Banner Artwork: Dana Montlack, W 37 Microscopic electron imagery and dragonfly jellyfish photographic composite.

Join us for aqueous work from an award-winning poet and distinguished composer. Peter Van Zandt Lane will give a presentation on his current composition project, Thresholds, a work for orchestra and electronics that incorporates data sonification from the Georgia Coastal Ecologies Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site and is supported by a grant from the Georgia Sea Grant Artists Program. Dana Montlack will talk about her photographic project, which hybridizes subject-matter to express the dynamics of life unobserved and unrecognized. Felicia Zamora visits to give a reading of her poetry, which meditates on the interstices of nature and culture.

Peter Van Zandt Lane’s music has been described as “refreshingly relevant” (New York Times) and “incisive… beautifully and confidently made… as inviting as it is sophisticated” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). He composes acoustic and electroacoustic concert music that taps into a broad range of classical and vernacular influences, writing pieces that often reflect critically on the subject of technology in society. A recipient of the 2020 MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year Award and a 2018 Charles Ives Fellowship, Peter has received fellowships from Copland House, Composers Now, Yaddo, and MacDowell Colony, among others. Recent works include Radix Tyrannis, a concerto for Joseph Alessi commissioned by American Chamber Winds, Piano Quartet: The Longitude Problem commissioned by the Atlanta Chamber Players, and Chamber Symphony commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for EQ Ensemble (Boston). His catalog of works for wind ensemble –namely Hivemind, Astrarium, and Echo Chambers– are widely performed by professional and collegiate bands alike. His electroacoustic ballet, HackPolitik (one of two award-winning collaborations with choreographer Kate Ladenheim) was a New York TimesCritic’s Pick, receiving international press attention for exploring cyber-activism through music and dance. Peter holds degrees from Brandeis University and the University of Miami, and is currently Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia and director of the Roger and Phyllis Dancz Center for New Music.

Dana Montlack, as a photographer, has engaged in a decades-long exploration of natural elements with a more recent focus on microscopic and oceanic imagery. Her goal is to present works that blur the imagined borders between the perceived physical entity and its more mysterious underlying reality. 

Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor currently living in OH. She is the author of six books of poetry including: Quotient (Tinderbox Editions 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press 2021) and winner of the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award (Red Hen Press 2020), Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions 2018), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press 2018), and Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press 2017). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Tin House, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She’s also authored two chapbooks and was the 2017 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Her poems and essays are found or forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and is the associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.