Volume 13 Contributor Bios

Silence/Presence (Spring 2022)


Alex Ates is an educator, writer, and theater-artist from New Orleans, Louisiana. He is currently a teacher at Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania. MA from New York University, MFA from The University of Alabama, BA from Emerson College. iAmAlexAtes.com.

Paul Beaudoin: Composer, visual artist, educator, author, and public speaker, Paul Beaudoin is a globally recognized specialist in contemporary art and music. Over a decades long career in music composition, Paul has had the opportunity to work with Martin Boykan, Morton Feldman, Milton, Babbitt, and for many years John Cage. Born in Miami, Florida, Paul moved to Boston to pursue graduate studies at the New England Conservatory of Music and then Brandeis University. Paul continues to compose and has had a very successful career as a interdisciplinary artist – often combining his compositions with his original artwork. Paul now lives in Tallinn, Estonia.

Blanca Bercial, b. June 6, 1988, Madrid, Spain, works on the field of Contemporary Art practices and Sound Studies. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Master of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art, which culminated with an Outstanding Thesis Award from the institution. Originally from Madrid (Spain), she has been living in San Francisco since 2018, when she started her research on the artistic and sonic landscapes of this city. Previously, from 2013 to 2016, Bercial worked for different non-profit art institutions in Beijing, China, where she gained art management professional experience for her career as a curator and art writer. Bercial writes poetry and fiction for independent publications and has recently published a poetry-artist book entitled Trash Poems with La Granja Editorial (Spain). Bercial is also an art practitioner, in her work, she uses sound and poetry as an inquiry about the ways we ignore and overlook common yet unexplored spaces, unutilized hideouts embedded within place, time, and in sound.

Callous Physical Theatre: Joséphine A. Garibaldi and Paul Zmolek are dedicated to fostering collaboration through a dialogic practice of artmaking, research, and pedagogy. Callous Physical Theatre is a collaborative, project- based endeavor guided by the slogan, “We go where the work takes us.”

Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, María Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Her work combines recorded sounds from vinyl records with the electroacoustic sounds of vinyl and needle in various deteriorating phases. Accidents, coincidence, and failures are themes that unite her sound sculptures, installations, and other works with her improvised solo turntable performance practice.

Jessica Covil-Manset lives in Durham, NC, and is Publicity Assistant in Books Marketing at Duke University Press. She will graduate with her PhD in English from Duke University in May 2022. Her dissertation, titled “Toward a Different Way of Knowing/Being/Speaking: Poetic Openings and Feminist Praxis in Contemporary Works, ” examines how poetry and poiesis can be taken up to imagine and advocate for more equitable political praxis. She is also a poet herself, with her work appearing in SWWIM Every Day, Whale Road Review, Rise Up Review, and One Hand Clapping, among other journals.

Topher Lineberry is a multidisciplinary artist who is promiscuous in form and method. Their work mediates research, experience, ethics, and desire. They have shown work at galleries and museums across the country, and presented academic research at colleges, universities, and archives. Lineberry was born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, while having spent considerable parts of their life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston. They recently earned a Masters of Fine Arts at Hunter College in New York City. Lineberry currently teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC

Tom Murphy is the 2021-2022 Corpus Christi, Texas Poet Laureate. Murphy first published poems and fiction in 1986. Winner of the Charles Gordone award in both poetry and fiction. Murphy’s books & CDs: Snake Woman Moon (El Grito del Lobo Press, 2021), Pearl (FlowerSong Press, 2020), American History (Slough Press, 2017), co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather Press, 2017), chapbook, Horizon to Horizon (Strike Syndicate, 2015), CDs “Live from Del Mar College” and “Slams from the Pit” (BOW Productions, 2015, 2014). Murphy is the Langdon Review’s 2022 Writer-In-Residence. Murphy is a committee member of the Corpus Christi People’s Poetry Festival. He teaches at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi.

Aki Onda is a New York-based artist, composer and curator. He is known for his “Cassette Memories”—works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using the cassette Walkman over a span of last three decades. Onda often works in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and choreographers. For the last fifteen years, he has worked with artists such as Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Paul Clipson, Raha Raissnia, Daisuke Yokota, Annea Lockwood, Loren Conners, Alan Licht, David Toop, Rie Nakajima, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his work at The Kitchen, MoMA, P.S.1 MOMA, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Présences électronique, Bozar, ICA London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nam June Paik Art Center, and many others.

Oliver Perrott-Webb is a scholar and artist affiliated with the University of Kent. His PhD titled “Transforming Violence in Cold War America, 1945-75” was completed at the University of Kent in 2020. He now works in Student Support with students studying Music, Arts, and Architecture.

Ted Pope is a performance poet and artist. His multiple collections of poetry include Varve (2013), rEdlipsticK (2005), Waiting for Charlie Brown (2011) with Tim Peeler, plus the CD Hannibal takes Luna. His latest book of poems is Jousting from the Back of a Mule (2020).

M.C. Richards (1916-1999) was many things. She wrote poetry and philosophy, taught, translated, painted, created pottery, and more. She earned her Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. Richards had the distinction of being the only female faculty at BMC with a terminal degree. In 1945 she joined the faculty at Black Mountain College where she taught writing, translated plays, danced, studied pottery, and founded The Black Mountain Review. She was one of BMC’s most popular faculty members in the late 1940s and later wrote: “I have no criticism of Black Mountain, it was an entirely transforming, maturing and inspiring experience.” While at BMC, Richards played an essential role in maintaining community balance in the wake of Josef and Anni Albers’s resignation and the rise of Charles Olson as the college’s leader during the 1950s. Richards was a key contributor to Theater Piece No. 1, orchestrated by John Cage. Richards returned to BMC as a student in 1953 where she learned pottery and sculpture. Her experiences at BMC led her to gain an interest in communal living, which she fostered at the Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, NY; Haystack Mountain School in Portland, Maine; and Camphill Village in Copake, NY. Richards taught workshops and lectured at universities and communities until her death in 1999. Her most well-known publications include Centering in Poetry, Pottery, and the Person (1964), The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (1973), and Towards Wholeness (1980).

Gideon Young is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective and Carrboro Poets Council.Gideon’s debut haiku collection my hands full of light was published by Backbone Press, April 2021. Prince Rivers: A Leader for Justice, a biography for young readers, is forthcoming from Gibbs Smith Education. He is co-author of One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, published by Unicorn Press, 2017, winner of the Haiku Society of America Merit Award for Best Anthology. Gideon is a Fellow for A+ Schools of North Carolina, a K-12 Literacy Specialist, and stay-at-home Dad. His current work is with the Arts Education Partnership and the Education Commission of the States. Discover more at www.gideonyoung.com.

Editors

Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor and Associate Dean for Continuing Studies in the Graduate School of Wake Forest University. He teaches and writes 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.

Carissa Pfeiffer is the Development Manager at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC and a Library Specialist at Buncombe County Special Collections. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science + an Advanced Certificate in Archives from Pratt Institute.

Kate Averett is a writer and curator based in Asheville, North Carolina, where she serves as Outreach Manager at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. She also manages Hysterics, a blog and podcast highlighting stories about gender, disability, and chronic and mental illness. She received her MA in Art History from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017.