Outer Space

CONGRATULATIONS ARE IN ORDER!

1. “The Center for Book and Paper Arts, a program of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, recently received a $50,000 Arts in Media grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in support of a new electronic publishing initiative, Expanded Artists’ Books. This grant will support the an award of two $10,000 commissions for new artworks for the iPad” – one of which has gone to the team of Amaranth Borsuk, Ian Hatcher, and Kate Durbin for their Abra, “which plays with the concept of the illuminated manuscript through a five-pronged collaboration between two poets, one visual artist, one iOS artist-developer, and a potentially infinite number of readers.” Congratulations to Borsuk, Hatcher, and Durbin! Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen (with husband Brad Bouse) and Durbin’s tumblr project Women as Objects alone should keep these artists in your orbit, but by their powers combined, Abra promises to be a celestial body of unforeseen magnitude.
2. Though 2013 will bring plenty of good things, we must bear the latex glove snap of anticipation. Anobium volume II contributor Roxane Gay’s (“Handsome Men Who Love Ugly Women”) first novel, An Untamed State, is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic in 2014! Also slated for release is her first collection of essays, Bad Feminist, forthcoming from Harper Perennial! And this on the heels of her appearance in Best American Short Stories 2012! Readers of her blog, I Have Become Accustomed to Rejection, and her tumblr, Roxane Gay is Spelled with One “N,”know how hard she works, how skilled she is, and how millions of times over this is deserved.
3. Mairead Case – Youth Services Coordinator at the Poetry Foundation, Featherproof Books Editor, proofreader of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (among other astonishing things) – selected Kristen Stone’s Domestication Handbook as her 2012 Staff Pick over on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog. Obviously, because it’s awesome.
4. The works of Outer Space fixture Kate Zambreno, Anobium volume II contributor Jac Jemc (“This Disturbed Evening”), and the much lauded Carina Finn – as well as many amazing others – made Christopher Higgs’ Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry Holiday Shopping Guides (respectively)!
5. Columbia Journalism Review named her one of “20 Women to Watch” in July, but Ann Friedman’s “Best Things” is a testament to how she crushed 2012.

Here’s to the survival and triumph of these and other artists and writers in 2013!

amaranth borsuk, ann friedman, anobium, Carina Finn, Center for Book and Paper Arts, chicago, christopher higgs, Columbia College Chicago, columbia journalism review, ian hatcher, jac jemc, kate durbin, Kate Zambreno, kristen stone, mairead case, National Endowment for the Arts, poetry foundation, Roxane Gay