Plein Air Editions: Four Poets from Bootstrap Press

Rebecca Eland earned her B.A from Naropa University and an M.F.A from Saint Mary’s College of California. She has performed poetry with dancers from the Boulder Ballet, and at venues such as The Royal Botanical Gardens of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Denver Art Museum and the Watershed Poetry Festival. She has taught at Deer Park Institute, India and currently teaches College Composition and dances ballet. Rebecca lives in the mountains just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Her first collection of poetry,Arrives, Then Steady Pace with the Hour, is published by Plein Air Editions. 

Jason Morris was raised in Vermont and now lives in California. His poems and essays have appeared in Vlak, The Can, Greetings, TRY!, Where Eagles Dare, Big Bell, The Tsatsawassans, Amerarcana, and elsewhere. His chapbooks are From the Golden West Notebooks (Allone Co./Publication Studios), Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Press), and most recently Takes (Bootstrap Press).

Ava Koohbor was born in Tehran and now lives in San Francisco. In the past, many of her poems have been translated into English with the assistance of poet Patrick James Dunagan and appear in various publications. Yet she’s now started to translate her own work as well as write directly in English: her recent chapbook published by Bootstrap Press is Triangle Squared, a fictional conversation among John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Morton Feldman. She appreciates whatever art offers to her in any and all forms. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities to what is.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest book of poems titled, someone’s dead already(Bootstrap Press, 2015) has been nominated for a California Book Award. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, “We Charge Genocide Again,” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.