Poetry & Conversation: Cynthia Hogue, David Abel, Maryrose Larkin, Charles Alexander

David Abel is a poet and editor, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. His publications include Equifinality (Crane’s Bill), XIV Eclipses (Couch Press), Carrier (Redfoxpress) and the artist’s book Selected Durations (Black Rock Press), as well as Black Valentine and Float, both from Chax Press; the coming year should see several new books, including After the Frontier: Selected Early Propositions (Himal Press) and Sweep: volume I from Chax. Among other curatorial projects, he organized the exhibition Chax Press: Publishing Poetics for the Pacific NW College of Art, and Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery. He is a founding member of the Spare Room reading series in Portland, now in its twenty-third year, and he and fellow Spare-Roomer Sam Lohmann will soon be reviving their Airfoil chapbook series.

Charles Alexander (born 1954) is an American poet, publisher, and book artist. He is the director and editor-in-chief of Chax Press. Alexander also served as the Director of the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts from 1993 until 1995, and as book artist there through 1996. Alexander lives in Tucson, AZ with his wife the visual artist Cynthia Miller and his two daughters. In 2006 he received the Arizona Arts Award[1] and in 2021 he received the Lord Nose Award[2] for lifetime excellence in independent literary publishing. Alexander’s books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press, 1990), arc of light | dark matter (Segue Books, 1992), Pushing Water: parts one through six (Standing Stones Press, Morris, MN, 1998), Pushing Water: part seven (Chax Press, Tucson), Four Ninety Eight to Seven (Meow Press, 1996), Etudes: D & D (Quarry Press, 1997), near or random acts (Singing Horse Press, 2004), Certain Slants (Junction Press, 2007), Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press, 2012), AT the Edge OF the Sea: Pushing Water II (Singing Horse Press, 2018), Time Being (Chax, 2023), and 13 chapbooks or fine letterpress books.. He is also the editor of Talking the Boundless Book.

Cynthia Hogue’s numerous collections of poetry include In June the Labyrinth (2017), Revenance (2014), Or Consequence (2010), Flux (2002), and Touchwood (1979). Hogue is the author of the critical volume Scheming Women: Poetry, Privilege, and the Politics of Subjectivity (1995). She edited The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream) by Delia Alton, by H.D. (2007, first edition coedited with Julie Vandivere), Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006, coedited with Elisabeth Frost), and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (2001, coedited with Laura Hinton). Hogue collaborated on the interview-based volume of poetry and photographs When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (2010) with photographer Rebecca Ross. She received the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for her co-translation of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Fortino Sámano, or The Overflowing of the Poem (2012). Hogue’s additional honors include a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, and the H.D. Fellowship at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and the Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She has served on the faculty of the MFA programs at the University of New Orleans, Bucknell University (where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry), and Arizona State University. Hogue lives in Tucson.