Basie Allen is a poet and visual artist from New York City’s Lower East Side. His work carves parentheses in-between dirt and feeling. In 2020 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
JJJJJerome Ellis is a blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist. Through music, literature, performance, and video, he explores blkness, disabled speech, and music as forces of refusal, possibility, reparation, and healing. His diverse body of work includes contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure historical archives. JJJJJerome’s solo and collaborative work has been presented by Lincoln Center, The Poetry Project, and ISSUE Project Room (New York); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); REDCAT (Los Angeles); Arraymusic (Toronto); and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), among others. He is a signed artist with NNA Tapes. His work has been covered by This American Life, Artforum, Black Enso, and Christian Science Monitor. JJJJJerome collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome or Jerome & James. Their recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.
Interdisciplinary artist, musician, and writer Jaylen Strong is the librarian curator for the Playground Annex. His work has been featured at MoMA PS1, Pratt Institute, the August Wilson House, Brown University, MoCA Cleveland, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and elsewhere.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves writes ethnobotanical literary criticism, and collages detritus into heraldic devices engaging ever expanding networks of reference through the granular analytics of poetic inquiry. She is author of Close Reading as Forestry (Belladonna*, 2017), Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and is anthologized in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing (Kore Press, 2018). Greaves has most recently been published in The Brooklyn Rail. She performs frequently across a broad spectrum of venues and educational contexts and has begun working with video in response to a Spring 2020 commission from Issue Project Room for their Isolated Field Recording Series. Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, site director for Wendy's Subway reading room, and an artist-in-residence at Rauschenberg Residency, Greaves is currently based in New York City where she is Young Mother of The Florxal Review—an emerging platform of literary criticism and network science centering floral language, its instances, applications, implications, and possibilities. In Fall 2021, Greaves will enter the Literary Arts Program at Brown University as a candidate for the MFA in Poetry.
Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs. Called “a hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (Theatre Jones) and “an East Village relic” (Vogue), Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Venues include La MaMa, MoMA PS1, Gibney, Abrons Arts Center, Judson Church, PSNY, JACK, and many bars and basements. Writings on counterfeit poetics and grotesque politics have appeared in publications including The New Inquiry, Hypocrite Reader, ArtReview Asia, Folder, Viscose, and Vulture. They teach workshops on masks, rot, and mistranslation and are honored to have been a Movement Research Artist in Residence, Abrons Artist in Residence, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellow, Independence Fellow, and Pew Fellow. Together with Ming Lin they form one half of Shanzhai Lyric, and recently founded the fictional entity Canal Street Research Association. Recent research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost. @tartar.biz
Benjamin Krusling is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of a book, Glaring, and a doctoral candidate in English at CUNY.
Fury Young is a multi-disciplinary artist and the E.D./ founder of Die Jim Crow Records—the first U.S. record label for justice-impacted musicians. The label seeks to dismantle stereotypes around race and prison in the United States by amplifying the voices of their artists. Venues in which Young has performed or shown work include the following: MoMA PS1, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, Sheen Center, and The New School.
