Stecopoulos, Heuving, + Thackrey

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet and independent scholar. She recently published Visceral Poetics (ON Contemporary Practice), which Alphonso Lingis writes “open[s] an important field for investigation and practice: the healing force of language, of poetry” and Petra Kuppers calls “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves.” Other books include Armies of Compassion (Palm Press) and Daphnephoria (Compline). She has taught at Bard College, the University of San Francisco, Naropa University, the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, and in community workshops. Originally from New York, she lives in Berkeley.

Jeanne Heuving is a writer and a scholar. Her book length-study The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is just out from the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at the University of Alabama Press.  Other books include Incapacity (Chiasmus), Transducer (Chax), and Omissions Are Not Accidents:  Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore (Wayne State U P). Her cross genre book Incapacity won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic.  She recently published her long poem “Miss  Lonelyhearts” in Hambone 20, and was one of two scholars to write an overview of American women’s poetry 1950-2000 for A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry (Cambridge 2016).  She has an essay on Tisa Bryant forthcoming in The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of our Time (Northwestern 2017).  Heuving directs the MFA program in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell and is on the graduate faculty in the English Department at the University of Washington Seattle. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Simpson Humanities Center, and the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three.  She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima over a number of years. Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and  George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan’s The H.D. Book for the San Francisco Poetry Center. Since reading Homer In Greek over a five year period with Robert Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has almost always included variously focused and long-lived reading groups with other poets. She has earned her livelihood in various ways, including as co-founder and co-director of the art gallery Thackrey and Robertson in San Francisco, and for a number of years as a Jungian analyst in the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.  There she has taught, spoken and published, focusing especially on art, recently publishing a talk and essay on Jung’s paintings for The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus (Routledge).

Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse, and Volt.  Current books in print are Andalusia (Chax), Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), and George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center).