Kate Colby & Todd Shalom
Kate Colby is author of seven books of poetry, including Blue Hole and I Mean. Fruitlands won the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2007. She was a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts, where she hosts an occasional reading series. Currently, she lives in Providence, where she was a 2012 recipient of a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts fellowship. Recent poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, VERSE and The Volta.
Todd Shalom works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. He is the founder and director of Elastic City. In this role, Todd leads his own walks, collaborates with artists to lead joint walks, and works with artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their expertise to the participatory walk format. He often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, they conceive and stage interactive performances in public and private environments. Todd is also a ringleader of Willing Participant. Willing Participant whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens.
Todd's work has been presented by organizations such as Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Creative Time, The Invisible Dog, ISSUE Project Room, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, P.S. 122 and Printed Matter. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts and also holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Boston University. Todd is a member of the core faculty in Pratt Institute's new MFA in Writing.