Youmna Chlala & Jennifer Firestone

YOUMNA CHLALA Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer born in Beirut based in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection, The Paper Camera (Litmus Press, 2019). She is the recipient of a 2018 O. Henry Award, a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Her writing appears in BOMB, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Bespoke, Aster(ix), CURA and MIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies. She has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, The Drawing Center, Art In General, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dubai Art Projects, Hessel Museum of Art, and MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de Sao Paulo, 2017 LIAF Biennial in Norway and the 11th Performa Biennial. She is co-editing a new series for Coffee House Press entitled Spatial Species (2021). She is a Professor in Humanities and Media Studies and Writing at the Pratt Institute. JENNIFER FIRESTONE Jennifer Firestone was raised in San Francisco and now lives in Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College (The New School). Her books include Ten (BlazeVOX, forthcoming), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes (Sona Books), snapshot (Sona Books), and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). Firestone co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and co-authored LITtle by LITtle with photographer and urban geographer, Laura Y. Liu. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. Firestone won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Robert Creeley Memorial Prize.