Oliver Strand is a visiting lecturer in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Wood Shop Coordinator at Harvard University’s Dept. of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He received an MFA from Brown University, where he received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing. His poetry has appeared in Entropy, The Fanzine, Poor Claudia, Burning House Press, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen received an M. F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after a decade of experience in organizations focused on social change. Author of chapbooks This Paper Lantern and Dead-Eye Spring, she has published poems and translations in the journals The Bombay Gin, Transom, Small Po[r]tions, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, Third Coast, Solstice Literary Magazine, TWO LINES Online, DIAGRAM, EOAGH, Split Rock Review, among others, as well as the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor in Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she initiated a Creative Writing Minor. She is also the Poetry Editor for the literary magazine Pangyrus. She was a finalist recipient for a Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship. Originally from Illinois, she has lived in Jamaica Plain for twenty years, now with her husband, twin sons, and several pets. She loves, more than anything, to laugh.
Donald Wellman has
nine books of English-language poetry to his credit. He translates from several
languages, German and French as well as Spanish. He is the English language
translator of Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, and Roberto Echavarren. From
German he has translated Yvan Goll’s Neila’s Evening Song: Last Poems
of Yvan Goll; from French, Blaise
Cendrars, The Prose of the
Transsiberian and Little Joan of France. His academic
expertise is in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. His research and
scholarship has concentrated on the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, Charles Olson and on figures associated with Black Mountain College
and with emerging avant-gardes (conceptual poetry and language-centered
poetry). Additionally, he has written on transnational literature, including
the literature and culture of the Caribbean. A study of translation practice, Albiach / Celan / Reading Across Languages
is available from Annex, 2017. His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is newly
released from Fairleigh Dickinson UP, March 2019. Editing O.ARS,
1981-1993. Among
the Neighbors, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at
Buffalo is forthcoming.
His book of poetry include Fields (1995),a selection of twenty years previous work. In addition to a range
of lyrics, Fields addresses themes
related to childhood and youth in New Hampshire and Maine. It includes a
“libretto” dedicated to labor history during the period of industrialization
and establishment of the mills. An ethnographic bent characterizes much of his
work, Baroque Threads and Prolog Pages were shaped from materials
in the notebooks that were kept while living in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. A North Atlantic Wall is drawn from pilgrimage
experiences in Spain and Morocco, where he pursued portions of the Camino de
Santiago and then continued to follow trails used by Albigensian refugees
fleeing through the Pyrenees, at the conclusion of a 20-year crusade initiated
by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism. This soul journey concludes on the
peaks of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Working with a close ethnographic
focus on the rural poor, Cranberry Island
Series is a collection addressing life in the Gulf of Maine. Essays are interleaved
with a sampling of poetry dating from as early as the mid1970s, including poems of mourning for
lost companions. Roman Exercises and Essay Poems were released in the last three
years. These works are long serial poems, mixing prose and verse composition.
Wellman was born in Nashua, NH. He also identifies with
Cranberry Island, Maine, his mother’s home. He graduated from Stuttgart
American High School in Germany and the University of New Hampshire. After
military service in Germany, he earned a Doctor of Arts from the University of
Oregon. He now lives in Weare New Hampshire. He has two loving and precocious
children, each an accomplished scholar and creative talent. He has just
returned from residence in Madrid and visits to Istanbul and Morocco. The
profile would seem to be that of a
wanderer, but he identifies deeply with each of the places that have shaped his
life.
Unfortunately there was a mixup with the station and James and I could not do the show. I am hoping that James will accept to be my guest sometime in the not too distant future.
James Cook signifies and represents in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He educates and administers. He fathers-forth but presents change. He husbands. He did his student-teaching at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. He is currently the principal of Gloucester High School. He taught English for eighteen years in between. He has been the co-editor of the literary magazine Polis, and his work has appeared in Wards of the Wards, Let the Bucket Down, Jacket2, Process, Gaff, and Underutilized Species.
Works:
The Fool Reads The Varieties of Hydrozoan Experience (collaboration with artist Stevens Brosnihan)
Cartoglossographia: A Draft (A Polis Supplement)
“Some Arguments” (Openmouth Press), from Arguments & Letters (Pressed Wafer)
Daniel Bouchard’s most recent book of poems is Spider Drop. Previous works include Some Mountains Removed, Art & Literature, and The Filaments. For some years he was a tenant organizer in Cambridge with the Eviction Free Zone. He works in academic publishing at MIT.