Faculty
Terri Witek
Terri Witek’s poetry is featured in the new international anthology JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry, and her seventh book, The Rattle Egg, is forthcoming. Her work with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes includes works on paper, video and site-specific installation and is represented by The Liminal in Valencia, Spain. She holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University, where she has won the McInery and the John Hague Awards for teaching.
Cyriaco Lopes
Cyriaco Lopes is a visual artist interested in systems of representation, language, and politics. Lopes has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio in NYC, the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris, Casa Degli Artisti in Milan, among many other international venues. He is the winner of the NYC World Studio Foundation Award, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis Project Award, and the São Paulo Phillips Prize. His collaborations with poet Terri Witek have been seen around the world, including at the National Academy in Lisbon, Portugal, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Salford Museum, in Manchester, England, and Oi Futuro Center for Art & Technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lopes is an associate professor of photography and deputy chair of the Art & Music department at John Jay College/the City University of New York.
Veronica Gonzalez Peña
Veronica Gonzalez Peña is a Mexican-born writer and filmmaker. In 2006 she founded rockypoint Press, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints, books and films. Veronica is an award-winning author of two novels, twin time: or how death befell me, and The Sad Passions, both published by semiotext(e). In July 2013 The Sad Passions was chosen as book of the week in Oprah and subsequently named one of 10 books to read if you need a good cry. Veronica’s book on the Mexican Drug War, So Far From God, was part of the semiotext(e) exhibition in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her films include On Becoming, with Michael Silverblatt, Chris Kraus, and Hedi El Kholti, Cordelia, with Michel Auder, Pat Steir, and Douglas Gordon, and Pat Steir: Artist an intimate, poetic documentary about the great woman painter, which was named one of the 10 best art documentaries of 2020 by Artnet. It is currently available on Apple iTunes and Amazon. Veronica is currently working on a documentary about Lawrence Weiner and a new Mexico-US co-produced feature film, Grace in the Desert.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, the Poesiefestival in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, the QOW conference in Slovakia, the International Poetry Festival in Bucharest, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the 56th Venice Biennale, Beijing and more recently, Leeuwarden. As a curator and director, she has staged events at BAM Café, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The David Rubenstein Atrium, The Highline, Poets House and El Museo del Barrio. LaTasha is the recipient of numerous awards, which include New York Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts, LMCC Workspace AIR, the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, the Japan-US Friendship Commission, Creative Capital and the Whiting Foundation Literary Award. She lives in Harlem.
Urayoán Noel
Urayoán Noel is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press) and eight books of poetry, including Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and Transversal, both with the University of Arizona Press. His translations include Wingston González's No Budu Please (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Pablo de Rokha's Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry (Shearsman Books), which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. He also translated the concrete poems in Amanda Berenguer's Materia Prima (Ugly Duckling Presse), which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and he is a translator for The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a contributing editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, and a former editor of Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. His writings on translation have been published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism and Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing, and other work has recently appeared in the New York Times and World Literature Today. His international performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia and the Toronto Biennial of Art. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at New York University.
Stephanie Sauer
Stephanie Sauer is the author of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press) and The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (University of Texas Press). Her writings have appeared in Drunken Boat, Pleiades, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, Grain, and Lavender Review, and her visual-verbal works have been exhibited at the De Young Museum, the Center for Book Arts, and the National Library of Baghdad. She has earned the Barbara Deming Memorial Award for Nonfiction, So to Speak’s Hybrid Book Award, and fellowships from Yaddo and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Living between California and Brazil, Sauer also develops publications with the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians and co-manages A Bolha Editora, the in-translation press that first brought the work of Hilda Hilst into English.
Sarah Gerard
Sarah Gerard is the author of two novels, Binary Star and True Love, and the essay collection Sunshine State. She co-authored a book of collages and text, Recycle, which was acquired by the MoMA Library in 2022. Her essays, short stories, and interviews have been published in McSweeney’s, Granta, Guernica, The Baffler, and several anthologies. She was the 2018 - 2019 New College of Florida writer-in-residence, and the 2021 winner of the LAMBDA Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
Jennine Capo Crucet
Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of two books: the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice book, the winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award, and was cited as the best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian and the Miami Herald; and the story collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her writing has appeared on PBS NewsHour, in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. She's currently a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, as well as a previous recipient of an O. Henry Prize, the Picador Fellowship and the Hillsdale Award for the Short Story, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third book, a collection of essays called My Time Among the Whites (Picador, 2019), investigates through a personal lens concepts of race, gender, immigration and the “American dream” since the 2016 election.
Vidhu Aggarwal
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, drawing mythic schemas from popular culture, science, and ancient texts. Their poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable @Yo-Yo Labs Press, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.’s play at being gods. They have been published in the Poetry, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, Poemelon, and Leonardo, among other journals. Aggarwal is currently engaging in “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborative process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. Daughter Isotope appeared with Operating System in 2021 (daughterisotope.com Links to an external site.). A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, they teach creative writing and postcolonial/transnational literature.