Lark Books & Writing Studio is a homemade, family-run enterprise offering writing, literature, & history classes for all ages; a reading series at Studio Grand in Oakland, California; and a press devoted to poetry & other visionary writing.
Born in Bloomington, Illinois, Tonya M. Foster is more accurately a native of a home that no longer is what it was (as always), a home made less familiar by time, by water, by natural calamities and socially orchestrated disasters. Home=New Orleans, or rather N’Awlins—that dike-enclosed fabrication caught among the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico, three tongues that should dictate the wills and ways of the city. Now residing in Harlem, she is a co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art and a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she studies the poetics of place.
Elizabeth Treadwell is a writer, mother, teacher, curator, and publisher. Her new book, Posy: a charm almanack & atlas, launches tonight. A selection from her earlier books appears in Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. She’s been working for some time on a collection of essays, Secret Mint: an exposition; the latest of these,“Ecology,” appears in the Chicago Review’s recent forum on gendered violence in literary communities. Treadwell’s Penny Marvel & the book of the city of selfys will be published next year by Dusie and she’s now writing a new manuscript called Shimmer. She cofounded Lark with her daughters, Ivy & Gemma Jackson, in 2013 and in 2015 she’s launched #gorgonpoetics.
Sophie Mayer co-edited CATECHISM: POEMS FOR PUSSY RIOT (English Pen) with Markie Burnhope and Sarah Crewe, kickstarting the current wave of UK poetry activism. With Sarah, she also co-edited BINDERS FULL OF WOMEN and GLITTER IS A GENDER (Contraband), and co-wrote SIGNS OF THE SISTERSHIP (KFS). She reviews poetry for Shearsman Review, and film for Sight & Sound and The F-Word, and is the author and editor of several books on feminist cinema, most recently POLITICAL ANIMALS: THE NEW FEMINIST CINEMA. She has published three solo collections and four chapbooks in the UK, most recently (O) from Arc Publications, and KAOLIN is her first US collection, and the second installment of Medusa’s adventures following the self-published chapbook INCARNADINE. Her poetry appears in two major anthologies of feminist experimental writing: Infinite Difference (ed. Carrie Etter) and Out of Everywhere II (ed. Emily Critchley). Sophie teaches film studies and creative writing wherever she can, and is a queer feminist arts activist.
