City Art Video

Michael McGriff is the author of two collections of poetry, Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and The Sequence of the Night (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012). He is the editor of To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill (Truman State University Press, 2010), and is the translator of Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer, 2010). Michael is the co-founder and editor of Tavern Books, an independent poetry press devoted to publishing books in translation. Michael is the 2010 recipient of a literary fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, and is happy to call Salt Lake City his new home.

Britta Ameel received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in American Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and New Orleans Review, among others. She is currently pursuing a medical education and finishing her first full-length collection of poems in a tiny Avenues Victorian apartment.

Native of Utah, Shari Zollinger has worked in the trenches of independent bookselling for over ten years. She has a BS in History from Utah State University and Certificate of Completion from the Stanford Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei, Taiwan where she spent six years of her life. Shari Zollinger’s poems have appeared in the Sugar House Review, 9Handed (a chapbook), and a Helicon West broadside. Her inspiration for poetry among many other things comes from travelling. She was fortunate to spend this last year visiting many different countries including England, Israel, Sweden, Indonesia and France. She just returned from living in Paris where she was working on a manuscript inspired by the sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

Shanan Ballamearned her MFA in Poetry Writing from The University of Nebraska’s low-residency program in 2007. One of her poems, “Red Riding Hood to Grandmother,” was nominated by Indiana Review for inclusion in The Best New Poets Anthology 2009. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, includingIndiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, cream city review, Tar River Poetry andCalyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her full-length poetry manuscript was a finalist for the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award. Her first chapbook, The Red Riding Hood Papers, will be published by Finishing Line Press in August 2010. She teaches poetry writing and academic writing at Utah State University, where she is also a Co-Director of the Intermediate Academic Writing Program. She lives in Wellsville, Utah with her husband, two dogs, and three cats.

Utah-based poet and singer, Lara Candland and composer-performer Christian Asplund have evolved a unique style of performance involving an ethereal and lush mix of speech, singing, live sampling, looping, layering, drones, and electronics. They will draw from poems in Candland's recently published Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree and her recently completed chapbook about surgery Physic at the Table.Lara Candland’s book Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree was just released from BlazeVox. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Greatcoat, Fine Madness, The Quarterly and other journals. Her pamphlet, Tongue Child was published by the University of South Carolina’s Palanquin/TDM series. She has been a finalist in The Motherwell, Hudson, and St. Lawrence book awards. She has also been the recipient of an AWP Intro Award, She is a founder and the librettist for Seattle Experimental Opera, and a finalist in the Genesis Prizes. Her opera, Sunset with Pink Pastoral with husband and composer Christian Asplund, was performed by Almeida Opera in London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Candland has taught poetry, college writing, food writing and fiction writing at various colleges and universities around the country as an itinerant grad student/follower of a grad student, and is currently exploring the intersection between written down works and live improv with electronic sampling. Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where he is Composer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University. He has degrees from University of Washington, Mills College, and Brigham Young University where his teachers have included Stuart Dempster, John Rahn, Joel-Francois Durand, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, Thea Musgrave, and Meyer Kupferman. He cofounded Seattle Experimental Opera which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good, Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His scores are published by Frog Peak Music. Asplund is also an active scholar and has published articles and chapters on music theory and critical theory.

Maximilian Werner lives in Salt Lake City and teaches writing at the University of Utah.  His poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in several journals and magazines, including Matter Journal: Edward Abbey Edition, The North American Review, Yale Anglers' Journal, ISLE, Weber Studies, Fly Rod and Reel, Puerto del Sol, and Columbia.  He is also an Academy of American Poets prize winner.  Mr. Werner's book Black River Dreams won the 2008 Utah Arts Council's Original Writing Competition for Nonfiction: Book and was published in January by Barclay Creek Press.

Ken Critchfield is a psychologist (Ph.D. from University of Utah in 2002), bassist, and composer. His musical work involves experimental forms developed to explore aspects of dialogue, personality, and meaning. The CD "Foundation," produced in 1997 with the help of a Utah Arts Council/NEA grant involved use of extreme structure (e.g., rigid and minimalist compositional forms) to explore how organic, human elements impose themselves as "errors" relative to expectation with just the two "voices" of drums and bass. More recent work with the group "Seraphim," has involved use of free improvisation among a group of musicians and poets, allowing structure, pattern, and meaning to emerge in a very different musical context. Some of this work has been captured on the CD titled "Hearing Voices". The focus on patterns that emerge through dialogue parallels Dr. Critchfield's specialty area in psychology which involves focus on how personality and identity emerge from relatedness with others. This will be his third time performing for City Arts across the past decade or so, itself representing an interesting meditation on possible convergences between pattern and meaning found in literary forms, and those found in human "sound-making" more generally. This particular performance will involve new material involving solo improvisation on upright bass, followed by opportunities for audience discussion about the experience.