I have worked as an editor, copyeditor, proofreader, and copywriter for over a decade. I have performed many of these functions since 2005 as an associate editor at Semiotext(e), an iconic intellectual press founded in New York City in 1974 and now based in Los Angeles. In 2014, I worked closely on the production of Semiotext(e)’s installation and pamphlet series for the Whitney Biennial. I have also worked with the Buffalo, NY–based proofreading firm Correct/ed Text; as a copywriter for KCRW’s Bookworm (National Public Radio); and as a master’s thesis editor in the graduate program in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere at the University of Southern California.
I am available for freelance copyediting. My specialties are academic and critical monographs in the arts and humanities; translated creative manuscripts; multiauthor documents; and writing by nonnative speakers. Rates and references are available upon request. Please inquire via the contact page.
New York and London: A.R.T. (Art Resources Transfer) and Koenig Books, 2019
This 560-page publication is a substantial archive and a singular point of entry with which to understand Andrea Fraser’s work and reception. The interview format provides intimate insight into Fraser’s self-positioning as a central aspect of her practice. By presenting the artist’s voice as mediated through interlocutors ranging from professional peers to popular media, it uniquely contextualizes Fraser’s practice in the artistic, institutional, and discursive fields in which she intervenes. As Fraser is engaged, challenged, and often misunderstood, from diverse perspectives, readers learn as much about her artistic commitments from the artist’s humor and affect as from her incisive analysis. Spanning three decades, Andrea Fraser: Collected Interviews 1990-2018 exemplifies the ways in which artistic strategies can question and recast social norms at an individual and institutional level. This collection is a singular resource for all who are concerned with art’s social roles in the broader public sphere.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018
Since the hopeful days of the Occupy movement, many things have changed in the respiration of the world, and we have entered a cycle of spasm, despair, and chaos. Breathing is a book about the increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, about the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere. “I can’t breathe.” These words panted by Eric Garner before dying, strangled by a police officer on the streets of Staten Island, capture perfectly catching the overall sentiment of our time. In Breathing, Franco “Bifo” Berardi comes back to the subject that was the core of his 2011 book, The Uprising: the place of poetry in the relations between language, capital, and possibility. In The Uprising, he focuses on poetry as an anticipation of the trend toward abstraction that led to the present form of financial capitalism. In Breathing, he tries to envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos. The Uprising was a genealogical diagnosis. Breathing is an essay on poetical therapy. How we deal with chaos, as we know that those who fight against chaos will be defeated, because chaos feeds upon war? How do we deal with suffocation? Is there a way out from the corpse of financial capitalism?
Los Angeles and Munich: University Art Galleries (UC, Irvine) and DelMonico/Prestel, 2017
The first monograph on the work of California-born artist Gilbert “Magu” Luján, this book reveals how Magu’s iconic Chicano art influenced contemporary art and culture. The work of this important sculptor, spokesperson, and teacher is seen from a variety of cultural perspectives in this book, which draws upon the artist’s entire oeuvre and places well-known works alongside unpublished drawings, paintings, sculptures, notebooks, and statements. Designed in a large format to complement Magu’s bold use of color, the book includes essays addressing such topics as the concept of emplacement, gender and the imagery of lowriders, and Magu as a social artist. Published in tandem with an exhibition at the University of California, Irvine’s University Art Galleries.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016
Since cofounding San Francisco’s influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America’s finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück’s nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück’s essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. These texts span the author’s career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O’Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks.
New York: A.R.T. (Art Resources Transfer) Press, 2015
In their wide-ranging critical dialogue, Ledare and Anastas probe the complexities of viewing [Ledare’s] Double Bind’s intimate performances and prolific imagery-from experiences of sensory overload or irritation, to notes of pleasure and humor-enlisting sexual-difference critiques along with a heterogeneous set of cultural and theoretical positions. Arranged in six sections, the dialogue addresses key concepts that structure Double Bind (as well as Ledare’s practice broadly): viewing, systemic conditions, enactment, installation and mass media, genealogy, and affect. The dialogue also appears with an introduction by Anastas, a preface by Ledare, and a chronology of Double Bind exhibitions and publications to date.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012
The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today’s precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and “rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009
Like Baudelaire’s gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city–wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit–seeing it with a poet’s eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her—and our—lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles’s account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007
Following Brazil’s first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Félix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil’s future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.