ARE YOU EVEN READY for OS FEST 2020?

Hosted by team OS in the space of our wonderful San Antonio community partner, Sala Diaz!!!

Outside if the weather behaves, inside if we need to.
It's what happens when decentralized horizontal community converges and connects, like a charging center against the forces that would bring us/you down.

We say fuck that noise. We say join us. We say build a new model to make the old one obsolete*. (*And we quote Bucky Fuller when we say that).

A mega celebration of possibility, community, and resistance.
MORE DETAILS TO COME, bios and info below.

7pm start for readings, followed by time to decompress and be together. free. no cover, no expectation of buying drinks or standing for hours, but drinks and snacks available by donation. come give yourself what you need.

performative social capital grubbing allergic.
#nogatekeepers

Featuring:
jp howard
berry grass
heidi reszies
orchid tierney
alan peleaz lopez
brent armendinger
melissa eleftherion
amanda galvan huynh
james lowell brunton
rachel mcleod kaminer
peter milne greiner
constantine jones
kenning jp garcía
danielle pafunda
stephanie heit
rocío carlos
joe milazzo
jp pluecker
zoe tuck
&
elæ


jp howard
OS class of '15, "Say/Mirror"

JP Howard’s debut collection, SAY/MIRROR, is a dialogue of history and memory, reflecting on and integrating vintage photographs of her mother, Ruth King (a fairly well known African American runway model in Harlem during the 1940’s and 1950’s) with snapshots from the poet’s own childhood. This manuscript began to emerge when Howard gained access to a large collection of her mother’s modeling photos, as well as some local Harlem magazine and newspaper clippings, and was thereby offered a window into her heyday, begging comparison to and recollection of a complex motherhood away from the spotlight. Here is a project that seeks to use poetry as both memoir and biography, alongside the evocative nostalgia of vintage image—a map from which Howard has pieced together the bright but uneven path of growing up in the shadow of a “model” mother. The atlas of SAY/MIRROR charts the islands of the poet and her mother’s overlapping lives—unearthing the shared experiences of a single parent and only child, coming to terms with each other in the 1970’s and 80’s: a socio-historical-emotional retelling of the life of a diva through a daughter’s eyes, with both parent and child learning to navigate the rocky terrain therein.

JP Howard is an educator, literary activist, curator and community builder. Her debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System), was a Lambda Literary finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*) and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians--We Are the Revolution! JP is a 2020 featured author in Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program and was a Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism finalist. JP is featured in the Lesbian Poet Trading Card Series from Headmistress Press and has received fellowships and grants from Cave Canem, VONA, Lambda, Astraea and Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). She curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a NY-based forum offering writers a monthly venue to collaborate. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The Academy of American Poets poem-a-day Series, Apogee Journal, The Feminist Wire, Split this Rock, Muzzle Magazine, The Best American Poetry Blog and others.

berry grass
OS class of '19, "Hall of Waters"
https://berrygrass.com/hall-of-waters

HALL OF WATERS is an attempt to demythologize the rural American Midwest through the specific example of the author’s hometown, Excelsior Springs, MO. Through lyric essay & memoir, the book seeks to examine & undercut the inherent settler white supremacy of the Midwestern small-town, to deromanticize the nostalgia for land & place that is the hallmark of Midwestern art, & to think about what it was like growing up queer & trans in such a toxic environment.

Berry Grass is originally from rural Missouri, got their MFA in Tuscaloosa, and now lives & teaches writing in Philadelphia. They are the author of Hall of Waters (forthcoming in 2019 from The Operating System). Their essays and poems appear in DIAGRAM, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, BOAAT, Phoebe, Bedfellows, The Wanderer, and Sonora Review, among other publications. They are a 2019 nominee for the Krause Essay Prize. Their chapbook, Collector's Item, was published in 2014 by Corgi Snorkel Press. They host Tragic: the Gathering -- an occasional transgender literature reading series in Philadelphia. When they aren't reading submissions as Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, they're embodying what happens when a Virgo watches too much professional wrestling.

heidi reszies
OS class of '19, "Illusory Borders"
https://squareup.com/market/the-operating-system/item/illusory-borders-by-heidi-reszies

'Illusory Borders' is grounded in a process that incorporates fragments, lists, and reflections on ‘woman’s work.’ It is inspired, in part, by lists I discovered in a woman’s day-planner from the 1940’s (a DailyAide Silent Secretary), as well as an erasure I created a few years ago from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons — in particular, the section titled “Objects.” My erasure became a list poem which I explored/enacted in different ways over time, eventually creating a series of prose poems/a long poem stitched together by fragments that I’d cut and collaged from my original list. This series/long poem seeks to expand liminal spaces, marginality, the unsaid, the footnotes of dailyness and everyday objects, as well as my own necessity to work in a series: continually ending and beginning.

Heidi Reszies is a poet and transdisciplinary artist. She is the author of three chapbooks; her poetry and poetics have appeared in journals including The Volta, La Vague Journal, Forklift Ohio, Gramma, BOAAT, LEVELER, Salt Hill, SUSAN/the Journal, and Queen of Cups. She is the founding creator/curator of Artifact Press, and currently resides in Richmond, Virginia. Find her at heidireszies.com.

orchid tierney
OS class of '19, "a year of misreading the wildcats", Core Member / Volunteer.
https://squareup.com/store/the-operating-system/item/a-year-of-misreading-the-wildcats

'a year of misreading the wildcats' unravels a sprawling, year-long encounter with petroleum that began with a strip of plastic, caught between the branches of a maidenhair tree. This hybrid collection of poetry, prose and Polaroid photography drills the archive for film scores, fiction, and scholarship to recover the intertextual saturations of plastic and plankton, oil and oceans.
Toggling between phantom islands and garbage gyres, the Pacific and Pennsylvania, a year of misreading the wildcats documents the impossible project of both environmental literature and photography to critique and catalogue disaster. This collection is a refusal for a narrative, where climate change denies the islands’ one.

Orchid Tierney is a poet, prose writer, and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand, currently residing in Philadelphia. She has been published widely in the U.S. and Aotearoa in journals like Western Humanities Review, Jacket2, Deluge, Pacific Literary Review, Landfall, and Brief. She is the author of four chapbooks: Brachiation (Dunedin: GumTree Press, 2012), The World in Small Parts (Chicago: Dancing Girl Press, 2012), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF, 2017), and ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, forthcoming). In 2016, TrollThread published her full-length dictation of the Book of Margery Kempe, Earsay.

alan peleaz lopez
OS class of '20, "Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien"
http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/product/intergalactic-travels-poems-from-a-fugitive-alien/

Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is an experimental poetry collection that renders an intimate portrait of growing up undocumented in the United States. Through the use of collages, photographs, emails, and immigration forms, Alan Pelaez Lopez formulates theories of fugitivity that position the Trans*Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. Although themes of isolation and unbelonging are at the forefront of the book, the poet doesn’t see belonging to U.S. society as a liberatory practice. Instead, Pelaez Lopez urges readers to question their inheritance and acceptance of “settler rage, settler fear, and settler citizenship,” so that they can actively address their participation in everyday violences that often go unnoticed. As the title invokes, Intergalactic Travels breaks open a new galaxy where artists of color are the warriors that manifest the change that is needed not only to survive, but thrive.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. They are the author of the art and poetry collection, 'Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien' (The Operating System, 2020), and the chapbook, 'to love and mourn in the age of displacement' (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” as well as published in Best New Poets, Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, Puerto Del Sol, Everyday Feminism, & elsewhere. Pelaez Lopez has received fellowships and/or residencies from Submittable, the Museum of the African Diaspora, VONA/Voices, and UC Berkeley. They live in Oakland, CA & the internet (as @MigrantScribble).

brent armendinger
OS class of '19, "Street Gloss", Core Member / Volunteer.
https://brentarmendinger.com/books/streetgloss/

In this book, Brent Armendinger follows the work of five contemporary Argentinian poets into the streets of Buenos Aires, attempting to map the ways a word might be an echo of the city itself. Interested in the surface areas of language and the generative potential of failure in translations, the author follows a set of procedures oriented simultaneously in the lines as well as in the streets of the city, gathering impressions, associations, and language through unpredictable encounters with the place and its inhabitants. Notes from these encounters appear interlaced, here, between the original poems in Spanish and their translations. Featuring poems by Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Diana Bellessi, and Néstor Perlongher, and artwork by Alpe Romero.

Brent Armendinger was born in Warsaw, NY, and studied at Bard College and the University of Michigan, where he received an Avery Hopwood Award in Poetry. His most recent book is Street Gloss, a hybrid work of site-specific poetry and experimental translation, featuring Argentinian writers Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi (The Operating System, 2019). Brent is also the author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and two chapbooks, Undetectable (New Michigan Press, 2009) and Archipelago (Noemi Press, 2009). His poems and translations have appeared in many journals, including Anomaly, Asymptote, Aufgabe, Bloom, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Ghost Proposal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, LIT, Puerto del Sol, Volt, and Web Conjunctions. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Blue Mountain Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Community of Writers. Brent is an associate professor in English and World Literature at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the L.A. Tenants Union.

melissa eleftherion
OS class of '18, "field guide to autobiography"
https://squareup.com/store/melissa-eleftherion/item/field-guide-to-autobiography-1

How does a person begin to enumerate the many fragments & fractals that comprise a life? field guide is an attempt at memoir through the lens of various animals & minerals including katydids, wrens, abalone shells, and apple trees.

"This isn’t conventional nature poetry; it’s a poetry that helps us understand the future and the world that embeds us." - Juliana Spahr

Melissa Eleftherion is a writer, librarian, and a visual artist. She grew up in Brooklyn, dropped out of high school, and went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from Mills College and an MLIS from San Jose State University. She is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & six chapbooks: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (Dusie, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2017), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2017) & little ditch (above/ground press, 2018). Founder of the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange for San Francisco State University, Melissa now lives in Mendocino County where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, & curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

amanda galvan huynh
OS class of '19, "of color: poets' ways of making" (Ed., w/ Luisa A. Igloria)
https://squareup.com/store/the-operating-system/item/of-color-poets-ways-of-making-amanda-galvan-huynh-luisa-a-igloria-editors

How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of “what one knows” have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others?

These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we’ve learned—each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu—this anthology project was born.

In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish—that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit. Instead, let there be a steady effort to compile lore and take inventory of strategies, intersections, bridges; to map our histories, to sight possibilities for the future.

AMANDA GALVAN HUYNH (she/her) is a Mexican American writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs of Brujería (Big Lucks September 2019) and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics (The Operating System 2019). Amanda has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. She was a 2016 AWP Intro Journal Project Award Winner, 2018 Best of the Net Winner, a finalist for the 2015 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poetry can be read in print and online journals such as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, The Southampton Review, and others.

james lowell brunton
OS class of '19, "Opera on TV"
https://squareup.com/market/the-operating-system/item/opera-on-tv-james-lowell-brunton

'Opera on TV' is a collection of experimental poetry/theory that examines the role of aesthetic practice in political subject formation, particularly for queer and trans subjects. The book addresses the role of state institutions and economic structures in making our lives intelligible — from our interpersonal relationships to our political identities and artistic endeavors. Many of the poems blend explorations of queer feminist aesthetics and politics with musicality and lyricism, in a variety of forms, such as prose blocks, lists, and transcripts. Drawing connections among themes of beauty, nostalgia, ideology, and liberation, 'Opera on TV' suggests ways to complicate the notion of art as a mode of political education.

James Brunton’s poems and experimental writing appear in Denver Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, Hotel Amerika, and other journals. He is the author, with Russell Evatt, of The Future Is a Faint Song (Dream Horse Press, 2014). James teaches critical theory in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

rachel mcleod kaminer & rocio carlos
OS class of '18, "attendance"

Reading 'Attendance' trains your attention on plants and animals until you can’t stop noticing them. It’s a way of moving through the natural world—which turns out to include the whole world. An almanac, a logbook, a devotional, a witness statement, poetry. A documentary not in the sense of capturing but in the sense of being a creature paying attention to the world we already live in. It’s a hybrid text: One year of two people reaching their arms across styles and genres. At times notes, at times lists, or run-on sentences, or poems, or things that want to be poems, but always plants, and always animals. The words are offered up with no correction or with the revision exposed. This is writing that includes where it comes from or writing that painfully doesn’t become.

We hold so many questions about love and attention and violence.

(A documentary work of attending to the year. The term was born from Rocío’s description of going outside every morning to check on every thing that grows in her backyard. Together we decided one of us would attend to the flora and one of us would attend to the fauna. Of course, we found it difficult to stay in our own lanes. The whole world crept in: Family, friends and community; politics, atrocity, tragedy; literally the world. The book is presented in the notes and poems of both poets, beginning with a month in the voice of Rachel alternating with the same month in the voice of Rocío.)

Rocío Carlos attends from the land of the chaparral. Born and raised in Los Ángeles, she is widely acknowledged to have zero short term memory but know the names of trees. Her poems have appeared in Chaparral, Angel City Review, The Spiral Orb and Cultural Weekly. She was selected as a 2003 Pen Center “Emerging Voices” fellow. She collaborates as a partner at Wirecutter Collective and is a teacher of the language arts. Her favorite trees are the olmo (elm)and aliso (sycamore).

Rachel McLeod Kaminer grew up in the Blue Ridge of the Appalachian Mountains near the French Broad River. She lives in the Los Ángeles River basin and works up the Arroyo Seco in the Hahamongna alluvial basin. Her book of poetry As in the dark, descend was published in 2016 with Writ Large Press; she’s also a partner-in-crime at Wirecutter Collective. Rachel’s bread job is in education, but she’s just as likely to be editing, reading, or messaging on tumblr.

peter milne greiner
OS class of '17, "Lost City Hydrothermal Field," deputy editor since 4evr
https://squareup.com/market/the-operating-system/item/lost-city-hydrothermal-field-peter-milne-greiner

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as John McPhee, Rachel Carson, Timothy Morton, Frank White, and others, 'Lost City Hydrothermal Field' explores philosophies of nature old and new through poetry and science fiction. The anthropocene crisis and the crisis of humanity-as-invasive-species are framed in this text as global, as well as personal, misadventures. A mixed-genre work, readers encounter poems and stories—islands and continents—in a rapid succession of speculative geography, and readers are invited to join its beleaguered, psychozoic populations.

Peter Milne Greiner’s work has been featured in Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Fence, SciArt Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been lauded by the likes of Jeff VanderMeer and Claire L. Evans. He studied poetry at The New School under Sekou Sundiata, and is a scholar of the history of the Roaring Forties. In July of 2013 he sent a poem into space through the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel Valley, California. He is the author of the chapbook 'Executive Producer Chris Carter.' 'Lost City Hydrothermal Field' is his first full length collection.

constantine jones
OS class of '20, "In Still Rooms." Core Member / Volunteer.

'In Still Rooms' is a poetic memoir disguised as an ancient Greek tragedy disguised as a haunted house novella. Set in an old house in rural East Tennessee, three generations of a Greek-American family mourn the loss of a matriarch who reveals herself to each of them in unique ways. Regardless of the family's comings and goings, the reader remains always in the house. In this house, religion, mythology, and superstition all exist at once. In this house, saints speak to mothers from their plaques on the wall; ancient deities manifest in the minds of children; a chorus of those who have previously died there periodically address the reader directly; and ultimately, the house itself begins to speak.

Constantine Jones is a queer Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee and currently housed in Brooklyn. They teach creative writing at the City College of New York, where they earned an MFA. Their work has found homes in the PEN Poetry Series, Blood Tree, Stone Pacific, Hematopoiesis and Fugue, and has been displayed or performed at various venues across the city.

kenning jp garcía
contributing editor / team OS

Kenning JP García is a diarist and the author of OF (What Place Meant).

danielle pafunda
OS class of '20, "Spite"
http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/product/spite/

Danielle Pafunda’s Spite reimagines André Breton’s Nadja in conversation with his Communicating Vessels and My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed. Spite speaks through the melancholy bohemian dream girl. No longer gateway to the masculine artist’s destiny, Nadja becomes agent of her own evolution. The poems consider what happens when we no longer equate the hospital with the tomb, but understand it as generative site. Nadja rolls her ex-lover on a gurney through a city on fire. She trawls construction sites, nurses’ brows, and apple trees. We pick up the tin-can extension, wreck ourselves on the delirious island, consider the dishonest belief that every day must include / pain, and descend a massive swath of silk. Spite has no fear of ugly feelings, nor of wonder.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of eight other books of prose and poetry: 'The Book of Scab' (Ricochet Editions), 'Beshrew' (Dusie Press), 'The Dead Girls Speak in Unison' (Bloof Books), 'Natural History Rape Museum' (Bloof Books), 'Manhater' (Dusie Press), 'Iatrogenic' (Noemi Press), 'My Zorba' (Bloof Books), and 'Pretty Young Thing' (Soft Skull Press). She's published two chapbooks: 'Cram' (Essay Press) and 'When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of This Corrupt Land' (Birds of Lace). Her work has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and a number of anthologies and journals. She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.

stephanie heit
OS class of '17, "the color she gave gravity"
https://squareup.com/store/the-operating-system/item/the-color-she-gave-gravity-stephanie-heit

'The Color She Gave Gravity' traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind, these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and by experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations.

Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a mad activist and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her debut poetry collection, The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) was a Nightboat Poetry Prize finalist and explores the seams of language, movement and mental health difference. Poetry from her current project Psych Murders, a hybrid memoir poem, appears in the Zoeglossia disability poetry anthology, We Are Not Your Metaphor (Squares and Rebels, 2019) and in Bombay Gin, Anomaly, In Corpore Sano, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Her work most recently appeared in Ecotone, Midwestern Gothic, Dunes Review, About Place, Lime Hawk, Typo, Streetnotes, Nerve Lantern, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, Spoon Knife Anthology, Theatre Topics, and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a community arts space, with her partner and collaborator, Petra Kuppers.

joe milazzo
OS class of '19, "from being things, to equalities in all"
https://squareup.com/store/the-operating-system/item/from-being-things-to-equalities-in-all-joe-milazzo

'From Being Things, To Equalities In All' is a sequence of 24 couplets (1 per page), the construction of which has been guided by syntactical, semantic and graphical constraint. The results are semi-concrete and utterly political — a language capable of acknowledging the degree to which it is both private refuge and public domain, and a language aware of its situation vis-a-vis history’s horizon.

Joe Milazzo the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie and two collections of poetry: The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places. He is also an Associate Editor for Southwest Review, a Contributing Editor at Entropy, and the proprietor of Imipolex Press, a tiny publishing house dedicated to the promotion and preservation of heteronymic literature. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is www.joe-milazzo.com.

jp pluecker
OS class of '20, "en el entre / in the between: Selected Antena Writings," (Antena Aire, w/ Jen Hofer)
http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/product/https-squareup-com-store-the-operating-system-item-en-el-entre-in-the-between-antena-aire-selected-writings/

Where does one person’s language end and another’s begin? Where does language live in our bodies? What is radical listening? What do we hear when we practice it, and how does it spark us to communicate differently? What does cross-language activist practice have to learn from experiments in poetic expression? Where might writing processes contribute to and be informed by social justice organizing efforts across language, race, nationality, immigration status, and other kinds of patently false yet perilously real borders? During the first ten years of their collaborative practice, Antena Aire founders Jen Hofer and John Pluecker have co-created manifestos, how-to guides, performances scores and improvised poems, translations, and essays—working from their home cities of Los Angeles and Houston respectively— which for the first time are collected here in one volume.

Antena Aire (initially known as Antena) is a language justice and language experimentation collaborative founded in 2010 by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker. Antena Aire activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena Aire has exhibited, published, performed, organized, advocated, translated, curated, interpreted, and/or instigated with numerous groups and institutions in the U.S. and across the Americas. Antena Aire publishes bilingual chapbooks and pamphlets through our Libros Antena Books imprint, and collaborates with Ugly Duckling Presse on the Señal Series of Latin American literature in translation. Antena Aire works in conjunction with two sister collectives dedicated to local language justice advocacy and organizing, Antena Houston and Antena Los Ángeles.

John Pluecker works with language, writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. In 2010, they co-founded the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and in 2015 the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JP’s undisciplinary work is informed by experimental poetics, language justice, radical aesthetics/politics, and cross-border/cross-language cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including most recently Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). JP’s book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press. JP is a member of the Macondo Writing Workshop and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more. More info at www.johnpluecker.com and www.antenaantena.org.

zoe tuck
Core Member / Volunteer, Liminal Lab / Threshold Academy co-coordinator.

Zoe Tuck is a queer transgender poet based in Northampton, MA. Author of Terror Matrix and Soft Investigations, co-curator of the But Also reading series, she offers poetry workshops and other services such as literary publicity and marketing, small press consultation, tarot readings, and more. A former member of the editorial collectives of Timeless, Infinite Light and of Hold: A Journal, she also continues to be available for editing services and manuscript consultation. She is currently working on building the Threshold Academy, an experiment in radical pedagogy and a future bookstore + alternative educational space, in Western Massachusetts. Support her as she writes her epic poem, "the book of bella," at https://www.patreon.com/zoetuck.

elæ [lynne DeSilva-Johnson]
Core Member / Volunteer, Founder / Creative Director.
"Collaborative Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide," "Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular"

https://squareup.com/store/the-operating-system/item/collaborative-precarity-bodyhacking-work-book-and-resource-guide

ELÆ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] is a multimodal creative practitioner, cultural scholar and educator. Their work employs relational aesthetics, text, installation, sound design, performance, digital tech and speculative theory in addressing the somatic, ontological intersections between persons, forms of language, and systems, as well as the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent and forthcoming features include Protagony at The Exponential Festival, How to Human: Resistance Protocols as part of Performing Knowledge at the Segal Center, the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Library & Lab for the Anarchist Bookfair, Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, and an onsite field lab installation for bioart/AI collaborative team APRIORI at Ars Electronica / STWST 2019. Recent and forthcoming publications include Vestiges, Big Echo, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and many more. They are the creator of many publication projects including Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, and the forthcoming Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular. Collaborative publications include Boddy Oddy Oddy, an ekphrastic project with painter Georgia Elrod, and The Collaborative Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide, with Cory Tamler and Storm Budwig. They are a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, as well as a frequent facilitator for workshops in schools and community organizations. They curate and host events regularly in New York and elsewhere, and are the Founder/Creative Director of The Operating System / Liminal Lab as well as lead R&D for the Brooklyn node of the Mycelium Network Society. Use this door to their rhizomatic links on IG: @thetroublewithbartleby