Interview

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to Columbia she was Dean of Faculty and Vice-President of Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was also on the faculty.

This is the second interview of Carol Becker, in this interview she discusses her book Losing Helen. The first interview is here.

She is the author of numerous articles and several books including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (Macmillan (1987) Reissued by Amazon (2014); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (Routledge,1994); Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (State University of New York Press, 1996); Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production (Paradigm Publishers/Routledge, 2009); and Losing Helen (Red Hen Press, 2016).

She travels widely, often lecturing on art, artists and their place in society. Working closely with the World Economic Forum, she has helped to build their art and culture program as well as to bring arts training to their Global Leadership Fellows Program.

Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His books include The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions), Action Figures (Avance Publishing), Mynd Eraser,  The Paranoia Machine,  and his latest collected writings Works & Interviews; he is also co-editor of An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting (Uitgeverij). Besides writing books, he curates a gallery for asemic writing called The New Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board of SCRIPTjr.nl. Recently, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), and curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery. In 2013 he was interviewed by SampleKanon and Asymptote Journal, and in 2016 by David Alan Binder . Currently, he created cover art for Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue, and as of 2017 he has become a publisher at Post-Asemic Press. In his spare time, he is working on designing a cyberspace planet dubbed THAT. His Ello studio can be found here: @asemicwriter.

Dr. Ignassen Mather engages in the study of history, literature, film and social communications, which led him to create a diet for the mind, where a selection of proverbs, books and film replaces the regular content received by the media; what he terms “media fat” for 30 Days, allowing the user to step out of context, garner new trains of thought, and therefore realize the importance of curating what the mind receives on a daily basis.

He is working on a series of essays on other important subjects such as entitlement, equality, and sustainability. He resides in the Berkshires.

If you want a copy of this book you can buy it in NYC at Maison 10 or you can buy it in kindle form here or print form here.

In the interview, the book he mentioned he was currently reading is Leonora Carrington – Complete Short Stories.

Philip Metres is the author and translator of ten books and a handful of chapbooks, including The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018); Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize; Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award; I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2015), shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award and the Read Russia Prize; Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), longlisted for the National Translation Award; A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013)and abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), both of which won the Arab American Book Award; To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008); and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007).

His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, numerous journals and anthologies, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Lannan Fellowship, the George S. Hunt, S.J. Prize, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, a Russian Institute for Literary Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship. He is professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

The book  mentioned in the interview is: Irish on the Inside by Tom Hayden.