| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Kamron Reynolds | Kamron Reynolds, of Kam Komics, is your friendly neighborhood comic book artist and rapper. As Kam says, “I JUST WANT TO HELP CREATE DIVERSE NEW CHARACTERS AND STORIES THAT CAN STAND THE TEST OF TIME, LIKE SO MANY ICONIC CHARACTERS FANS HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH FOR OVER A CENTURY. THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IS CHANGING EVERYDAY. AS MUCH AS I LOVE SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN, SUPERMAN, X-MEN, THE FANTASTIC FOUR INCREDIBLE HULK, ETC. THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE IN THIS NEW ERA OF COMICS. WE NEED MORE DIVERSE CHARACTERS WITH DEPTH. IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT HAVING BLACK/WHITE CHARACTERS ANYMORE. WE NEED MORE CHARACTERS THAT ARE HISPANIC, ASIAN, INDONESIAN, GAY, STRAIGHT, MALE, FEMALE, TRANS-GENDER, DISABLED, KIDS, TEENAGERS, ADULTS, SENIOR CITIZENS, ETC. AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET THIS TYPE OF DIVERSITY IS TO ENCOURAGE DIVERSE CREATORS AND ARTISTS. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE COMICS NOW. AND WE AS CREATORS AND ARTISTS HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO DIG DEEPER TO CREATE NEW ART AND LITERATURE. JUST LIKE ANYTHING IT TAKES TIME. AND I JUST HOPE MY WORK REACHES THE MOST DIVERSE COMMUNITY THAT IT CAN.” | |
Cassandra Caverhill | Cassandra Caverhill is a Canadian-American poet and editor. She is the author of the chapbook Mayflies (Finishing Line Press) and a winner of the 2021 AWP Intro Journals Award. Her work has most recently appeared in Atticus Review, Peninsula Poets, Coastal Shelf, Last Resort Literary Review, Reed Magazine, and Into the Void. She is a graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MFA program in Poetry. Cassandra earned a certificate in Editing from the University of Chicago and an honors BA in Drama and Communication Studies from the University of Windsor. Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, Cassandra lives, writes, and edits with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. |  |
Carla Harryman | Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, performance writer, and collaborator in multi-disciplinary performance. The author of twenty-five books, she is known for her boundary breaking investigations of genre, non/narrative poetics, and text-based performances. The influence of improvised music, electronic sampling, and collaborative practices animate her recent works. Recent publications include Cloud Cantata (Pamenar, 2022); the poet's theater play Good Morning (PAJ: Journal of Performance and Art, MIT Press, 2022); and Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (trans. Sabine Huynh), a collection of poetry and performance writings composed between 2001-2015 and released in 2018 by PURH "To Series" in separate English and French volumes. Other key publications in the last two decades include Adorno's Noise (2008), an experiment in prose poetry and "the essay as form," the collaborative ten-volume work, The Grand Piano: Experiments in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980 (completed in 2010); the poet's novel Gardener of Stars (2001); W-/M-(2013), and the essay Artifact of Hope (2017). Her awards include an artist award in poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York; a grant (with Erling Wald) from Opera America: Next Stage, an NEA Consortium Playwright Commission; several awards from The Foundation for Poetry; and the Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Activity at Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been translated into many languages and her poetry, prose and plays have been represented in over thirty national and international anthologies. | |
Thomas Zimmerman | Thomas Zimmerman is a poet, teacher, and editor. Tom teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Huron River Review, The Big Windows Review, and the WCC Poetry Club at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. | |
Eileen Pollack | Eileen Pollack is the author of several novels and award winning story collections. Of which, Breaking and Entering was named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. Eileen's work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club was published in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Her works have been selected for Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Eileen lived in Ann Arbor for 27 years and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. She now lives and writes in Boston but many of her books, stories, and essays are set in Michigan/Ann Arbor. | |
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt | Kelly Murdoch-Kitt is an Associate Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She is a user experience designer and educator focused on people, systems, and interpersonal interactions. In her work and teaching, human connection drives the creation of effective and socially responsible concepts. She integrates visual communication, user experience, and service design with behavior change and social engagement, drawing on her industry experience as a user experience strategist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to joining U-M, Murdoch-Kitt served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also taught in the Graphic Design Programs at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. Her excellence in teaching and contributions to service within the discipline have been recognized by the Design Incubation Communication Design Educator Awards: Intercultural Design Collaborations in Sustainability; and the Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference. Murdoch-Kitt and her research partner, Dr. Denielle J. Emans of Roger Williams University are co-authors of Intercultural Collaboration by Design: Drawing from Differences, Distances, and Disciplines through Visual Thinking (Routledge 2020). Based on their research, the book offers more than 30 visual thinking activities to support effective collaboration among diverse teams. Their research group, ORBIT Labs (Online Resource for Building Intercultural Teams), was recently recognized as a recipient of the 2022 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change. Murdoch-Kitt and Emans are currently working together on a new book about the intersection of creative practice and psychological resilience, which argues that everyone can learn to become creatively resilient—and put methods of adaptability, flexibility, and optimism into practice. Its 15 case studies include various projects, practices, and activities that show readers how to utilize creative methods to work positively with uncertainty. |  |
Irene Butter | Irene Butter was born in Berlin and grew up as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Europe. A survivor of two concentration camps, she came to the US in 1945. Since the late 80s Irene has been teaching students about the Holocaust and the lessons she learned during those traumatic years. Her memoir, Shores Beyond Shores, details her journey. Irene is a co-founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Medal & Lecture series at the University of Michigan, and one of the founders of Zeitouna, an Arab/Jewish Women's Dialogue group in Ann Arbor. |  |
Jean Buescher Bartlett | Jean Buescher Bartlett is an artist, designer, and bookbinder working in mixed media, handmade books, cards & hand tools, who was born in Cincinnati, OH in 1956. She received a BS in Design from the University of Cincinnati and worked for Herman Miller in Zeeland, MI. A love of reading and writing led her to pursue an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama. She owned and operated Bloodroot Press from 1990 to 2020, focusing on limited edition, letterpress printed and illustrated, handbound artists’ books. Jean has also worked as an art & design librarian, interior designer, manager of Drew’s Bookshop in Cincinnati, fine art photography gallery director, author events coordinator at Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, curator, book designer, instructor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit for 15 years and lecturer at the University of Michigan while maintaining a steady studio practice. She has exhibited her work internationally and it is in over 50 public collections worldwide, including: the New York Public Library, the Detroit Public Library, the University of Michigan and Stanford University Special Collections, the Victoria and Albert Museum Library, Wellesley College Special Collections, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Clark Art Institute. | |
Ellen Stone | Ellen Stone grew up on the north branch of the Susquehanna River in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Pennsylvania. She advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen’s poems have appeared recently in Anti-Heroin Chic, Great Lakes Review, Rust + Moth and River Mouth Review among other places. She is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Ellen’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net. | |
Andrei Markovits | Andrei Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies and teaches in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He was born in the West Romanian city of Timisoara where he grew up as the only son in a tri-lingual (Hungarian, Romanian, German) middle class Jewish family ravaged by the Holocaust. He completed his secondary education in Vienna, Austria before embarking on his post-secondary studies at Columbia University where he spent nine years receiving five degrees in the process. He then became an associate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University of which he was a member for nearly 25 years while holding professorships at Wesleyan University, Boston University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1999 where he has been ever since. His more than 20 edited and authored books have been translated into many languages (German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Korean among others). The topics of his books range from European anti-Americanism to women's soccer; from sports to dog rescue. They have been published by the finest university presses from Princeton University Press to Cornell University Press; from the University of Michigan Press to Cambridge University Press. His memoir entitled THE PASSPORT AS HOME: COMFORT IN ROOTLESSNESS published by the Central European University Press in Budapest and Vienna in 2021. The book has also appeared in a German translation and will be published in Romanian. | |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
