In 2010, Belladonna* formed a cooperative board with each member taking specific responsibilities so that the ongoing readings and publications can proceed. Presently the members are:

 

Martine Bellen is the author of six collections of poetry, including GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil Press); THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press); TALES OF MURASAKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and PLACES PEOPLE DARE NOT ENTER (Potes & Poets Press). A bilingual collection of her poetry has been published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes). She has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! OPERA NO-OPERA, a pioneering collective work, that's been co-composed and performed by creators from around the globe. For more information, visit www.ah-opera.org. Her cross-genre novella 2X(SQUARED) was published by BlazeVOX [books]. She has been a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy; the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; and the American Academy of Poets Award.
Photograph by Michael Eastman.

Click here for Martine's website.

Cara Benson is the author of two books: (made) (BookThug, 2010) and Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, forthcoming 2011). Her chapbook "Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation" won the bpNichol Prize. “The Secret of Milk,” a treatise on the lyric possibilities of advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness, is forthcoming from eohippus labs Tract Series. She teaches poetry in a NY State Prison.

Click here for Cara's website.

Tisa Bryant

Caroline Crumpacker is a Gemini. She lives in so-called “mid-upstate New York” with her lovely daughter Coco and her partner the puppeteer Roberto Rossi. A bit further upstate, she runs The Millay Colony for the Arts, an artists’ residency program. She was a founding Poetry Editor of Fence magazine, an editor of the French/American online magazine Double Change, and a contributing editor for Circumference magazine. She is also the curator of the Bilingual Reading Series/World of Poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club. She has published the chapbooks Recherche Theories (Etherdome Press, 2010) and The Institution in Her Twilight (Dusie Kollectiv, 2011). Her poetry, translations and reviews also appear in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman, 2007); American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007); and Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press, 2004).

Marcella Durand is the author of Deep Eco Pré, a collaboration with poet Tina Darragh, available as a PDF; AREA (Belladonna Books, 2008); and Traffic & Weather, a site-specific book-length poem written during a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Futurepoem Books, 2008). She was a 2009 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the 2010-2011 Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice for the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a 2011-2013 Fellow at the Black Earth Institute. Her poem “Scale Shift” was recently set to music by composer Jonathan Newman and performed in Okazaki, Japan, by the Nagoya Academic Winds and Chorus; excerpts from the same poem were incorporated into a public art project by artist Hillary Mushkin at Van Nuys Sherman Oaks Park, CA. She lives in New York City with her husband Rich Orussa and son Ismael, and works fulltime as a writer and editor at the National MS Society. She is working on a new collection of poems tentatively titled Montage in the Feuilleton. 

HR Hegnauer is a freelance book and website designer who specializes in working with small presses and individual artists. HR has been the Belladonna* webmaster and book designer since 2007. She maintains a portfolio of her work at hrhegnauer.com. Some of her most recent design projects include Leslie Scalapino's official website and her book How Phenonema Appear to Unfold (Litmus Press, 2011), A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos edited by David Trinidad (Nightboat Books, 2011), and Notes on Teaching (RCR Creative Press, forthcoming 2011), among many other projects. HR received her MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, and she has also studied at the Evergreen State College, The Art Institute of Seattle, and Noble Desktop. Her first chapbook, Sir, was released from Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs (2011). HR has also acted in two movies directed by Ed Bowes: The Value of Small Skeletons (2011) and Essay on Ash (forthcoming).

Barbara Henning was born in Detroit and moved to New York City in the early eighties. Professor Emerita at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, she continues to teach creative writing and American literature courses for Naropa University, as well as LIU. She is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, and a series of photo-poem pamphlets, including most recently, Cities & Memory (Chax Press), Thirty Miles from Rosebud (BlazeVOX), and My Autobiography (United Artists). In the nineties, Barbara was the editor of Long News in the Short Century.

Rafael Otto interviews Barbara Henning for Not Enough Night (April 2011).

 

Krystal Languell was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She is the author of Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVOX, 2011). Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as editor-in-chief for Noemi Press. She teaches composition at York College in Queens and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she also co-curates the HOT TEXTS Reading Series.

Rachel Levitsky (founder) is the author of Neighbor (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Under the Sun (Futurepoem Books, 2002), and DEARLY, (A+Bend Press, 1999). Her book The Story of My Accident Is Ours is forthcoming from Future Poem Books.

In 1999, Rachel started Belladonna* as a reading series at the Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore. She is now a founding member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

SINA QUEYRAS interviews RACHEL LEVITSKY about Belladonna* for The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog. (April 30, 2011)

Akilah Oliver (in memoriam, 1961– 2011) was born in 1961 in L.A. In the 1990’s she founded and performed with the feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls. For several years, from the mid-90's Akilah lived and raised her son Oluchi McDonald (1982-2003) in Boulder, Colorado where she was a teacher at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Recently, in New York City, Akilah taught poetry and writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, Pratt Institute and The Poetry Project. She was a PhD candidate at The European Graduate School and a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

Akilah Oliver’s books include A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2009), the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof Press / Erudite Fangs Editions, 1999), a book of experimental prose poetry honored by the PEN American Center’s “Open Book” program, and the chapbooks An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007) and A Collection of Objects (Tente, 2010). Among her many other projects, she was writing a book-length theory of lamentation.

Kristin Prevallet was born in Denver and moved to New York City for the first time in the early nineties. She is the author of four books of poetry and she edited/introduced the critical edition of Helen Adam's work, A Helen Adam Reader. She has taught writing and poetics workshops in a variety of institutions across the U.S. and currently works as a hypnotherapist in Manhattan. Here's a recent interview with Belladonna Collaborative member Cara Benson on the Best American Poetry blog.

Photograph by Struan Oglanby

Emily Skillings is a poet, dancer, and choreographer living in Brooklyn. She earned her BA in dance and poetry from The New School in 2010. 

Lila Zemborain