Volume 15 Contributor Bios
RE/WEAVING (Fall 2024)
Joseph Bathanti is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University. He will be inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024. In 1992, he became close friends with BMC writer Fielding Dawson and, for the remaining years of Dawson’s life, Bathanti and Dawson offered creative writing workshops every spring to prisoners confined by the NC Department of Correction.
The creators of Perpetua are Annie Blazejack, Peter Boyer, Geddes Levenson, and Alex Rubinsteyn, two artists and two computer scientists; two pairs of husband and wife; and four long-time friends. Collectively, their interests span art, art history, textiles, biology, engineering, computer science, graphics, and machine learning. Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson have a collaborative painting practice. Alex Rubinsteyn is an Assistant Professor of Genetics in the Computational Medicine Program and Lineberger Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Peter Boyer is CTO and co-founder of Higharc, a web-based homebuilding platform.
O.M. Comstock (they/them) (they/them) is currently a PhD student in art history at the University of Minnesota specializing in American craft. Their work accounts for the expansive field beyond the object, including social practice, pedagogy, artistic process, and materials. They served as independent curator for Edible at the Northern Clay Center and as co-curator for ¡PRESENTE! 50 Years of Chicano and Latino Studies at Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio. They were also the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award in Berlin, Germany where they staged participatory workshops at the Museum FLUXUS+.
With degrees in Fine Art, Education, and Literature, Anne Dickens was attracted to the history of Black Mountain College immediately. After years of attending events hosted by the museum, she began presenting workshops at the ReViewing Conference in 2022.
Alec Dunn is a writer, artist, and printer based in Portland, OR. He has designed book and record covers, political graphics, punk fliers and is a member of the Justseeds Artists Cooperative. Since 2010, he has been co-editor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture.
Amy E. Elkins is Associate Professor of English at Macalester College and a multimedia artist. She is the author of Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present (Oxford University Press, 2022). In addition to interviewing writers for Los Angeles Review of Books and for podcasts such as Novel Dialogue, she has published collaborative creative-critical work in Post-45 Contemporaries and Modernism/modernity Print+, a film-essay in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and has published scholarly essays in such places as PMLA and Contemporary Literature.
Lorna Goodison has published twelve internationally acclaimed collections of poetry and served as Jamaica’s poet laureate from 2017-2020. She also trained as a painter at the Jamaica School of Art and at the Art Students League in New York, taking classes with Black Mountain faculty member Jacob Lawrence. Goodison is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies, and has received the prestigious U.S. Windham-Campbell Prize, the Queen’s medal, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for her memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), among many other prizes and awards.
Charlott Greub is an artist, architect, urban designer, and Associate Professor of Architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Her work has been exhibited in many fine art museums across Germany. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and an MA in Architecture from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. Previously she taught architecture and art at the University of Utah, the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and the Technical University Graz, Austria.
Katie Horak is an architectural historian and principal at Architectural Resources Group (ARG), a historic preservation design and planning firm on the west coast. She leads the firm’s Los Angeles office. The collaborative, interdisciplinary work of ARG includes award winning projects on some of California’s most recognizable landmarks, including Los Angeles Union Station, the Eames House, and Wayfarers Chapel. Katie is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California in the School of Architecture’s Master of Heritage Conservation program and current president of Docomomo US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement.
Katherine Markoski is a scholar and curator based in Washington, D.C. She received a PhD in the History of Art from Johns Hopkins University and has held positions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Washington College, where she was Director of Kohl Gallery and a Lecturer in Art History. She has also taught courses on modern and contemporary art at American University, The Catholic University of America, and Oberlin College. She has published essays and reviews on American modernism, Jasper Johns, and the Judson Dance Theater as well as contributions to Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (Yale University Press, 2015), Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 (Princeton University Press, 2019), Marcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection (Prestel, 2019), and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Collection (DelMonico, 2022). In 2022, she co-curated America: Between Dreams and Realities and also co-authored the accompanying catalogue (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2022). As a recipient of a Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Smithsonian American Art Museum Postdoctoral Fellowship, Markoski explored the significance of notions of community to artistic practice at Black Mountain College. At present, she is an Adjunct Professor in Art History at George Washington University and American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Maria Molteni (They/ Them, b. 1983 Nashville, TN) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and mystic, based in MA and TN. Their formal training is rooted in painting + printmaking and athletics + dance (trained by a former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), but their work has grown to incorporate deep research, experimental education, and social magic. They are an independent scholar of intentional communities and matriarchal societies, specializing in honeybees and the Shaker “Era of Manifestations”. Having laid the foundations for the community-centered basketball court painting movement with their collective New Craft Artists in Action, they playfully position their themself as if a P.E. Coach of visionary movements like Black Mountain College.
David Peifer has been a professor of mathematics at UNC Asheville for 30 years. His mathematical research — on low dimensional topology — is directly related to work begun by Max Dehn, who taught at Black Mountain College. Recently David’s research has addressed questions concerning the role of the sciences at Black Mountain College. For more than a decade, David has been a board member of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Besides research, he enjoys spending time with friends, mountain biking, playing music, and roaming the local mountains searching for wildflowers.
Always a poet, Richard Edwin Roberts (1919-2007) first published in the 1940’s (an anthology, Spring Comes in Many Ways and Duty to Death, LD. in Oscar Williams’ The War Poets). He continued to write during his two years at Black Mountain College later that decade. He was active publishing again in the 1970’s – 1980’s with works in The Christian Science Monitor, The Educational Forum, and High Country News. A native of Montana, his love of nature and all things wild is reflected in his poems, many of which were written during the last three decades of his life spent in a log home that he built off the grid in Montana. Posthumous works have appeared in Big Sky Journal and Cirque.
Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Program in African American Studies. As one of the nation’s distinguished scholars, the Phi Beta Kappa Society named Dean Walker the 2023-2024 Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Visiting Scholar. His research, teaching, and public scholarship span the areas of American and African American social and religious thought, ethics, and religion and American public life. Dean Walker is author and editor of several books and has published over seventy articles, essays, and book chapters in a wide variety of scholarly journals and publications.
Editors
Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor Emeritus of Wake Forest University. He has taught and continues to write and consult about American communities of ideals, particularly liberal arts colleges and utopian movements, as well as the conservation of the natural and built landscapes that tell the stories of how American culture developed.
Kira Houston is Outreach Coordinator at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. He graduated from Clark University with a BA in Art History and Spanish.
Special thanks to Isabel Baggett for their work as a Production Assistant for this volume.