Abbadi is a Moroccan-born multidisciplinary 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 has been working in the areas of painting, printmaking, and bookmaking and has been assisting at Brighton Press since 2004. www.jinaneabbadi.com

Acosta was born in 1961 in Coyoacan, Mexico. He is the author of Diciendo Unas Palabras (Saying Some Dark Words) and Dijubar el Aire (To Draw the Air). Acosta has translated into Spanish the works of Derek Walcott, Jack Spicer, Louise Gluck, and Robert Hass. In addition, he is the editor of Light from a Nearby Window: Poems of Contemporary Mexico published in 1994 by City Lights.

Alcosser shares thirty acres in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana with a dwindling population of bear, moose, elk, and mountain lion. Except by Nature received numerous national awards including the James Laughlin from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the graduate writing programs of Pacific University and SDSU and has served as Montana's first Poet Laureate. Since 2004, she has been Language of Conservation Poet for Poets House and New York and Chicago Zoological Societies. Alcosser received three fellowships from NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Brinsfield grew up in New Jersey and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. Her writing appeared in Word Riot, Tupelo Quarterly, CutBank, and Matter Press.

After working for many years in commercial book publishing, Merilyn Britt began creating limited-edition books by hand and dying paper with plant derived pigments. Her paintings, books, and woven paper compositions have been exhibited in The San Diego Museum of Art, The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, and are included in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.

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 the translator of some of the great French poers 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.

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, Brian has shown in forty individual exhibitions, including a retrospective in 1997 at the Fresno Art Museum, and 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

Cremean was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1932, and was educated at Alfred University and 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 piece in process in his studio, all of his work is held either in private or public collections. Cremean has his studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

DeNiord is the author of four books of poetry, The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), named one of the ten best books of poetry in 2011 by the Boston globe, Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990). His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone, Lucille Dlifton, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Jack Gilbert, and Maxine Kumin) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on Twentieth Century American Poets was published in 2011 by Marick Press. He is professor of English at Providence College and lives in Putney, Vermont, with his wife, Liz. www.charddeniord.com

De Szyszlo's well known series of paintings and prints, Abolición de la Muerte, was created in response to Emilio Adolfo Westphalen's poems of the same name. Szyszlo's relationship with Westphalen dates to 1947 in Lima, Peru, when they worked together on the literary magazine, Las Moradas.

Everwine was born in Michigan and raised in western Pennsylvania. His most recent collection of poems is From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems. He is 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 he passed away on October 28, 2018.

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 film by Jane Campion based on Frame's autobiography was released in 1990, which led to a wider readership. She received numerous literary honors, as well as being named a New Zealand icon by the prime minister. She died in Dunedin in 2004.

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. www.miyahannan.com

Hanzlicek was born in Minnesota in 1942. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1966. He is a recipient of a NEA Fellowship and several awards for poetry and translation. Hanzlicek has taught as California State University, Fresno since 1966. Against Dreaming, his seventh collection of poetry was published in 1994 by the University of Missouri Press.

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 was 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.

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 a literature of commitment 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 commemorating her was established.

Klimenko began writing poetry in 1973, soon after she began modeling for Manuel Neri. She received a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. She also has a master's degree in psychotherapy. Klimenko's poems have appeared in numerous publications from 1978 to the present. She has been the primary model for Manuel Neri since 1972.

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.

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.

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.

Martin is a 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 published artwork is housed in numerous public and private collections in the United States. Her paintings and book arts have been exhibited both locally and nationally.

Frances 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.

 

McGraw was born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1945. He was educated at the Otis Art Institute, California State Univerity, 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.

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, Emily, and White Man Dancing. 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. www.stephenmetcalfe.net

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was 15, 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.

 

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.

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.

James Renner was one of the founding members of Brighton Press, with which he has also published The Mouse and the Woman (1988), and Soliloquy (2007). These books are housed in over thirty public collections. He has had seven solo shows of his sculptures, drawings, and collages along with numerous group shows across the country. He was born and still resides in San Diego. www.jamesrennerart.com

Faith Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, activist, and writer from 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 17 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. www.faithringgold.com

Romero was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1962. He studied at the National School of Painting and Sculpture, "La Esmerelda," and has widely exhibited his paintings and graphic art. Romero's work is held in several public collections including Standford University, Dartmouth College, and Temple University. www.derliromero.com

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. Poems and Poetics blog

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; and with Michele Burgess, she has collaborated on three artists' books, The Diener, Ghost Trees, and Reliquary. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. www.marthaserpas.com

Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He was educated at Geneva College and the University of Deleware, He has 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.

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. From that time until the present, he has 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 MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sternberg died in 2001.

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, where she died in 2011. www.ruthstonefoundation.org

Talcott 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. Her work is held in many private and public collections including the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Detroit Institute for the Arts. www.juliatalcott.com

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, and he continued to publish poetry and short stories until his early death at the age of thirty-nine.

Tyson is a sculptor living and working in Provence, France. He has been making artists' books for the last forty-five 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.

Westphalen was born in Lima, Peru, in 1911. His career as a poet and writer spans many decades in 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.

Willard 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. In 2013,Willard retired from teaching at Vassar College after forty-seven years. She died at home in February of 2017.