Tom Konyves is a Canadian video poetry pioneer and author of the 2011 Videopoetry: A Manifesto. In 1978, Tom Konyves coined the term “videopoetry,” a genre he pioneered as a member of The Vehicule Poets, a Montréal avant-garde group. Konyves initiated The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Expo 86); curated Montréal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980); and has given numerous poetry performances. His collection, Videopoems 1978-2008, is available on DVD (AM Productions, 2008). He currently teaches at the University of the Fraser Valley, in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

Nico Vassilakis is a text and visual poet. He manipulates letters to free them of their word scrum. Many of his results can be found online and on his website, Staring Poetics. Nico’s work has been exhibited in visual poetry exhibits around the world. Alphabet Noir, a book of poems/texts about visual poetry, is out from c_L Books. Another book forthcoming is Voir Dire by Dusie Press. Nico was vispo editor for Coldfront Magazine. He has curated online mini-vispo anthologies of Finnish, Turkish, and Chilean vispoets. He co-edited The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics Books 2012). He lives in New York City with his wife and children.

John Lucas’s photography and multimedia projections have been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries. He is collaborating with the poet Claudia Rankine on short documentary films, incorporating image and text in response to topical issues in the American consciousness.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004). She is co–editor of American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) and author of the play Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, which was staged at the Foundry Theatre in 2009. Rankine is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the National Endowments for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. She is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

Eula Biss is the author of The Balloonists and Notes from No Man’s Land, which recently received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and teaches nonfiction writing as an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfiction, The Believer, Gulf Coast, and Harper’s.

John Bresland works in video, radio, and print. His audio essays have aired on public radio’s Weekend America, and his video essays can be seen at Ninth Letter and Blackbird. His print essays can be read in North American Review, Hotel Amerika, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and new media at Northwestern University.

Matthea Harvey is the author of five books of poetry — If the Tabloids are True What Are You?, Of Lamb (an illustrated erasure with images by Amy Jean Porter), Modern Life (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book), Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. She has also published two children’s books, Cecil the Pet Glacier, illustrated by Giselle Potter and The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence and lives in Brooklyn.

Addoley Dzegede is a Ghanaian-American interdisciplinary artist based in St Louis. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Africa, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland, Foundation Obras in Portugal, and Nes Artist Residency in Iceland, as well as a post-graduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. She received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and was awarded a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship at Washington University in St Louis, where she completed an MFA degree in Visual Art in 2015.

Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.

The Evolution of Meaning is based on poems from Kate Greenstreet’s book, The End of Something. See more of her videopoems here.