Art Spiegelman

Frank X Walker

Nick Montfort

Cecelia Condit

Saul Williams

Mark Amerika

Stuart Moulthrop

Deena Larsen

Zeitgeist

Kanser with More Than Lights

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus— which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. In his lecture “Comix 101.1" Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for “comics echo the way the brain works." Spiegelman’s work also includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology, Breakdowns (Fall 2008); it includes an autobiographical comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself, entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; as well as a new children’s book (published with Toon Books), called Jack and the Box. Additionally, in preparation is a book with a DVD about the making of Maus, entitled Meta Maus. In 2009 Maus was chosen by the Young Adult Library Association as one of its recommended titles for all students (the list is revised every 5 years and used by educators and librarians across the country). McSweeney’s has published a collection of three of his sketchbooks entitled Be a Nose. A major exhibition of his work was arranged by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the "15 Masters of 20th Century Comics" exhibit (November 2005). In 2005, Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and—the American equivalent—played himself on an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2008.

Frank X Walker (http://www.frankxwalker.com/) is the author of four poetry collections: When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry, Walker serves as Writer in Residence and lecturer of English at Northern Kentucky University and is the proud editor and publisher of PLUCK!, the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture.

Nick Montfort (http://nickm.com/) is an associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The digital media writing projects Montfort has undertaken include the blog Post Position, where he writes about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; ppg256, a 256-character poetry generator; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare: A Novel Machine. His work has been presented in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Irvine, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington D.C. and in Brazil, Canada, England, Mexico, Norway, Spain, and Taiwan. He is also one of the featured authors/programmers interviewed in Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary, which will premiere in Boston on March 26, 2010.

Artist Cecelia Condit studied sculpture at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA; received a B.F.A. in sculpture at the Philadelphia College of Art, and an M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She has received numerous awards for her work including fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the American Film Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mary L. Nohl Fund. Her videos have been widely shown internationally at institutions and festivals including the Biennale de Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI. She is currently Professor of Film and Video and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Condit's work will be on exhibit at the North Dakota Museum of Art during the Writers Conference; it can also be viewed on her blog http://www.ceceliacondit.com/.

Gifted and fiery, Saul Williams (http://www.saulwilliams.com/) is a former Grand Slam Champion who continually explores social consciousness with passionate emotion through his poetry. His artistry is raw and expressive, and always capable of provoking deep introspective thought in hopes of bringing about change. Williams brings his remarkable success to books, film, television, and music. He co-wrote and starred in Slam, a Sundance Film Festival and Camera d’Or Cannes Film Festival winner. He has also been on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and is a recurring character on UPN’s hit show, Girlfriends. With three albums to his credit, Williams’s music provides a sonic soundscape for his already rhythmic and expansive poetry. His debut album, Amethyst Rock Star, earned him great critical acclaim and his September '04 self-titled release has received just as many accolades. As the author of four unique collections of poems, including She and The Seventh Octave, his voice adds value and intensity to the weight of words. His newest book, The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop, gives readers a tour of the history of hip-hop.

Mark Amerika (http://www.markamerika.com/), who has been named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, has had four retrospectives of his digital art work. Amerika is the Publisher of Alt-X, which he founded in 1993 and the electronic book review. Publishers Weekly has called Alt-X "the literary publishing model of the future." He is also the author of three published novels, two edited anthologies, and two artist ebooks. His first novel, The Kafka Chronicles, is now in its third printing. His second novel, Sexual Blood, has been translated into Italian as Sangue Sessuale. Amerika is also the producer, director, and writer of an ongoing series of limited edition feature-length films that are part of his Foreign Film Series. The first film released in the series is Immobilité. Immobilité was featured in the Fall 2008 Intermedia Programme at the Tate Modern and is scheduled for solo exhibitions in New York and Athens, Greece, in 2009. Amerika is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he is developing the TECHNE practice-based research initiative.

Stuart Moulthrop (http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/) Stuart Moulthrop is an award-winning artist, writer, and scholar of digital culture. He is currently Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, where he teaches in the Bachelor of Science in Simulation and Digital Entertainment, as well as the Master's and Doctoral programs. His electronic literary works, beginning with the hypertext fiction Victory Garden in 1991, have drawn widespread critical attention. In a front-page article in the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Robert Coover called Victory Garden "the new benchmark" for digital literature and named Moulthrop the foremost practitioner and theorist of the craft. Coover later included this work, along with Michael Joyce's afternoon and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, in his "golden age" of early hypertext. Later projects, including "Hegirascope" (1995 and 1997), "Reagan Library" (1999), "Pax" (2003), "Deep Surface" (2007), and "Under Language" (2007), have been subjects of numerous studies and commentaries. "Pax" was selected for an international juried show. "Reagan Library" is included in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, the first anthology of digital literature. "Deep Surface" and "Under Language" won the international Ciutat de Vinarós Prize, the former for narrative and the latter for poetry (ex aequo with Isaias Herrero Florensa's Universo Molecula). He has been a visiting fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, and an adviser to the Information Technology University of Copenhagen.

Deena Larsen (http://www.deenalarsen.net/) has long since given up on shaking the new media addiction. She has published numerous works and helps create more addicts to this new forum with chats and workshops, as well as working with the Electronic Literature Organization and trAce. She has published over 30 works, ranging from in depth mystery novels like Disappearing Rain to poems and short stories. These appear in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, Blue Moon Review. Her latest projects include collaborating in pageSpace and a recent artist in residency at the Tristram Shandy Hall, which produced Shandean ambles, forthcoming in Drunken Boat.

Zeitgeist is a new music ensemble based in St. Paul, Minn whose mission is to enliven today's music and expand its audience with performances that absorb, stimulate and hearten. A family of musicians animated by a spirit of adventure and collaboration, Zeitgeist has been presenting works of substance with passion and integrity for more than 30 years. With unique instrumentation of two percussion, piano and woodwinds, Zeitgeist continually strives to forge new links between musicians and music lovers through live performances, commissions, collaborations, recordings and dialogue with audiences. Zeitgeist's events invite listeners to join in an experience both intimate and challenging—an experience charged with the excitement of the never-before-heard!

One of the longest established new music groups in the country, Zeitgeist commissions and presents a wide variety of new music for audiences in the Twin Cities and on tour. Always eager to explore new artistic frontiers, Zeitgeist collaborates with poets, choreographers, directors, visual artists and sound artists of all types to create imaginative new work that challenges the boundaries of traditional chamber music. The members of Zeitgeist are: Heather Barringer, percussion; Patti Cudd, percussion; Pat O’Keefe, woodwinds; Shannon Wettstein, piano.

Zeitgeist has maintained a fierce dedication to the creation of new music for the past three decades, commissioning more than 150 works and collaborating with emerging composers and some of the finest established composers, including Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Dresher, Mark Applebaum, Scott Lindroth, Pamela Madsen, Edie Hill, Libby Larsen, Arthur Kreiger and Jin Hi Kim. Zeitgeist’s upcoming commissioning projects include For the Birds, a chamber suite by Victor Zupanc based on a series of poems by humorist Kevin Kling, and Propell by Mary Ellen Childs, an opera for Nautiilus Music Theater and Zeitgeist that employs instrumental music, video imagery and staging to explore the nature of flight and the infinite.

Further, Zeitgeist has earned an international reputation for superb craftsmanship and virtuosic performance of contemporary music. Recent highlights include a Walker Art Center premiere of Pine Eyes by Martin Bresnick (2006), 2007 tour of the Czech Republic with a production of Shape Shifting: Shades of Transformation with composer Scott Miiller and poet Philippe Costaglioli, and the 30th anniversary celebration, Glancing Back/Charging Forward: 30 Years of Groundbreaking Music featuring the world premieres of works by 30 Minnesota composers.

Zeitgeist has released recordings including In Bone-Colored Light, She is a Phantom (music of Harold Budd), A Decade (music of Frederic Rzewski), Intuitive Leaps (music of Terry Riley), Eric Stokes (music of Eric Stokes), If Tigers Were Clouds (featuring the music of experimental women composers), and Shape Shifting (music by Scott Miller, poetry by Philippe Costaglioli).

Kanser with More Than Lights: Hailing from the South-Side of Minneapolis, Kanser is one of the most decorated underground hip-hop acts to come out of a city known for its endless pool of talent. Kanser is comprised of New MC (Zach Combs) and Unicus (Harry Philibert) on the mic with DJ Elusive (Erik Dorf) laying the tracks. In addition to sharing the stage with many Minneapolis legends, such as Atmosphere (Rhymesayers), POS (Rhymesayers/Doomtree), and Heiruspecs (Razor and Tie), they’ve also been known to rock the mic with many of today’s chart toppers like Cee Lo (of Gnarls Barkley), Clipse, and Juvenile.

They have a resume that spans nearly ten years. It began in 1997 with their Minneapolis classic “NOW”, which was recorded on Ant of Atmosphere’s 4-Track. Numerous singles and six full lengths later, we await the release of their newest full length album, “Future Retro Legacy”. The album boasts exclusive production by Big Jess of the Unknown Prophets and features guest spots by Midwest underground greats like AD of The Crest and Pee Wee Dred of Dred I Dread. The result: a soulful and classically Minneapolis sound that remind us why we liked Midwest underground hip-hop in the first place.