TERRI WITEK
TERRI WITEK is the author of seven previous books of poems. Exit Island was a Florida Book Award medalist; The Rape Kit won the the 2018 Slope Editions Prize, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin called The Rape Kit “a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath …”
Witek’s poetry, though often topical, traces the breakages between words and visual images. Her visual poetics work is featured in two recent international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021). It has appeared in museum and gallery shows and in site-specific performances as well, often in collaboration with visual artists.
The poet’s collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have, since 2005, been shown nationally and internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Valencia (Spain), and Rio de Janeiro. The duo are represented by The Liminal Gallery in Valencia. Since 2011, collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) often use augmented reality technology and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami. Collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk loops the pandemic and the eco-crisis as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds and that with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile. Individual poems have been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, Lana Turner, The New Republic, and many other journals and anthologies.
With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. They also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek also directs Stetson’s undergraduate creative writing program, and holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing. (terriwitek.com)