Amir Zaki Building and Becoming

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature (particularly 19th-century to 20th-century), Critical Theory, identity politics, and visual arts. He is the author of several books, most recently The Beauty of a Social Problem; Photography, Autonomy and Political Economy (University of Chicago, 2015). Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism, and socioeconomic inequality. Two of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004)--the latter being adopted from his 2001 essay of the same name.

Jennifer Ashton is Professor of English at University of Illinois Chicago whose research and teaching focuses on poetics and the history of poetry, with a particular emphasis on modern and contemporary American poetry. Her book publications include From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP 2005) and an edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 (Cambridge UP 2013). Her articles and essays have appeared in ELH, ALH, Modernism/Modernity, MLN, Interval(le)s, Chicago Review, and numerous edited collections. She is also a founding member of the editorial collective of the arts and politics journal, nonsite.org. She is currently completing a book on the aesthetics and politics of very recent experimental poetry in the United States.

Corrina Peipon is an artist, writer, and curator who lives in Los Angeles.