Photo by Jo Mariner
CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. The author of 9 books of poetry and essays, the latest is titled While Standing In Line For Death and is forthcoming from Wave Books (September 2017). He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Ojbect and Ucross. For his books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
Sophie Robinson is a poet. She lives between London and Norwich, where she teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Recent work has appeared in n+1, The White Review, Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail and Ploughshares.
Born in 1977 in New York, Melissa Buzzeo has worked as a counselor, curator, professor and palm reader. She is the author of the full-length collections THE DEVASTATION (2015, Nightboat Books), FOR LIGHT AND SOUND (2013, Les Figues), WHAT BEGAN US (2007, Leon Works) and FACE (2009, Book Thug). In addition she is the author of three chapbooks: In the Garden of The Book, City M. and Near: a luminescence.
Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar devoted to the cross–contamination of these modes of inquiry, on the page and off. Her books include FROM DAME QUICKLY (Litmus Press, 2009), Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated on multidisciplinary performance works with a wide range of other writers, musicians, architects, code artists, and dancers. She grew up on Long Island. THE REPUBLIC OF EXIT 43 was patched together, performed, rehearsed and revised from within the financial crisis between homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Rome, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where she teaches.