Jim Dine and Karen Weiser

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935. Dine’s paintings, sculptures, photography, and prints have been the subject of nine major surveys and retrospectives since 1970, including solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and a major traveling retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art. In 1969, Trigram Press and Asa Benveniste, London, published Dine's first book of poems Welcome Home Lovebirds. Dine has made etchings to accompany Robert Creeley's book Mabel and collaborated with Ron Padgett on The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Jim and Ron and Oo La La. In 2008, Gerhard Steidl printed and published Dine’s 52 Books. Dine lives in Walla Walla, Washington, and Gottingen, Germany, and farms both places.

—Jim Dine

Marc Marder studied the bass with Alvin Brehm in the first graduating class at Purchase College, State University of New York, and began playing professionally with three seasons at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, the Casals Festival Orchestra in Mexico City, and as principal with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in New York City. After moving to Paris in 1978 to become soloist with Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain, he then played with the French National Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein and taught at the National Conservatory in Lyon. While performing contemporary and classical chamber music during this time, Marder also began composing for live performance and film. In 1991, he won the Deutsches Schallplatten Preis for his score for Charles Lane’s silent feature Sidewalk Stories. Marder has been in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival five times with Cambodian director Rithy Panh, for whom he has scored all of his 18 films, and has been commissioned for chamber works twice by French radio. This October, his score for Yesim Ustaolglu’s film Araf—Somewhere in Between premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

Karen Weiser is a mother, poet, and doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying early American literature. Her publications include To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), her first full-length collection, as well as the following chapbooks: Dear Pierre (Well Greased Press, 2012); Pitching Woo (Cy Press, 2006); and Placefullness (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). Poems by Weiser have appeared in the Poetry Project Newsletter, the Chicago Review, the Brooklyn Rail, as well as several anthologies. She is also the recipient of a Fund for Poetry award and the Mellon Fellowship through the Center for the Humanities. She lives in New York City and teaches English courses at Queens College.

Please click here for Karen Weiser's poem.