TRAVIS SHARP is a poet, book artist, and teacher. He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell, where he completed his thesis, Love Poems to the Poet's Body, an ecriture queer reparative writing-reading of his body. He is currently a PhD student in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where he teaches writing and rhetoric, creative writing, and professional writing. His recent research focuses on ecopoetics and biopoetics; biopolitics; the politics of aesthetics; race, class, gender, and the avant-garde; and 20th/21st century poetry and poetics.
His chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda came out with above/ground press in the summer of 2018, and an artist's book, one plus one is two ones, was published in late 2018 by Recreational Resources. With Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson, he co-edited Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press, 2017), a curation of responses by Essay Press authors to the 2016 US Presidential election. Other recent publications include poetry in Columbia Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, LIT, Puerto del Sol, Fact-Simile, and elsewhere. Essays, interviews, and book reviews have appeared with The Operating System, Entropy, and The Conversant. With funding from the James H. McNulty Chair (Myung Mi Kim), the David Gray Chair (Steve McCaffery), and the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, Travis is working on an editorial experiment, AUTODESTRUCT, which curates and publishes ephemeral and transitory texts and explores alternative and public modes of distribution. Additionally, Travis is a founding member of the [ r ] editorial collective, which publishes the text and art journal Small Po[r]tions and publishes chapbooks, artists' books, and broadsides through the micropress imprint Letter [r]. Since 2015, Travis is an editor, book designer, and website manager at Essay Press where he co-edits the Listening Tour Series with Cristiana Baik and the Groundloop Series with Maria Anderson. Alongside his MFA cohort and with the guidance of poet and artist Amaranth Borsuk, Travis co-curated Blood of an Author Box, an homage to Eleanor Antin's Blood of the Poet Box, in which collaborators invited writers to contribute a word, as their authorial blood, to a box of slides. These words were later archived to the project website and made available for viewers to use as a database of blood-language in the creation of additional texts. Travis' art has been exhibited at the Alabama Center for the Arts, the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts, and Gallery 1412 in Seattle, WA. Chapbooks and artists' books include Small Po_tions #1, a small collection of poetry by Travis, Maged Zaher, Samar Abulhassan, Jeanne Heuving, and Christina Montilla, published by Letter [r]; the JUNK MAIL CHAPS series and FEARHEAR GESTHARE URESHARM HEREHIRE, released during an exhibition at Gallery 1412; and a number of small books and art objects produced for poetry readings. |