Rattapallax has the unique opportunity to meet with myriad internationally-renown poets, filmmakers, and a staff that is deeply focused on promoting and presenting new work.
PUBLISHER & PRODUCER
Ram Devineni produced, edited and directed the feature documentary The Human Tower, which was shot in India, Chile, and Spain. The film is being distributed by Goldcrest, which has won 19 Academy Awards and 28 BAFTAs. Recently, he produced Amir Naderi’s feature film, Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the Venice & Tribeca Film Festivals and a three-part travel documentary TV series called On the Road about endangered languages shot in West Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and showing on LINK TV. Devineni is one of the founding partners of Academia Internacional de Cinema, the first independent film school in Brazil.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Flávia Rocha is a Brazilian poet, editor and journalist. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University, and is the author of two poetry books, both published in Brazil, the bilingual A Casa Azul ao Meio-dia/ The Blue House Around Noon (Travessa dos Editores, 2005) and Quartos Habitáveis (Confraria do Vento, 2011). She has edited anthologies of Brazilian poetry for magazines Rattapallax (U.S.A.), Poetry Wales (U.K.) and Papertiger (Australia), among others. Her translations from English into Portuguese of contemporary poetry often appear in literary magazines in Brazil. In the area of Film, she is a Founder and the Director of Communications of the Academia Internacional de Cinema, a film school located in São Paulo. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two young daughters.
EDITORS
Alan Cheuse is the author and/or editor of more than fifteen books. His latest book is Paradise, Or and Eat Your Face, a trio of novellas. He has been Rattapallax’s Fiction Editor for nearly a decade.
Craig Epplin is an assistant professor of Spanish at Portland State University. He writes and teaches on the confluence of media, ecology, and literary culture in contemporary Latin America. As a translator, he has worked in numerous genres—poetry, manifestos, opera, essays, and short stories. He keeps a blog at http://nonhumancollectives.wordpress.com/ and an editor since 2010.
Natalia Fedorova is a new media artist, writer, literary scholar and translator. Natalia holds a PhD in literary theory from Herzen State University (St-Petersburg). She is an author of publications on avant-garde poetry, kitetic poetry, concrete poetry, hyperfiction, literary text generators and video poetry, as well as a curator and creator of VIDEO.txt, videopoetry festival in St- Petersburg. Natalia is an author of hyperfiction piece with multiple endings 7, and an interactive novel Madame Ebaressa and a Butterfly, co-written with Sergeij Kitov, and a number of short prose fragments. In collaboration with Taras Mashtalir she founded Machine Libertine, a media poetry project (Snow Queen, In Your Voice, Machine Poetry Manifesto, Whoever You Are, Light Duty, Memory). Currently Natalia is back after her one year post-doctorate term at MIT Trope Tank to teaching experimental literature in Smolny University (St-Petersburg) and editing of e-lit and new media writing column in Rattapallax.
Catherine Fletcher is a poet, an editor, and the Director of Poetry Programs at City Lore. She has written and edited content for the website World Poetry Map, an online anthology of the poetic traditions of non-majority languages, and has produced poetry events around New York City and abroad. Fletcher has commissioned new translations of works previously un-translated into English by such poets as Maxamed Ibraahim Warsame Hadraawi and Cabdulqaadir Xasan Sheikh Mumin (Somali), Weldedingel (Tigrinya), Galaktion Tabidze (Georgian), and Bernardo Colipan Filgueira (Mapuche).
Haale is a musician, songwriter, poet, and video artist living in Brooklyn. She is the lead singer of The Mast, her latest project with percussionist Matt Kilmer. Their acclaimed debut Wild Poppies was followed in 2012 with the release of the single Seas Across Your Mind and the EP UpUpUp a post-dubstep tune with a stunning video she directed and edited. Haale has also toured under her name throughout the US and in Europe releasing two EPs (Paratrooper and Morning, 2007), as well as a full-length album entitled No Ceiling, 2008, which the Boston Globe called “a swirling gem…one of the year’s most memorable releases.” Haale has a BS in Biology from Stanford U and an MFA from CCNY in Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in Rattapallax and Beyond Borders. She will be releasing another solo album soon and her site is www.haale.com
Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, a 2011 National Poetry Series Selection, and The Next Country, a finalist for the 2008 Foreword Book of the Year Award. She’s received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her recent translations include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. She’s taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative, at NYU, and in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her website is http://www.idranovey.com
Tera Vale Ragan received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she received the Virginia Middleton Award and and the Undergraduate Creative Writing Award for poetry. She recently earned her MFA from San Francisco State where she was the Poetry Editor of Fourteen Hills and winner of the Mark Linenthal Award. Poetry publications include Rattle, Transfer, Eclipse, Hot Metal Bridge, Barely South Review, etc. She lives each summer in Prague and studies at Charles University.
Lloyd Robson is a poet, novelist, magazine journalist, and radio/TV broadcaster. Originally from Wales, UK, he currently lives in New York with fellow poet Catherine Fletcher. Books include Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum, bbboing! & associated weirdness, and cardiff cut.
Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. His books include, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function Of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books) and most recently Yes Thing No Thing from Roof Books. He’s received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught many workshops and has been widely published, his CD Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. His recent invention, NORICUA, is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement which has had its non-ideologies performed in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax and currently lives in upstate New York.
Caecilia Tripp has received several international grants representing a body of film and video installations, performance and photographic works, which has been shown internationally in galleries, museums such as PS1 MOMA (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), Zacheta Gallery (Warsaw), De Appel (Amsterdam), Roomade (Brussels), Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), Center Of Contemporary Arts (New Orleans), Prospect Biennale 1 (New Orleans), Rotunda Gallery (New York), Dakar Biennale, 7th Gwangju Biennale 2008 (Gwangju , South Korea), Clark House Initiative (Mumbai, India) and in Film Festivals such as MOSTRA 61Film Festival (Venice), Cannes (France, 2005), Zebra Poetry Film Award (Berlin, 2006), Real Life Film Festival (Ghana, West Africa), Athens Film Festival (Greece), Atlanta, Urban Film Festival, (New York). The Making of Americans (2004) won an award for the best experimental film at Cinema Paradise (Hawaii).
ART EDITOR
Fernanda Rocha is a Brazilian photographer who also specializes in media licensing and rights. She had her first contact with photography while working in the production of magazines in São Paulo. She spent over one year in London and India, and in 2002 moved to New York to work as an image researcher and editor for books. Five years later she was heading the licensing and reproductions operation at the Miami Herald Archives, and is currently managing rights for Colgate-Palmolive advertising at Young & Rubicam Agency. Her photography has appeared in art and editorial publications, in a boutique hotel in Miami Beach, and can be seen at her blog: www.artificialflirtations.com.
INTERNS
Tamara Alazri is an intern at Rattapallax and an Arts & Culture writer for the Portland State Vanguard.
