Joe Brainard's Art

First the sweeping statement: Brainard is an artist for the 21st century.

Now the specifics:This edited collection examines the ways in which Brainard’s work informingly lined, bound, and shaped the poetics of the American avant-garde movements which he illustrated. It includes essays that treat the aesthetics of Brainard’s collages, cartoons, postcards, miniature art, and poetry, along with personal reflections from New York School poets regarding Brainard's influence.

With chapters by:
Alice Notley
Anne Waldman
Ron Padgett
John Ashbery
John Brainard
Edmund Berrigan
Brian Glavey
Rona Cran
Nick Sturm
Nathan Kernan
Timothy Keane
Anna Smaill
Andrew Epstein
Andy Fitch
Marjorie Perloff


This book will be released in print by Edinburgh University Press in April, 2019.

Stanza

This Digital Humanities project offers a digital archive devoted to presenting its general user with a sense of the literal density of urban places. Stanza is a user-friendly app ultimately aiming to engage the public in a sense of the literariness of places. Stanza (Italian, after all, for “the places one stands in”) integrates geo-tagged information with GPS technology to smoothly present its pedestrian with a sense of the poetry of their environment. In 2017, this project was generously awarded a seed grant  by Florida Atlantic University's South Florida Cultures Platform. 

Stanza will be available for free download from Google Playstore in  2019.

Refugee Senses of Home

This book project chronicles personal narratives of Arab displacement since 1945. It intereweaves interviews conducted with Syrians living amongst the 80,000 refugees in Zaatari Refugee Camp of Jordan, 60,000 in Azraq Refugee Camp, and the over 1.1 million in other camps and make-shift communities throughout Jordan as “urban refugees,” with personal accounts from other displaced Levantine exiles and expats.

It also asks the more universal question: How do we make home in temporary spaces, and why?  This work ultimately aims to faciliate understanding between worlds of the developed and the developing; the settled and the rootless, revealing the universal in definitions of home. ​Interpreting oral histories as literary and cultural contributions to ongoing studies of space/place, kinship, care, ethics, and home, this work of creative nonfiction speaks to both academic and popular audiences.

​The New York School on The New York School

This collection of interviews asks living New York School poets directly about the parameters, importance, and implications of the movement they comprised.

In Progress, for publication in early 2020.