EDIT: Submissions are closed -- the book will be available January 2020.
We are still accepting submissions of select pieces up until the final deadline of November, and will pick the final pieces then, but these are the bios for contributors that got abstracts in on time. When our publisher is secured, we'll have more announcements to make...
Contributor Bios:
Tara Isabella Burton (MSt, University of Oxford) is a writer, critic, and literary scholar. She is the winner of The Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize (2012) for travel writing and a Lowell Thomas Award (2016). Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous popular and literary periodicals, such as The Atlantic, Paris Review Daily, Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her fiction has appeared at Tor.com, PANK, Shimmer, and elsewhere. She is a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, completing doctoral work in theology.
James Curcio (BA, Bard College) is a novelist, graphic artist, former editor at Rebel News, and transmedia producer. Among extensive credits, he is the author of Join My Cult! (New Falcon, 2004), Party at the World’s End (Mythos Media, 2013), co-star of Clark: A Gonzomentary (2013) and editor of numerous anthologies including The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized, 2011). He is the creative director at ModernMythology.net.
John Gray (D.Phil, University of Oxford) is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and over a distinguished career has taught at Essex, Tulane, Yale, Harvard, and Oxford. A prolific and critically acclaimed writer, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and BBC Radio. He has authored dozens of books, including The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), and Mill on Liberty: A Defence (Routledge, 1996). J. G. Ballard has described his work as “an essential guide to the new millennium.”
Kevin Hunt (PhD, University of Nottingham) is Senior Lecturer in Design, Culture and Context at Nottingham Trent University. He is a columnist for Flow: Online Journal of Television and Media Studies and blogs for The Huffington Post. He has published in scholarly collections such as Enchanting David Bowie (2015), and in multiple journals, such as Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.
Yahia Lababidi (BA, George Washington University) is a critically acclaimed poet and writer. His work has appeared in film (Sleepdancing, by Swoon), on radio (NPR), in numerous popular periodicals (Harper’s Magazine, Salon, The London Magazine), literary journals (Poetry, Cimarron Review, Agni), and anthologies (With Our Eyes Wide Open, 2015; Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, 2007). His books include Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems, 1993-2015 (Press 53, 2016) and The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi (Onesuch Press, 2012). Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Lababidi was chosen as a Juror for the 2012 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He has been featured on Best American Poetry, World Literature Today, The Guardian, NPR, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont, has described his work as “resonates in plain-spoken yet dazzling poetry - sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes expansive - that betrays the eclectic transmissions of his myriad influences, from Rumi to Kierkegaard, Dickinson to Kafka.” Lababidi’s writing has been translated into several languages.
Gary Lachman (aka Gary Valentine) is a writer and musician. A founding member of the New Wave band, Blondie, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. His writing has appeared in numerous popular periodicals, such as The Guardian, Mojo, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A frequent guest on BBC Radio, he has authored more than dozen books, such as The Secret History of Consciousness (Lindisfarne, 2003), Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World (Floris, 2013), and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (TarcherPerigee, 2016). His work has been translated into 10 languages.
Lúcio Reis-Filho (Ph.D, University Anhembi Morumbi) is a film critic and historian specializing in the relations between cinema, history and literature. Focusing on the horror genre, he wrote essays about zombies in contemporary Brazilian and Latin American films, published in journals such as the SFRA Review and horror-themed anthologies. He also contributed with a biographical study about George Romero in a Brazilian anthology on world independent cinema. Currently, researches the oeuvre of the American writer H.P. Lovecraft and the English musician David Bowie.
Jack Marsh (PhD, SUNY Binghamton) is a philosopher and teaches at Concordia International School, Shanghai. He is co-editor of Normativity and Meaning: On the Promise of Phenomenology (forthcoming), and has published in multiple peer-reviewed journals, such as Philosophy Today, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Cahiers d’etudes Levinassiennes.
Tanja Stark (BSW, University of Queensland) is a sculptor and multimedia artist from Brisbane, Australia. She has exhibited internationally, and has work commissioned and held by The Bowie Archive. She is a contributing author to Enchanting David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2015) and David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015). She is currently working on a series of hand built ceramic “ladybowls” for a forthcoming exhibition exploring the strength and sensuality of the feminine as part of a project around gender and violence.
John Harrigan is a writer, director and performer. He is a founder of FoolishPeople and is one of the earliest pioneers of immersive theatre. His work as a writer, director and filmmaker explores the inherent truth that each life holds. Harrigan's work centers on the creation of film, ritual theatre, and installation art. He has performed at the ICA, the Horse Hospital, Arcola Theatre, and throughout London and the UK. His work has been presented internationally in the United States and Netherlands.
Peter-R. Koenig (BA, University of Zurich) is a Swiss writer and journalist. He is the author of over a dozen books and 100 articles on the occult, such as Der kleine Theodor-Reuss-Reader (Munich: ARW, 1993), Ein Leben für die Rose: Arnoldo Krumm-Heller (Munich: ARW, 1995), and was a major contributor to Disinformation’s Book of Lies (2014).
Jean-François Martel (BA, University of Ottawa) is a writer and award-winning filmmaker working in the Canadian film and television industry. Among extensive credits, his documentary short, Cicada, won the Best Short Film award at the 2013 Canadian Film Festival; and his series of short documentaries, Champlain en vingt fragments (UNIS, 2015), won a Hermes Creative Gold Award and a Creativity International Silver Award in 2015. Jean-François is author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice (Evolver Editions, 2015), and has published multiple essays in anthologies and web magazines, such as Reality Sandwich, Metapsychosis, Disinfo and The Finch.
Michael Hunter (Ph.D, Stanford University) is a director, performance curator, and senior lecturer at California College of the Arts. As a theater director, he trained under the late Carl Weber, who was an assistant to Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s. Hunter has staged works by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Eugène Ionesco, Joe Orton, Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, Heiner Müller, Jean Genet, and Witold Gombrowicz, to name a few. He is a cofounder of Collected Works, a San Francisco-based theater collective that specializes in novel interpretations of classic plays, usually performed in nontraditional spaces. With members of Collected Works, Hunter has also begun working on a project that uses performance to embody and narrativize archives. The first iteration took place last summer in San Francisco’s Museum of Performance and Design.
Tom Powers (Ph.D, Indiana University of Pennsylvania) is a writer and Senior Lecturer at Montgomery County Community College. He is the author of Gender and the Quest in British Science Fiction Television (McFarland, 2016) and the co-author of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who (McFarland, 2007).
Seth Russell (BA, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is a Native American of the O'odham peoples who grew up in the cliffs of Southern Illinois. He is an MPA candidate and curatorial assistant at SIU University Museum, and spends his days digitizing archival records for an encyclopedic collection of over 70,000 objects from global cultures. When not reciting poetry to Dylan Thomas’ death mask, he reconstructs and practices occult rites from across traditions with particular emphasis on Andrew Chumbley's source materials, Crowley's unpublished works, as well as Saivist and Vajrayana Tantra.
Roy Starrs (PhD, University of British Columbia) is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at University of Otago. A prolific author, he has published dozens of essays and book chapters, and has edited and authored numerous books, including Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata (Curzon Press, 1998), Modernism and Japanese culture. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Rethinking Japanese modernism. (Global Oriental, 2012), and When the tsunami came to shore: Culture and disaster in Japan. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014). He is the Japan editor of the online The Literary Encyclopedia.
Slavoj Žižek (PhD, University of Paris VIII) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Less Than Nothing; The Year of Dreaming Dangerously; Living in the End Times; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; In Defense of Lost Causes; and many more.