Headliners

Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals and magazines—including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Fiddlehead—and his work has been anthologized widely, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

Dodie Bellamy (belladodie.com)

Dodie Bellamy writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. Her methods include radical feminist revisions of canonical works. Cunt-Ups, her first appropriation of the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. In 2018, Tender Buttons released a 17^th Anniversary edition of the text, introduce by UK poet Sophie Robinson. Bellamy further experiments with the cut-up technique in Cunt Norton (Les Figures, 2013), in which she takes the second edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetryand sexualizes it in the language of porn and desire. Bellamy’s latest books—both from Semiotext€ are bee Reaved, an essay/memoir collection circling around grief, loss and abandonment; and a new edition of her 1998 PoMo vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. With Kevin Killian, she coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017). In 2018-19, she was the subject of On Our Mind, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays and reading-group meetings organized by the CCA Wattis Institute, which culminated in a compendium of essays on Bellamy’s work, Dodie Bellamy is On Our Mind (Semiotext(e), 2020). She is based in San Francisco.

Klaus Maeck ( www.interzone-pictures.com)

In 1979 Maeck opened the first punk recordstore (Rip Off) in his hometown of Hamburg, which soon distributed independent German music worldwide (until 1985). Around the same time he started to shoot and cut up Super 8 films and wrote and produced his first feature film Decoder, based on W.S.Burroughs cut up writings. Burroughs himself played a small key role, recorded during the Final Academy in 1982. Parallel to the release of the film in 1984 Maeck co-organized and recorded Burroughs last reading dates in Germany. At the Berlin reading he filmed an extensive interview with Burroughs by Jürgen Ploog, both edited in the film portrait William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers (1991). Finding it difficult to survive as a filmmaker he was co-founder and longtime CEO of the independent Freibank Music Publishing initiated by the band Einstürzende Neubauten, for which he also has worked as a manager. Always one foot in films, he produced and directed several music videos and documentaries and acted as a music consultant for films which brought him the encounter with young film director Fatih Akin. While working on the Golden Bear-winner Head On (2004) they co-founded their own production company corazón international.They produced Akin‘s next 5 features and documentaries as well as films of other directors. In 2013 Maeck founded his own film production company Interzone Pictures. His first production B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West Berlin premiered successfully at Berlinale 2015 and became a Berlin cult movie. His latest film All is one. Except 0, about the history of German computer hackers, was released in 2021.