NEW VILLAGE PRESS - Key Persons
Amara Geffen (1957-) is an artist, community organizer, and Emerita Professor of Art at Allegheny College. She is the founder and director of the Art & Environment Initiative in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where her regional community-focused public art emphasizes beautification, environmental renewal, and placemaking/placekeeping. She has exhibited widely, receiving numerous grants and awards from state and federal agencies. Her work is included in public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She serves as Emerita Professor of Art at Allegheny College. Recently, she co-edited with Chris Fremantle, Ann Rosenthal, and Aviva Rahmani the anthology, Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities (New Village Press, 2022).
Geffen has received numerous awards for her work with local communities and government agencies in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Her ceramic art practice has also received acclaim. She lives in Meadville, PA.
Ann Rosenthal (1950-) brings to communities over thirty years' experience as an artist, educator, and writer. Her work examines the intersections of nature and culture through timely issues, including climate change and biodiversity. Ann teaches through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Pittsburgh. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.
Rosenthal's essays and work on eco/community art have been published in several journals and anthologies, most recently in Regenerative Infrastructures (New York: Prestel, 2013); "Atomic Legacy Art" in the Women Environmental Artists Directory Magazine, and the online, peer-reviewed Ecopsychology Journal. She co-edited with Amara Geffen, Aviva Rahmani, and Chris Fremantle the anthology, Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities (New Village Press, 2022).
She is the Founding and Managing Director of Learning Urban Nature through Arts, and lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2020, Rosenthal received the "Woman of Environmental Art" Celebrating Women in Conservation Award from PennFuture. Her work is informed by social and deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social justice.
Arlene Goldbard is a New Mexico-based writer, visual artist, speaker, consultant, and cultural activist. Her books include The Wave (Waterlight Press, 2013), The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future (Waterlight Press, 2013), New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development (New Village Press, 2006), and In the Camp of Angels of Freedom (New Village Press, 2023). She is Chief Policy Wonk Emerita of the USDAC.
Goldbard's essays have appeared in many journals, such as Art in America, The Independent, High Performance, and Tikkun. She is a former President of the Shalom Center, and now sits on its board as well as the board of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal and Tsofah.
Goldbard was one of 2015's "fifty most powerful and influential people in the nonprofit arts," and a 2019 recipient of the Randy Martin Spirit Award from Imagining America. She works for justice and compassion while advocating for community-based arts. Listen to her podcast, A Culture of Possibility with co-host Francois Matarasso.
Cheryl S. Doble is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and served as the Director of the Center for Community Design Research at SUNY ESF.
She co-edited Service Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries (New Village Press, 2011) with Tom Angotti and Paula Horrigan.
Chris Fremantle (1965-) is a researcher and producer in art, ecology, and health. He and Anne Douglas have collaborated over twenty years in research and critical thinking. He is the founder of ecoartscotland, a platform for research and practice.
Currently, Fremantle is a Lecturer on the Contemporary Art Practice program and a Senior Research Fellow at Gray's School of Art at Robert Gordon University. He is the co-author of the research report, The Artist as Leader and a contributor to The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce is on the Horizon (Prestel, 2016). Most recently, he co-edited with Amara Geffen, Ann Rosenthal, and Aviva Rahmani the anthology, Ecoart in Action: Activities, Case Studies, and Provocations for Classrooms and Communities (New Village Press, 2022).
Fremantle is a Fellow of the RSA, served on the Executive of the Scottish Artists Union for a decade, and is on the Board of the South Ayrshire Arts Partnership. He lives in Ayr, Scotland.
Edvige Giunta (1959-) is a writer, scholar, and teacher. She is a founder and significant contributor to the field of Italian American studies, and a Professor of English at New Jersey City University. She is a co-editor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy and poetry editor of The Women's Studies Quarterly, part of The Feminist Press.
She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (Palgrave, 2002) and co-editor of six anthologies, most recently Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire (New Village Press, 2022), with Mary Anne Trasciatti. Her essays accompanied reprints of key Italian American women writers including Tina De Rosa, Helen Barolini, and Louise DeSalvo, contributing to their resurgence.
Giunta's work involves collaboration, community-building, and accessibility. She teaches the craft of memoir as well as a unique course devoted to the study of the Triangle fire. In 2012, she received the NJCU Distinguished Faculty Award, among others. Giunta lives in New Jersey.
Erica Kohl-Arenas [Davis, CA] is Faculty Director of Imagining America, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies, University of California, Davis. She was previously faculty of the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at The New School, NYC.
Iain Robertson (1948-2021) was a landscape architect, academic, and writer. He focused on the role of creativity in the practice of design, and was known to inspire colleagues and students to imagine the unimaginable.
Robertson was Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington's Landscape Architect Department, and had three decades of experience teaching design studios and creativity seminars. He authored Cultivating Creativity (New Village Press, 2022), a playful resource text for inspiring creativity in the classroom.
A native of Edinburgh, Robertson lived in Washington State. There, he made a positive and long-lasting impact by serving the Seattle Design Commission and on the Seattle Parks Foundation Board, advocating for local plants in Seattle's Freeway Parks, and creating a new garden in the Washington Park Arboretum.
Job Titles:
- Chairman in Public History and the Humanities at Rutgers University
Jah Alyse Sayres [New York, NY] is a doctoral student in Environmental Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. They have worked at New Village Press and the Design Trust for Public Space. Jah previously completed a B.A. in Urban Planning with Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Jan Cohen-Cruz (1950-) is an author, teacher, and practitioner of community-based performance art. She is the Founding Editor of Public: A Journal and served as Director of Imagining America from 2007-2012.
Cohen-Cruz writes on the work of performance artists who address social issues. Her trilogy on the topic includes Local Acts: Community Based Performance in the U.S. (Rutgers, 2005), Engaging Performance: Theater as Call and Response (Routledge, 2010), and Remapping Performance: Common Ground, Uncommon Partners (MacMillan, 2015). Her most recent work is co-written with activist Rad Pereira-Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who Lived It (New Village Press, 2022).
Grounded in the resistant theater of the late 60s and early 70s, she was a member of the NYC Street Theater/Jonah Project, and has been a freelance practitioner of the techniques of Augusto Boal since bringing him to the U.S. in 1989. After receiving her PhD at NYU in Performance Studies, she taught in the Drama Department for 28 years, and now continues to teach at and collaborate with several New York institutions.
Jane McGroarty [Brooklyn, NY] is an architect who has previously served as the National and the New York Chapter president of Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). (Secretary, New Village Press)
Judith Tannenbaum (1947-2019) was an educator, speaker, poet, and writer. She shared and taught poetry in schools before finding a passion for prison justice and reform. For decades, she taught arts in California state prison systems in partnership with the California Arts Council and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Through this work, Tannenbaum fostered a 20-year-long friendship with poet Spoon Jackson, and the two recounted their lives and experiences in the double memoir, By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives (New Village Press, 2010).
Her legacy is further explored in two new books. The Book of Judith: Opening Hearts Through Poetry (New Village Press, 2022), co-edited by Jackson, Mark Foss and Sara Press, and That's a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions (New Village Press, 2023), edited by Leigh Sugar.
Leigh Sugar is a Michigan-born writer, teacher, and dancer, who has facilitated creative writing workshops through the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) at Cooper Street Correctional Facility in Jackson, MI, and co-edited PCAP's annual Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing (Vol. 4-6). She has taught writing at the Institute for Justice and Opportunity, NYU, Poetry Foundation, Justice Arts Coalition, and beyond.
Leigh holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. Her writing appears in Poetry magazine, Split This Rock, jubilat, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. She most recently edited That's a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions (New Village Press, 2023).
As a disabled and chronically ill person, Leigh Sugar is committed to learning from Disability Justice leaders and working towards greater justice for all.
Louise Dunlap (1938-) is a teacher, writer, and Buddhist activist, whose work focuses on nature and truth-telling. She has taught writing at MIT, Tufts, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and many others as well as to city workers, environmental professionals, and activists. Until recently she was Lecturer in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, and taught writing in other planning and environmental programs.
She is the author of Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing (New Village Press, 2007). Her new memoir, Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind (New Village Press, 2022), explores the damaging legacy of colonization and racism beginning in California's Napa Valley, where her ancestors settled, and looking further back to early colonial history in New England.,
Her recent work legacy continues to emphasize social-change, focusing on climate and "organizing with other white people to change the mind of racism." As an ordained member of Thich Nhat Hanh's Order of Interbeing, Dunlap is committed to engagement and awakening in the wider world. She lives in Oakland, California.
Margaret Randall (1936-) is a poet, essayist, photographer, and revolutionary. She is associated with New York's abstract expressionists and the Beat Movement, revolutionary histories in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and a famous case of political deportation in 1984-89.
She has been honored with the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression, the PEN New Mexico's Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism, the Medal for Literary Merit by Literatura en el Bravo, the Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize, and the 2020 George Garrett Award given by AWP. She is the author of over 200 titles, the most recent of which are My Life in 100 Objects (New Village Press, 2020); Artists in My Life (New Village Press, 2022); Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (New Village Press, 2022); and Luck (New Village Press, 2023).
Randall has lived in New York City, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua with formative stays in Peru and North Vietnam. She currently lives with her wife, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her portrait and landscape photography collection is kept in the University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections.
Mark Foss is an author, essayist, and poet. He is the author of two novels, Molly O (Cormorant Book, 2019), Spoilers (8th House Publishing, 2016).
In 2015, Foss became friends with poet Spoon Jackson and is now a co-editor of upcoming homage to Judith Tannenbaum, The Book of Judith: Opening Hearts Through Poetry (New Village Press, 2022) with Jackson and Sara Press.
Also a contributor to print and online literary journals, Foss's radio drama Higher Ground, was broadcast on CBC. He lives in Montreal.
Mary Anne Trasciatti (1963-) is an activist, scholar, and editor. She is President of the Triangle Fire Coalition, and a Professor of Rhetoric and Director of the Labor Studies program at Hofstra University in Long Island.
She is co-editor Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Fire (New Village Press, 2022), with Edvige Giunta. She is also a co-editor of Where Are the Workers?: Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (University of Illinois Press, 2022).
Trasciatti is the daughter and granddaughter of garment workers, and has devoted more than a decade to advocating for the creation of a Triangle Fire Memorial. In her work, she is inspired by the discipline of rhetoric as a tool for knowledge creation, community building, and social advocacy.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Landscape Architect
Paula Horrigan is a landscape architect, editor, and scholar. She is an Emerita Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. Her focus is on placemaking and democratic design. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and has spearheaded Cornell University's Rust to Green (R2G) Utica Action Research Project since 2010.
She co-edited Service Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries (New Village Press, 2011) with Tom Angotti and Cheryl S. Doble. She is the recipient of several awards for sustainability and planning, including the Environmental Design Research Association Great Places Book Award in 2015. Her latest work is Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools (Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 2023), co-edited with Thomas Oles.
For over a decade, Horrigan has led communities in Utica, New York in a large-scale placemaking project, the One World Garden. She lives in Utica.
Rad Pereira is a cultural worker, performing artist, healer, and educator. Their work ranges from social sculpture to performances in theater, TV, and film.
Pereira has worked as a community organizer, cultural strategist and facilitator, actor, director, and teacher. They are co-author with Jan Cohen-Cruz of Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965-2020, by Those Who Lived it (New Village Press, 2022).
Job Titles:
- Artist
- Producer of the Maine Masters Project
Robert Shetterly (1946-) is a visual artist, social activist, and writer. For the past twenty years, he has painted portraits of citizens who address issues of social, environmental, and economic fairness in the series Americans Who Tell The Truth, now the subject of Kane Lewis's documentary Truth Tellers.
The project is recorded in a multi-volume book series, the first of which is Portraits of Racial Justice: Americans Who Tell The Truth (New Village Press, 2021), followed by Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell The Truth (New Village Press, 2022). Shetterly has illustrated for The Maine Times newspaper, the National Audubon's children's newspaper Audubon Adventures, and 30 children's titles. As an independent artist, he has contributed to various collections of drawings and etchings across the U.S. and Europe, most notably, a collection of drawings titled Speaking Fire at Stones and a series of 70 etchings based on William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell."
Since 1990, Shetterly has been a producer of the Maine Masters Project, a video documentary project highlighting Maine artists, and has served as President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA). Shetterly lives and works in Brooksville, Maine.
Spoon Jackson (1957-) is a writer, poet, and teacher. He was sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole when he was twenty years old, and has written and published poems, essays, novels, memoirs, and plays for the more than forty years he has been behind bars. He is a creator of award-winning podcast Uncuffed, a show made by people behind bars in California prisons.
Jackson is the co-author of the double memoir By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives (New Village Press, 2010), with Judith Tannenbaum, and co-editor of the newly published homage to Tannenbaum, The Book of Judith: Opening Hearts Through Poetry (New Village Press, 2022) with Mark Foss and Sara Press. His poetry is collected in Longer Ago (2010).
Jackson has collaborated with other artists on several projects, including the Prison Music Project with Ani DiFranco; Spoon, a film by Michka Saäl; Barstow, a film by Rainer Komers; Three Poems by Spoon Jackson, a documentary by Michel Wenser; and Die Jim Crow, produced by Fury Young. He was interviewed in a recent feature from Olivia Durif, LA Review of Books.
Tom Angotti is an author, editor, and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and he was the founder and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development.
He has written and edited several titles, including Zoned Out! Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City, Revised Edition (New Village Press, 2023), co-edited with Sylvia Morse, Service Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries (New Village Press, 2011), co-edited with Cheryl Doble and Paula Horrigan, Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism (Black Rose Books, 2019), and New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate (MIT Press, 2008), which won the Davidoff Book Award.
Angotti lives in and works on community issues in New York City. He is the Editor of Progressive City and a Participating Editor for Latin American Perspectives and Local Environment.