photography in Woodstock. He has had two monographs of his photographs published: Angels at the Arno (Godine), and Salt Grass (Lodima Press). Lindbloom’s photographs are in public collections, including the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Alinari Museum in Florence, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. His work is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
Nelle Martin
Martin, a native of California, is the Master Printer and Production Designer at Brighton Press, where she began as an apprentice in 1987. She has a BFA in painting, printmaking, and sculpture from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Certificate in Architectural Drafting from the Phoenix Institute of Technology. Her artist’s books are housed in numerous public and private collections in the United States. She has taught at San Diego State University and the Art Institute of San Diego. Her paintings and books have been exhibited both locally and nationally.
DeLoss McGraw
McGraw was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1945. He was educated at the Otis Art Institute, California State University, Long Beach, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His paintings, sculpture, and books have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. McGraw’s works are held in numerous public collections including the Getty Research Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Library of Congress. He lives and works in Oklahoma.
Manuel Neri
Neri is known primarily for his figurative sculpture in plaster, bronze, and marble, and for his participation in the San Francisco Bay Area Figurative movement during the 1950s and 1960s. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEA Individual Artist Grant. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Olda Procházka
Procházka was born twenty miles from Mahler’s birthplace in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, in 1927. He was educated at Charles University in Prague where he later became a professor of philosophy and taught from 1954 to 1980. From 1966 to 1968 he was a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. During the 1970s Procházka began to exhibit his sculpture and drawings in several museums and institutions in Czechoslovakia. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States, and eventually to San Diego where he began making etchings with Bill Kelly at Brighton Press. He died in San Diego in 2003.
James Renner
Renner is one of the founding members of Brighton Press, with which he has also published three artist’s books. These books are housed in over thirty public rare book collections, including the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. He has had seven solo shows of his sculptures, drawings, and collages along with numerous group shows at venues including Taylor Bercier Fine Arts in New Orleans, Rico Maresca in New York City, and the Fresno and Oceanside Art Museums in California. He was born and still resides in San Diego.
Faith Ringgold
Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, activist, and writer born in Harlem, New York, best known for her narrative quilts. She has won numerous awards such as two National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the NAACP Image Award. She taught art at the University of California, San Diego from 1987-2002. She has written and illustrated seventeen children’s books. Her work is held by numerous museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.
Derli Romero
Romero was born in Sinaloa, Mexico. He studied at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking “La Esmerelda,” in Mexico City. He has exhibited his paintings and graphic art in Mexico and the United States. He worked as a printer at Brighton Press in the 1990s and went on to found Nihil Obstadt Press in Morelia, Mexico. Romero’s work is held in several public collections in the United States and Mexico, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Temple University.
Harry Sternberg
Sternberg achieved a national reputation as a painter, graphic artist, author, filmmaker, and teacher. Born in 1904 on the Lower East Side of New York, he remained there for the next sixty-three years, working as an artist and teacher. He influenced generations of young artists at the Art Students League where he taught for thirty-four years. His first one-man show was held at the Weyhe Gallery in 1932, and he exhibited at the first Whitney Museum Invitational Annual in 1937. He had numerous one-man shows at museums and galleries here and abroad. He is represented in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sternberg died in 2001.
Fernando de Szyszlo
Szyszlo was a painter and printmaker born in Lima, Peru. He studied at the School of Plastic Arts of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. After his graduation in 1948, he traveled to Europe where he studied the works of the masters, particularly Rembrandt, Titian, and Tintoretto, and absorbed the varied influences of Cubism, Surrealism, and abstraction. While in Paris he met Octavio Paz and André Breton and was part of a group of expatriate Latin American artists and writers. Upon his return to Peru, Szyszlo became a major force for artistic renewal in his country breaking new ground by expressing a Peruvian subject matter in a nonrepresentational style. He taught at Cornell and Yale Universities. He died in 2017, in Lima, Peru.
Julia Talcott
Talcott is a printmaker, illustrator, and owner of Studio 80 near Boston, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Williams College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art where she received her MFA. She has taught at the Art Institute of Boston, the New England School of Art and Design, and Monserrat College of Art. Creator of the 1996 Christmas stamp for the US Postal Service, she has received four certificates of design excellence from Print Magazine. Her work is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Detroit Institute for the Arts.
Ian Tyson
Tyson is a sculptor living and working in Provence, France. He has been making artist’s books for almost fifty years. He founded Tetrad Press (1970-95) followed by ed.it, in 1995. Recent exhibitions include “Sculptures and Wall Drawings,” Eric Linard Gallerie, Droma, France, “Dialogues,” Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France, and “Livres d’artiste / estampes,” L’Ami Voyage, Avignon, France. His work is in many public and private collections in Europe and the United States.
Jenny Yoshida Park
Yoshida Park studied art at UC Berkeley and is an MFA graduate of San Diego State University in graphic design and book arts. She publishes her own editions of artists' books under the imprint Evidence of the Hand Press. Her own work questions the authority of our traditional hierarchies of knowledge and draws from the gut feelings, trivial flotsam, idiosyncrasies, tragedies, and embarrassments that get edited out.
Writers’ Biographies
Juvenal Acosta
Acosta is a writer who has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is the author of the novels The Tattoo Hunter and The Violence of Velvet and has edited anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry published by City Lights Books. He received his BA from New College of California and his PhD from the University of California, Davis. Acosta is the Dean of the Writing Department at California College of the Arts.
Sandra Alcosser
Alcosser shares thirty acres in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana with a dwindling population of bear, moose, elk, and mountain lion and has served as Montana’s first Poet Laureate. Her poetry collection Except by Nature received numerous national awards including the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Alcosser received three fellowships from the NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and been writer-in-residence at Glacier National Park and the Central Park Zoo. Alcosser is also a founder of the MFA program at San Diego State University, where she is a professor of poetry, fiction, and feminist poetics.
Elizabeth Brinsfield
Brinsfield grew up in New Jersey and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. Her writing has appeared in Word Riot, Tupelo Quarterly, CutBank, and Matter Press.
François Cheng
Cheng is a Chinese-born poet, essayist, novelist, calligrapher, and art historian who has lived in Paris since 1949. He is the author of essays, novels, collections of poetry, and books on art written in the French language, and is the translator of some of the great French poets into Chinese. Among his books are Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting, The Way of Beauty, and the novels The River Below, and Green Mountain, White Cloud. In 2002, he became the first person of Asian origin elected to the French Academy.
Chard deNiord
DeNiord grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, and was educated at Lynchburg College, Yale Divinity School, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poetry collections include Interstate, The Double Truth, Night Mowing, and Sharp Golden Thorn, among others. DeNiord has also authored two books of interviews with renowned American poets, Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century American Poets, and I Would Lie to You If I Could. He is professor of English at Providence College and lives in Putney, Vermont, with his wife, Liz. He is currently serving as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Peter Everwine
Everwine was born in Michigan and raised in western Pennsylvania. He authored seven books of poetry and numerous translations. His most recent collection of poems is Listening Long and Late (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). He also translated poetry from the Hebrew and Aztec languages. Everwine taught at California State University, Fresno, and Reed College. He was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel. He was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He lived in Fresno, California, until his death in late 2018.
Janet Frame
Frame was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1924, and is the country’s best-known author. Over three decades, she wrote twelve novels, a three-volume autobiography, as well as many short stories and poems. A 1990 film by Jane Campion, An Angel at My Table, was based on Frame’s autobiography and led to a wider readership. She received numerous literary honors, and was named a New Zealand Icon by the Prime Minister. She died in Dunedin in 2004.
C. G. Hanzlicek
Hanzlicek was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1942. He received a BA from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, The Lives of Birds. He has translated Native American songs, A Bird’s Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for thirty-five years and was, for most of those years, the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Dave Hickey
Hickey, born in Fort Worth, Texas, is a celebrated art critic who has written for publications like Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and Art in America, where he also served as Executive Editor. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and a Peabody Award in 2006 for his PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. His essays are collected in the books, Invisible Dragons: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.
Marie Luise Kaschnitz
Kaschnitz was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1901, and was renowned in her home country as a distinguished poet and writer of fiction and essays, authoring more than thirty books. Having remained in Germany through the Nazi regime and the Second World War, she became an important voice in literature concerned with confronting the immediate past. In her life she received the Georg Büchner Prize and Roswitha Prize, and, after her death in 1974, a literary prize was established to commemorate her.
Mary Julia Klimenko
Klimenko began writing poetry in 1973, soon after she began modeling for artist Manuel Neri. She received dual master’s degrees in creative writing and psychology from San Francisco State University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. Klimenko’s poems have appeared in numerous publications from 1978 to the present. She has been the primary model for Manuel Neri since 1972, as well as a psychotherapist in private practice in Benicia, California.
Janet Lewis
Lewis, born in Chicago in 1899, was known for her poetry, historical novels, short stories, and opera libretti. Her books of poetry include, The Earth-Bound 1924-1944 and Poems Old and New, 1918-1978. Among her historical novels are The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. Lewis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950. She taught at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley. Lewis died in 1998 in Los Altos, California.
Li He
A Chinese poet of the Middle Tang Dynasty, Li He was born in the year 791. His method of composition was riding on horseback with a bag full of paper pieces which he would pull out when the idea for a phrase hit him and write it down. When he returned home in the evening he would assemble them into a poem. He often explored the supernatural in his poems, and was also nicknamed the Ghost. He died at the age of twenty-seven in AD 817.
Frances Mayes
Mayes is a poet, memoirist, and essayist originally from Georgia. In 1975 she earned her MA from San Francisco State University, where she eventually became professor of Creative Writing, director of the Poetry Center, and chair of the Department of Creative Writing. While there, she wrote the text The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems. She is the author of numerous books and is best known for her memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun.
Stephen Metcalfe
Metcalfe was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1953. His plays include Vikings, Strange Stew, Half a Lifetime, White Linen, Sorrows and Sons, Spittin’ Image, Baseball Play, Pilgrims, The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers. His work has been produced in New York City and at many regional theaters throughout the country. His screenplays and teleplays include Half a Lifetime, Cousins, Jacknife, Summer, and Roommates. Metcalfe is a member of the Playwright’s Unit at the Manhattan Theater Club and is an Associate Artist of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. He has published two novels, The Tragic Age in 2014, and The Practical Navigator in 2016.
Lisel Mueller
Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was fifteen, settling in the Chicago area. She attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University. Drawn to modernism, she wrote thirteen books of poetry, winning numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as being named the Poet Laureate of Illinois. She also translated poetry from German, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz.
Jerome Rothenberg
Rothenberg is an internationally known poet, translator, anthologist, and performance artist who has written over eighty books of poetry and collected ten assemblages of traditional and contemporary work, such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. A book of essays, Poetics & Polemics, 1985-2005, appeared in 2008, and his recent books of poetry include Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010. His awards include an American Book Award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is the editor of the Poems and Poetics blog. poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com
Martha Serpas
Serpas, a native of southern Louisiana, is a poet, environmentalist, and hospital chaplain. Three volumes of her poetry have been published, Cote Blanche, The Dirty Side of the Storm, and The Diener. Her poems have been included in Southwest Review, The New Yorker, and The Nation, and her essays on Cajun culture and the environment have appeared in The New York Times and Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. She co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary on Louisiana’s land loss. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.
W. D. Snodgrass
Snodgrass was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He was educated at Geneva College and the University of Delaware. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim and the Ingram Merrill Foundations, the Academy of American Poets, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book of poems, Heart’s Needle, won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, and subsequent books of poetry, essays, songs, and translations have achieved worldwide recognition. He died in 2009 in Madison County, New York.
Bianca Stone
Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City in 2007 where she received her MFA from NYU. Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, and Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours and most recently, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief. She and her husband the poet Ben Pease co-run the Ruth Stone Foundation and letterpress studio. www.ruthstonefoundation.org
Ruth Stone
Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915. She wrote thirteen books of poetry, most recently What Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Among her many recognitions are the Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Award, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. She taught at SUNY Binghamton for twenty-three years. In 2007 Stone was named Poet Laureate of Vermont. She died in 2011. www.ruthstonefoundation.org
Dylan Thomas
Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. He worked in his early years as a journalist and scriptwriter. His first book of poetry, 18 Poems, was published when he was twenty. His most famous works include the poems “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”; the ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” He died in New York in 1953, at the age of thirty-nine.
Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
Westphalen was born in Lima, Peru, in 1911. His career as a poet and writer spans many decades, during which he was also a diplomat and a teacher. Westphalen is strongly identified with the Peruvian surrealist poetry movement of which he and Cesár Moro were leaders in the 1930s. His collected works, Bajo Zarpas de la Quimera: Poemas 1930-1988, was published in Madrid in 1992. He died in Lima in 2001.
Nancy Willard
Willard, born in 1936, grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She published two novels, Things Invisible to See and Sister Water, and twelve books of poetry, including her selected poems, Swimming Lessons. She also published short story collections, books of essays–primarily about writing–and many children’s books. Her book, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1981. Other awards include the O. Henry Award, Crawford Award, Golden Kite Award for Fiction, and the Michigan Author Award. In 2013, Willard retired from teaching at Vassar College after forty-seven years. She died at home in Poughkeepsie, New York, in February of 2017.