Biographies of Our Authors and Artists

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan in 1963 and was raised in Charlotte, NC.  She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Sleep that Changed Everything (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun and Moon, 1999) which received the New American Poetry Series Award ), and a song cycle, The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time.  She is editor of Tender Buttons Press, publishing experimental women’s poetry since 1989.  Her poetry has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, Jacket, The Chicago Review, Intervalles, the Interdisciplinary Transcription Issue and The Poetry Project Newsletter and in several anthologies, including Line:  A Drawing Center Anthology, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. She teaches in the English Department of St. John’s University in New York City.   Poet Robin Blaser calls, her second book, The Sleep That Changed Everything “"an astonishing, wonderful book, top-of-the-line poetry…. Her ‘life long love of language’ breathes here"” and Charles Bernstein calls it "a “sprung formalist ode to the ‘open possibilities’ of song."

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Tony Torn is an actor and director based in New York City and Marshall, North Carolina.  He was a. He most recently appeared as Trinculo in CSC's production of The Tempest.  His first feature as director Lucky Days, a directorial collaboration with Angelica Torn, was recently awarded best feature at the 2008 Coney Island Film Festival. He is founder, with his wife Lee Ann Brown, of The FBI (French Broad Institute of Time and the River).