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Cheryl Pallant (born in New York City) is a poet, author, dancer, healer, and professor who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She has published several books of innovative poetry, nonfiction, and has been featured in several anthologies. Her background as a writer and dancer has led to frequently merging these disciplines.
While a literature student at Long Island University, she was introduced to the dance form, contact improvisation. This postmodern improvisational dance has had a strong influence upon her poetics. Thematic frames and syntax shift rhythmically in her poetry, moving from one context to another, the language much like the moves of a dancer. Her books, such as Into Stillness and Uncommon Grammar Cloth, demonstrate a kinetic poetics guided by an internal momentum that expands upon the possibilities of language and challenges the usual logical mode of reading. Morphs, written in collaboration with Grant Jenkins, resulted from a furthering of her language play, a single poem morphed thirty-five times.
Her book on dance, Contact Improvisation: an Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form, is considered a primary book in its field. Her ongoing interest in applying a somatic approach to writing and dance led to her popular workshop, Writing From the Body, and to Writing and the Body in Motion, a book on somatic writing, which expands perceptual possibilities. Her embodied, somatic approach demonstrates a correlation between articulation in movement and articulation in words, the primordial, nonconceptual unconscious provided a route toward consciousness. Sara Lovett says, "Writing and the Body in Motion" is not only a work for writers searching for new ways in which to express themselves, it also has relevance to anyone seeking a more intimate relationship with their body [and] deeper understanding of mind, body and spirit....What Pallant does is write from the body, not about it." 1 Laura Page, writing about the poetry collection, Her Body Listening, says Pallant is “stripping away artifice in language, leaving the inimitable understanding of the body as it processes social proscriptions... the creative impulse, trauma, shame, and joy.” 2
She was performance art critic for High Performance and dance critic for Style Weekly , a newspaper in Virginia. Ginseng Tango is her memoir about her time living in South Korea, learning tango, and undergoing a spiritual renewal. Consistent in her work is proprioceptive awareness, meditation, embodiment, consciousness, and language play.
Pallant won the Theresa Pollak Prize (2013) and was a three-time recipient of a NEH Grant (2000, 1999, and 1996) in partnership with the Richmond Arts Council. She was selected as Finalist for the Bechtel Prize (2007), among other awards. She was poetry editor for The New Southern Literary Messenger, successor to Southern Literary Messenger , edited by Edgar Allan Poe, and an editor for Contact Quarterly. She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, Keimyung University (in S. Korea), and University of Tulsa.
Rosmarie Waldrop is an American poet, novelist, translator, essayist and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958 and has settled in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is a co-editor and publisher of Burning Deck Press.
Carla Harryman is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. She is married to the poet Barrett Watten.
Contact improvisation is a form of improvised partner dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness. It has evolved into a broad global community of social dancing around "jams" characterized by their welcoming attitude towards newcomers to dance, as well as seasoned practitioners, and is often found overlapping with ecstatic dance communities.
Dance improvisation is the process of spontaneously creating movement. Development of movement material is facilitated through a variety of creative explorations including body mapping through levels, shape and dynamics schema.
Nancy Stark Smith was an American dancer and founding participant in contact improvisation.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist and translator. She lives in France.
kari edwards was a poet, artist and gender activist. Her name is written all lowercase. She won the New Langton Arts Bay Area Award in literature (2002) and posthumously won a Lambda Literary Award.
Anne Tardos is a French-born American poet, visual artist, academic, and composer.
Alan Sondheim is a poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace from the United States.
Ted Pearson is an American poet. He is often associated with the Language poets.
Barbara Henning is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her recent novelized biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, was named by the Library of Michigan as a Notable Book of 2023. She is also the editor of a collection of interviews, [Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works] and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her work has been published in numerous journals. Some recent books of poetry and prose are Digigram ; a novel, Just Like That ; and a conceptual project, a collection of sonnets composed from 999 passages from 999 books in her collection, entitled My Autobiography. Prompt Book: Experiments in Poetry and Fiction is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil 2020). Poets on the Road, a Blog, soon to be released by City Point Press, celebrates Henning and Maureen Owen's extensive reading road trip in 2018 across the USA.
Cris Cheek is a British-American multimodal poet and scholar. He began his career in the mid 1970s working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and with the Writers Forum group, who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. During that time he co-founded a poetry performance group known as jgjgjgjgjgjgjg. . .(as long as you can say it that's our name) with Lawrence Upton and Clive Fencott. Subsequently, cris collaborated on electronic music improvisations with Upton and ee Vonna-Michel as "bang crash wallop" and released several cassettes through Balsam Flex. In 1981, he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space.
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (中川ジェーン), born in 1960, is an avant-garde, expatriate American poet and essayist who resides in Japan. She is the author of volumes of poetry, poetry chapbooks, and a poetry broadside. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies published in Japan, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and a number of other countries. Her work is archived in the University of Chicago library's special collection of poetry from Japan.
Somatics is a field within bodywork and movement studies which emphasizes internal physical perception and experience. The term is used in movement therapy to signify approaches based on the soma, or "the body as perceived from within", including Skinner Releasing Technique, Alexander technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Eutony Gerda Alexander, Rolfing Structural Integration, among others. In dance, the term refers to techniques based on the dancer's internal sensation, in contrast with "performative techniques", such as ballet or modern dance, which emphasize the external observation of movement by an audience. Somatic techniques may be used in bodywork, psychotherapy, dance, or spiritual practices.
Deborah Meadows is an American poet and playwright and essayist.
Mary O'Donnell Fulkerson (1946–2020) was an American dance teacher and choreographer. Born in the United States, she developed an approach to expressive human movement called 'Anatomical Release Technique' in the US and UK, which has influenced the practice of dance movement therapy, as seen in the clinical work of Bonnie Meekums, postmodern dance, as exemplified by the choreography of Kevin Finnan, and the application of guided meditation and guided imagery, as seen in the psychotherapeutic work of Paul Newham.
BlazeVOX Books, often stylized as BlazeVOX [books], is an independent publisher founded by Geoffrey Gatza and based in Buffalo, New York. Since 2000, it has published more than 350 books of poetry and prose, most of which fall within the sphere of avant-garde literature.
Betsy Fagin is an American poet. She is the author of All is Not Yet Lost, Names Disguised as well as numerous chapbooks including Poverty Rush, the science seemed so solid, Belief Opportunity, Rosemary Stretch, For every solution there is a problem, and a number of self-published chapbooks.
Amy King is an American poet, essayist, and activist.
Michael Handler Ruby is an American poet and longtime editor at The Wall Street Journal. As a poet, he has primarily identified with surrealism, Language poetry and the New York School, including Bernadette Mayer, whose early books he co-edited.
1 Lovett, Sara. "Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice, Cheryl Pallant (2018) Review" Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices Volume 14 Number 1, 2022
2 Page, Laura. "Book Review by Laura Page" Stirringlit.com
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