Incubators of Creativity : Where Great Writers Are Made

Sandra Alcosser’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Awarded two individual artist fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, her books of poetry, A FISH TO FEED ALL HUNGER and EXCEPT BY NATURE, received the highest honors from National Poetry Series, Academy of American Poets and Associated Writing Programs. Her four artist book collaborations with Brighton Press reside in international museums and special collections. She was National Endowment for the Arts’ first Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and Poets House, New York, as well as Montana’s first poet laureate and recipient of the Merriam Award for Distinguished Contribution to Montana Literature. She founded and directs SDSU’s MFA each fall and serves on the MFA faculty of Pacific University. 

Sandra Luckow, Writer, Director, Producer, is an award-winning filmmaker who teaches film production Yale University, School of Art, Columbia and Barnard Colleges. Her first documentary, Sharp Edges, won the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts. It has aired worldwide and most recently seen in ESPN’s 30 for 30 The Price of Gold. She received an M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Writing and Directing for Film and Television. Her film, Belly Talkers, a cross-country road trip that explored the art of ventriloquism, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. She was an associate director on ABC’s One Life to Live. She is a member of the International Documentary Association and the Directors Guild of America. She founded Ojeda Films, Inc., a company devoted to independent and personal filmmaking. In 2002, She developed an Intensive six-week production workshop, which she taught for 13 years, at the Yale Summer Film Institute as the director of production. Her screenplay, Blind Man’s Bluff, based on a World War II Dutch memoir, is in pre-production and she is writing a one-woman stage show, No Strings Attached. Her current documentary, That Way Madness Lies… about her brother’s paranoid schizophrenia is in post-production and recently awarded a substantial financial grant from Artemis Rising.

Ranjit Hostoke is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He is the author of more than 25 books, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), and the monographs Zinny & Maidagan: Compartment/ Das Abteil (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/ Walther König, 2010) and Atul Dodiya (Prestel, 2014). Hoskote has translated the poetry of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). With Ilija Trojanow, he has co-authored Kampfabsage (Blessing, 2007; in English as Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West, Yoda, 2012). With Nancy Adajania, he is co-author of The Dialogues Series (Popular, 2011), an unfolding programme of conversations with artists. With Maria Hlavajova, he is editor of Future Publics: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (BAK, forthcoming). Since 1993, Hoskote has curated 30 exhibitions of contemporary art, including two monographic surveys of Atul Dodiya (Bombay: Labyrinth/ Laboratory, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, 2001; and Experiments with Truth: Atul Dodiya, Works 1981-2013, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 2013), a lifetime retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala (National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay and New Delhi, 2005-2006), a historical survey of Indian abstraction, Nothing is Absolute (with Mehlli Gobhai; CSMVS/ The Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, 2013), and a survey of 150 years of art by Parsi artists within the narrative of an emergent Indian modernism, No Parsi is an Island (with Nancy Adajania; National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, 2013-2014). Over 2000-2002, Hoskote co-curated the trans-Asian collaborative project, ‘Under Construction’ (Japan Foundation: Tokyo and other Asian centres). Hoskote co-curated the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) He was curator of India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011). And a jury Member of the 56th Venice Biennale.

Rochelle Potkar’s book, 'The Arithmetic of breasts and other stories' was shortlisted for The Digital Book of the Year Award 2014, by Publishing Next. Widely anthologized, a few of her poems and short stories have won awards. She was a writer-in-residence at the UNESCO city of literature – Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), Fall 2015. Her works were dramatically read and interpreted by veteran actors and dancers on stages in Iowa and Portland, Maine.She has read poetry at several interfaces in Mumbai, Goa, Hyderabad, Chennai, Hong Kong, and Iowa. ‘Four degrees of separation’ (Paperwall, 2016) is her first book of poetry and out on the shelves. She is working on a novel and two collections of short stories.