Author’s Spotlight

Organized by Fence Editor Rebecca Wolff

With Tessa Kelly & Christopher Stackhouse

Rebecca Wolff is the author of four books of poems and a novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. She is the founding editor and publisher of the independent press called Fence, which publishes a biannual print literary journal of the same name as well as Fence Portal, Fence Digital, The Constant Critic, and other digital projects. She has lived in the area full-time since 2005 and currently serves as an alderperson on the Hudson Common Council.

Tessa Kelly, who is architect and director of the Mastheads. The Mastheads is a public humanities project in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which seeks to connect residents to the literary history of the region, create a forum for thinking about place, and support the production of new creative work. Founded in 2016 upon the legacy of five American Renaissance authors who wrote in Pittsfield, The Mastheads is at once an urban architectural experiment, a literary research initiative, a writers’ residency, and an educational program.

Christopher Stackhouse’s books include the poetry collection Plural, and, the art-text collaboration Seismosis with writer John Keene. His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, American Poet- The Journal of The Academy of American Poets, and Modern Painters among many other journals, anthologies, and periodicals. His essay Basquiat & Xerox Art in Context appears in the book Jean-Michel Basquiat – Xerox (Hatje Cantz, 2019). Forthcoming, Stackhouse is a contributing writer to the monograph The Wayland Rudd Collection (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), offering a meditation on the African-American Soviet Union expat actor Wayland Rudd’s life and career. He received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He has taught and lectured at several institutions including the Maryland Institute College of Art, Bloomfield College, Ohio State University, and Naropa University. Stackhouse is board member and longtime collaborator with Fence.

The Hot Topics Series of The Hudson Eye 2020 was made possible via a Relief Grant from Humanities New York.