Blue Mountain Center

I'm currently a resident at Women's Studio Workshop, in Rosendale, New York, working on a handmade artist's book dealing with immigrants in prisons, jails and immigration detention. I've been interviewed recently. Here are a couple of links to articles about this project:
http://blog.wsworkshop.org/?p=472
http://www.rollmagazine.com/mar10/articles/art.php

Tina is the new Berkeley CA Poet Laureate.

I'm thrilled and honored to have my first-ever article published in a journal of great respect.
http://www.truthout.org/change-is-dead-long-live-change57879

I'm working on two new projects these days - one is MOTIONARY COMICS, an art-installation-giant comic strip that we're making in real time on April 16, and a new adaptation of THE HEART OF A DOG, a stage adaptation I made with my friend Andy North, and which we're taking to the Prague and Minnesota Fringe Festivals. We're trying to fundraise for HEART OF A DOG on Kickstarter. We've got 60 days to raise $1,000, which is about a quarter of our total budget for the Prague Festival alone, but we're trying to keep our expectations low and realistic.

If you have any inclination, to find out more about the project, please head over to:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/499112113/fringe-festival-performanc...

Even if you don't feel like you can fund us, you should check out Kickstarter, which is a promising new micro-financing tool.

thanks!

Full version of Proliferation is now posted.
This is the year of the Census, and prisoners need to be properly counted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySH-FgMljYo

In May of 2009 I was honored to be part of a Prison Issues residency at the Blue Mountain Center. While there I had the honor of being in the company of some amazing people. Artists, activist from around the world provided over two weeks of inspiration, knowledge, and camaraderie.

While doing my individual research, I happened upon some maps that showed the growth of the US Prison system. With that information, I was inspired to create Proliferation, an animated mapping of the US Prison system set to original music.

"Night Navigation" is now in paperback. www.amazon.com www.indiebound.org

A few of you have lamented the fact that my review of John D'Agata's Lost Origins of the Essay, published in the Feb. issue of The Believer, isn't available online. But now it is! It's been chosen by the National Book Critics Circle for powells.com, so if you'd like to read it in full, just follow this link:
http://www.powells.com//review/2010_02_17.html

The Dust Zone is out as an actual book!
www.maggiedubris.com
www.dustzone.com

Open Crossings

Buy it at Amazon

Buy it at Naxos

On August 25th, composer Andy Teirstein's newest CD, "Open Crossings," was released by Naxos Records International, the largest CD publisher in the classical music field. The CD is available online through Amazon, itunes, Barnes and Noble, Arkiv Musik, and countless other venues, and is available nationwide in stores such as Barnes and Noble and J&R Music.

This is the final version, slightly expanded, of an earlier draft on Huffington Post. It's being blogged elsewhere and has been picked up by www.countercurrent.org, the Enough! Project, and other web-sites. My hope is that it will open a dialog that needs to take place, the sooner the better, around the question of how to avert war When South Sudan votes to secede from the North next year.
David
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-morse

While at BMC last summer, Henri Cole and Naoe and I would put the hens to bed. One day Henri gave me a photocopy of a glossary from a book about chickens. Touched, I wrote a poem for him called "A Glossary of Chickens," which I left tacked to the kitchen door. Paul Muldoon sent me an email this morning [Jan 21, 2010] accepting that poem for The New Yorker. Yay!

The first chapter of my unpublished memoir, "Piecing the Puzzle: Coming of Age in Anacostia," will be published in the next issue of CALLALOO (May/June). The piece is called "Drive," the first draft of which I wrote while in residence at BMC in 2001.

I'm happy to announce that I'm one of the winners representing San Francisco's District 6 in the annual, local Poets 11 competition. The district kick-off was on March 24th; the citywide kickoff event is May 8th at 1 PM, at the SFPL Main Branch. I am reading at both events.

In February 2010, Duke University Press will publish Frank Wilderson’s monograph on cinema, politics, and race: Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.

Frank B. Wilderson III, the award winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress, and former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe. His captivating memoir received the American Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, the Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order, and the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship

In the late '80s, Frank Wilderson used his life story to help college students understand South African apartheid, a popular political cause of the day on US campuses. Educated in the hard-knock school of activism amid the Black Panther Party and UC Berkeley's famous student uprisings, Wilderson went on to settle in South Africa; once there, he simultaneously taught university classes and assisted in the African National Congress' revolutionary actions. But years later, he was informed that President Nelson Mandela saw him as "a threat to national security." Wilderson's memoir, Incognegro, builds off the author's complex personal history to reach a nuanced analysis of race and transnationalism.

For those of you that missed my Cornish College show, new videos have been posted of Proliferation – an animation illustrating the rapid proliferation of the US Prison system set to music. The complete video will be posted and released next month. Also posted is Four Score – an interactive installation that is a play on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and four graphic music scores.

Also, a video that documented some of my 50 cello concerts for the site-specific program is now on YouTube. You can view Strange Fruit here.

I’m working on the Trails Project, a project about the trail system in King County. This is a public art commission from 4Culture to create art inspired by the trail system. During this project I’ll be walking large portions of the trail, while creating new art work inspired by the trails. Later there will be performances and other aspects that will be open to the public. I’ll keep you informed.

I’m playing several shows over the next few months including The Stone in NYC, Earth Day at Earthworks in Kent, WA, and a May Day Music Marathon at Town Hall in Seattle entitled May Day! May Day! Dates and times are listed on my calendar.

I hope to have my solo cello CD complete soon before the upcoming shows.

My work from the "Anatomy of A Future Forest" (initially started at in 2008 at BMC) is featured in the latest issue of New American Paintings,# 85. You can find my new work on pages 132-135.

Dear friends – just wanted to announce my forthcoming chapbook, Voluptuous Bristle, ready for pre-order at Finishing Line Press. It’s my first book in nearly four years and a peek into my upcoming manuscript of poems. Perhaps what I’m most pleased by though is the chance to use old friend Sonya Sklaroff’s painting on the cover. If you don’t mind wading, you’ll find it at:

http://finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

You know you need to read a poem about a painting that begins “Giddy up pigment!” Ravi Shankar is a postmodern flâneur. He wanders the world’s real and fictional gridded cities (or perhaps his astral body swoops high above them) and reports back. Using x-ray vision, a snappy vocabulary and considerable intelligence he hones in on what’s flaunted and hidden, the understated and the gaudy, the modest and the excessive. Each poem is a tiny stage on which miniature dramas ignite, in all their cunning, vivid, mutating detail. Visual art, music, and politics; the sensual and the ornate all percolate here. Voluptuous Bristle gives voice to a mind readers will be happy to spend time inside.

-Amy Gerstler

Ravi Shankar’s Voluptuous Bristle offers up a dizzying array of lush images gracefully tumbling down the pages. These sensual poems capture the spontaneous energy of the brushstroke while taking full advantage of the magic of sound.

-Jim Daniels

Thanks for your continued support. And check out the new issue of Drunken Boat, with an interview with US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan and a Sound Art Folio, among other goodness.

The Sun Magazine has published an image from my Brasil project in the February issue--- in the print edition and online. The image accompanies a written piece by another contributor. For those that are not already aware of this publication, it is a wonderful Literary + Photography magazine out of Chapel Hill, NC.
link to magazine: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/
link to page: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/410/borrowing

01.26.10: University of Chicago featured a wee story about me (from UCMag) on their homepage. Yay!
www.uchicago.edu

LR Berger continues journeying as NE Associate with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, bringing poems to the Nevada Test Site where she was arrested with beloved crew of irrepressible abolitionists. She also had gift of organizing speaking tour with
Palestinian and Israeli members of Combatants for Peace.