BOARD & STAFF

Mandana Chaffa—President

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, a finalist for CLMP’s Best Magazine: Debut; and an Editor-at-Large at Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications. She also serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where she is VP of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York. [Board member since 2021]

Marc Fitten—Treasurer

Marc Fitten, a Senior Product Manager for Amazon Web Services, is the author of two novels: Valeria’s Last Stand and Elza’s Kitchen. He has been published in half a dozen languages. He’s written for The New York Times and his books and selections have been published by Bloomsbury, DTV, Flammarion, Neri Pozza and Beacon Press. He is currently working on a third novel and a travelogue. He is a restless fellow who likes to travel, but you can keep up with him on Instagram. [Board member since 2022]

Emily Skillings—Secretary

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. [Board member since 2021]

David Kermani—Founding President Emeritus

David Kermani was born in Albany, NY in 1946. An Iranian-American, he received a BA from Brown University (American Civilization), and an MA (Middle East Languages and Cultures) and MLS (specializing in archival management) from Columbia University. He was Director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York from 1977 until 1982, when he joined his family’s oriental rug business in upstate NY. Soon after meeting John Ashbery in 1970, he began work on a comprehensive bibliography of Ashbery’s work, including his writing about art, which was published in 1976; he has managed Ashbery’s business affairs for many years. He has been on the Board of Friends of Olana (now The Olana Partnership), serving as Treasurer, Vice-President, and President. Along with Dara Wier, James Tate and Ashbery, he was a founding member of The Flow Chart Foundation in 1998, helping to develop the Ashbery Resource Center and its online catalogue as a continuation of the earlier bibliography, and the “Created Spaces” concept. [Board member since 1998]

Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Wier)

Dara Barroir/Dixon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and raised south of New Orleans in Naomi, Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Her thirteen books include the In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, and Reverse Rapture, awarded The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives Book Award in 2006. Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council and Lannan Foundation Fellowship have supported her work. Her poems are included in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Limited editions include (X In Fix) and The Usual Ratio Between Banality and Wonder in Rain Taxi’s Brainstorm series. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke: The Author’s Annotations, Commentary, and Note of Reference for a Millennium’s Teardrop. She's held the Richard Hugo Chair at the University of Montana, and The Louis Rubin Chair at Hollins University and been a poet-in-residence at University of Texas, Emory University and the University of Utah; she served as the Associated Writing Program's President in the early 1980s. She is a member of the University of Massachusetts Amherst poetry faculty, director and co-founder of the Juniper Initiative for literary arts and action and the Juniper Summer Institute and Workshops, editor and publisher of factory hollow press and publisher of the literary journal jubilat, she lives and works in North Amherst, Massachusetts. [Board member since 1998]

Justin Jamail

Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds (2018, Hanging Loose Press) and has published poems and commentary in many journals and online publications. He is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. He studied poetry at Columbia University and the UMass Amherst MFA program. He grew up in Houston, TX and now lives in Montclair, NJ.

Tracie Morris

Tracie Morris is a poet working in multiple genres including live performance, sound art, music, visual art, film, creative non-fiction and cultural studies. Tracie is the author/editor of 10 books. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and a PhD from NYU. A Guggenheim Poetry Fellow, Tracie is a Professor of Poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. [Board member since 2021]

Evan Craig Reardon

Evan Craig Reardon is a poet and librarian. He is a scholar of John Ashbery and avant-garde poetry, and works as a librarian at an episcopal seminary. He served earlier as the librarian/archivist for the Ashbery Resource Center. He is a scholar of John Ashbery and avant-garde poetry, and works as a librarian at an episcopal seminary. He served earlier as the librarian/archivist for the Ashbery Resource Center. [Board member since 2023]

Eugene Richie

A cofounder, with the poet Rosanne Wasserman, of the nonprofit Groundwater Press, Eugene Richie is Director of Creative Writing in the Pace University English Department, in New York. He has published five collections of poems and three books of translations, as well as articles and reviews, on translation and on the work of various poets. He has edited Ashbery’s Selected Prose (University of Michigan Press / Carcanet, 2004) and, with Wasserman and Olivier Brossard, three bilingual collections of Pierre Martory’s poems, translated by Ashbery: The Landscape Is behind the Door (Groundwater, 1990); Oh, Lake / Oh, lac (Artery Editions, 2008); and The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow / Carcanet, 2008), a London Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and a National Book Critics Circle Award poetry finalist. With Wasserman, he also edited Ashbery’s Collected French Translations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Carcanet, 2014), a London Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and a finalist for the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. [Board member since 1998]

Jeffrey Lependorf—Executive Director

A performer, composer, visual artist, and nonprofit arts professional, Jeffrey Lependorf formerly served as Executive Director of Small Press Distribution and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. He currently also directs the Art Omi: Music international musicians residency, a program that he created for musicians from around the globe to collaborate with one another. He received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory, and his masters and doctorate from Columbia University, where he also taught music history for a number of years. National Arts Strategies named him a national arts leader, providing him a fellowship to their prestigious Chief Executives Program, and he has received numerous grants, awards and honors. For more information, visit jeffreylependorf.com.

Nina Boutsikaris—Librarian & Archivist / Program Support

Nina Boutsikaris is a creative writer and archivist who earned her MSLS in Archival Management at Simmons University. She is the author of the memoir I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych, winner of the 2021 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Small Press Distribution Bestseller. Her essays have been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologized in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Fiction, and twice named Notable Essays by the Best American Essays series. She has taught at The University of Arizona, The New School, Catapult, and Gotham Writers Workshop. As an archivist she is interested in helping to facilitate "archive Interventions," or relationships between the arts, lives, and the archives.

Ryan Cook—Program Associate

Ryan Cook is a Brooklyn based genderqueer poet and performer. They received their MFA candidate in poetry from Columbia, where they had been awarded the teaching fellowship. Their work specializes in queer mythologies, digital cultures, and curses, and has been published or are forthcoming in Iterant, Tupelo Quarterly, Thimble Lit Mag, the Nightboat Blog, No Dear Mag, the Poetry Project’s Footnotes Series, and Hot Pink Mag. They also host events at McNally Jackson Bookstore with various authors, as well as a freelance event manager. Along with Aiden Farell, they co-host the “Unnamed Reading Series” that features artists from all over New York City. They are currently a poetry fellow with Belladonna* Collaborative. You can follow them at @Ryan_patrick_cook. 

ADVISORY BOARD

Rosangela Briscese

Olivier Brossard

Eric Brown

Tom Healy

David Lehman

Micaela Morrissette

Robert Polito

Don Pulfer

Archie Rand

Karin Roffman

Sarah Rothenberg

Rosanne Wasserman