Catskill Sieve: Mojo Dojo 3

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About Truitt

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He attended Kenyon College (BA in English), and began graduate study in Medieval English at SUNY-Binghamton, where he met Robert Creeley. In 1985, he moved to Dublin, Ireland, to study Anglo-Saxon literature at Trinity College. In 1986, he moved to Baltimore, MD, where he lived in the Baltimore Artists Housing Cooperative and worked as an IATSE 695 sound technician. In 1989, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a private investigator for Krout and Schneider, Inc., a Los Angeles-based detective agency. He briefly studied at California College of the Arts and published his first book, Blazon (Deep Forest Books), a chapbook. In 1992, he entered the MFA program at Brown University. His study included work with C.D. Wright, for whom he also worked as a researcher and assistant on Lost Roads: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas Literature (publication and traveling exhibition). On completing his degree and a stint at the artist colony Yaddo (the first of numerous residencies), he moved to New York, where he worked various jobs, including at Voyager Company, where he was the poetry editor of the CD-Rom Invisible Universe, among other titles. In 1995, he published the chapbook The Song of Rasputin with Golden Books and began the Ichor Reading Series, a monthly poetry reading program, which ran through 1996. In that year, he started using a hand-held voice recorder as an alternative form of composition; and he received a Fund for Poetry Award (the first of two). In 1997, while working at Granta, he published his first book, Anamorphosis Eisenhower, with Lost Roads Publishers, the small press of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander. He also taught that year a survey course entitled New York Writing at the New University. In 1998, he co-founded Morse Partners, a literary public relations firm, and Ugly Duckling Presse published the limited-edition, folio version of Vertical Elegies: Three Works, collecting the short books Falltime, Raton Rex and the aforementioned The Song of Rasputin. In 1999, he became the Real Estate Editor of work.com, an online business news agency co-founded by the Dow Jones Company, which subsequently lead to a brief career (2001-02, 2004-05) as a columnist and editor for Reis, a commercial real estate publisher of statistical information and analysis. In 2002, he won the Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, which published his third book of poetry, Vertical Elegies 5: The Section. In that year, he began teaching as an adjunct at various New York colleges and universities, including Hunter College, where he taught Performance and Concrete Poetry. That year he met his wife, and in 2005 with their new-born daughter they moved to Albany where he entered SUNY’s PhD program in English. In 2006, his second daughter was born. In 2007 he began teaching in the Language and Thinking Workshop at Bard College (2007-2015) and published on ubu.com “Transverse,” the series of audio-visual recording made in New York from 2000-2004. That same year he made a series of 175 audio-visual recordings entitled “Days.” In 2008 he was awarded a PhD in poetics, published Three Works as a full-length book with Ugly Duckling, and was a full-time visiting faculty member at Siena College. That same year he moved to Catskill, NY. In 2010 he was awarded a Howard Fellowship, moved to Woodstock, NY, where he lives today, and became the Director of Station Hill Press. In 2011 he published with Station Hill Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete, a collection made of direct transcriptions of “Transverse.” In 2014, Lunar Chandelier published Dick: A Vertical Elegy, and over the course of 2012-13 he made 365 sequential interpretive transcripts of that book using sound, image and movement and unloaded daily onto YouTube. MadHat Press published in 2018 Truitt’s Heresway, a collection of terse poems that riff on certain balances, or rhymes—“here” and “sway” being one among a host of others—composed in the Catskill Mountains, which constitutes their affiliate topography. In 2018, Truitt also joined the Woodstock Rescue Squad, where he remains a EMS-certified ambulance driver. In the course of his tenure at Station Hill, he has seen into publication over 50 books, including Bernadette Mayer’s Study Hunger Journals and Eating The Colors Of A Lineup Of Words, which he co-edited; In|Filtration: An Anthology of Poetry from the Hudson River Valley, which he co-edited; and Clark Coolidge’s Selected Poems: 1962-1986, edited by Coolidge and Larry Fagin. Having met in late 2016 the Cuban poet Omar Pérez in Havana and subsequently visiting Cuba the following year, Truitt set up a three-month residency for Pérez in the Hudson Valley and New York City and a series of performances entitled “The Post-Cuban Cabaret,” sponsored by the Institute for Publishing Arts (IPA). This tour was roughly coincident with the publication by Station Hill of his Cubanology. In 2018 he was elected President of the IPA, under the auspices of which in 2019 he began the podcast Baffling Combustions, of which he is a co-host. In 2020, he started the Station Hill Intermedia Lab, a performance series dedicated to discovering new surfaces for poetry. Also in that year he published Tokyoatoto, made of and from a hand-written book composed in the course of a 2019 Tokyo sojourn. Truitt lives with his wife and children in Woodstock, NY.

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