Elise Asher’s paintings of the 1950s and 1960s blend text with color and brushwork. The personal style of these lyric abstractions was Asher’s unique contribution to New York School painting. Asher also published three volumes of poetry in 1955, 1994, and 2000. The poetry within her abstractions is suggestive, rather than literal and legible. The words, taken mostly from her own poetry, as well as that of her husband, Stanley Kunitz, blend into atmospheric clouds of brushwork. Asher described that poems are "jumping-off points, parts of a text that makes music for me and extend the life of the poem."
Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. He is a long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Marie Howe earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Stanley Kunitz. She’s published four collections of poetry: What the Living Do, The Good Thief, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and Magdalene, and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Dartmouth College, and New York University.
Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise (2022) and the novel Before Everything. Victoria is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
Sherry Sidoti is an award-winning author and the founder and lead teacher at FLY Yoga School on Martha’s Vineyard. Gold Medalist for Inspirational Memoir of 2023 by The Living Now Book Awards, A Smoke and a Song is Sherry's first book. Sherry is the granddaughter of artist Elise Asher.