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THE DIRT PALACE
The Word Shelter
Shelter built in 2023 by Shaun Bullens for DPPP
Mahogany, copper, glass, Vestaboard
​
The Word Shelter is a sign facing Broadway right next to the bus stop. Texts will be crafted by a variety of wordsmiths all year!
THE CURRENT
WORD SHELTER
POET IS....
LUCIA RETTA
Lucía Retta is a writer, educator, and artist with ancestral roots in Texas and Northern Mexico. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches creative writing. Her current work focuses on the land and the body as sites of memory and mystery, revelation and renewal. Instagram: @lrrettaWebsite: www.luciaretta.com
CURRENT WORD SHELTER MESSAGE
PAST WORD SHELTER ARTISTS
MURPHY CHANG
Murphy Chang thinks on the structure and malleability of language as material. Her work often takes on a written and/or visual form and has been “shown" both nationally and internationally. Murphy cares little for the boundaries between disciplines. She holds degrees from allegedly reputable institutions and sincerely hopes her work never takes on a publishable form.
MUGGS FOGARTY
Muggs Fogarty is a writer, performance artist, and vocalist from Providence, Rhode Island. Muggs is the author of poetry chapbooks Unburn (Ghost Hum Arts 2016) and Sex Camel (Game Over Books 2018), and can be found fronting music acts, Lookers, Bittersweet and their solo loop pedal poetry project. A former director of Providence Poetry Slam, Muggs has taught and mentored several youth & collegiate poetry groups through UCONN, Brown University, RISD, New Urban Arts, ProvSlam Youth and has received awards from Rhode Island State Council for the Arts for projects in support of local youth writers. Muggs' poetry work has been featured with The Poetry Foundation, Button Poetry, Freezeray, Providence Monthly and Radar Productions. Muggs is host of ‘Chaos Hour’ on WVVX 101.1 Providence Community Radio and is a resident of non-profit community arts space, AS220. Muggs also practices myofascial bodywork and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in acupuncture.
JEREMY PALMER READER
Jeremy Palmer Reader enjoys his golden years in Providence, Rhode Island
JOHN-FRANCIS QUIÑONEZ
John-Francis Quiñonez (they/them)
is a Desert Blossom //
Resident of The Dirt Palace in Providence, RI //
maker of Ice Creams with Big Feeling //
Becoveralled Aunt Figure & Events Guardian at Lost Bag //
proud member & organizer at Binch Press & Queer.Archive.Work. //
Writer with a collection of Poems Keep Your Little Lights Alive
&
is thinking (constantly) about emerging.
SUSSY SANTANA
Sussy Santana is a poet and culture artisan, born in the Dominican Republic. Santana is the author of four works of poetry. Her work facilitates cross-sector partnerships in Arts & Health. She has a community centered practice often performing at corner stores, supermarkets, and small businesses. Her approach includes making “llamados” or “calls” for members of the community to participate in collective performance. Santana is the first Latina recipient of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in writing from the Rhode Island Foundation
SASHA WISEMAN
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Sasha Wiseman was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. She was a resident of the Dirt Palace from 2004-2009, and then went on to earn a BA in Literature from Bennington College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was the Senior Fellow in Nonfiction. Her fiction, poetry, and literary criticism have appeared in publications such as Story, The Southampton Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Providence again with her husband and their dog.
DARCIE DENNIGAN
Darcie Dennigan is the author of several books, a few plays, and some criticism, including the recent "Happy Birthday Don't Die," a celebration of The Story of Harold, a mostly forgotten novel about a suicidal writer of children's books.
She directs the Spatulate Church Emergency Shift, an ad hoc poets theatre group.
CHARLOTTE ABOTSI
VATIC KUUMBA
Mary-Kim Arnold is a writer, artist, and educator. She currently serves as Assistant Dean for Equity & Inclusion in Teaching & Learning at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Fish & The Dove (Noemi Press) and Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press).
Other writings have appeared in Hyperallergic, Conjunctions, The Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.
Mary-Kim has received several fellowships and awards, including the 2020 Howard Foundation Fellowship, the 2018 MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the 2017 Fellowship in Fiction from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
She serves as Senior Editor for Collaborative & Cross-Disciplinary Texts at Tupelo Quarterly.
In 2021, she was appointed by the Governor to serve on the Board of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She also serves on the Board of the Providence Athenaeum.
Adopted from Korea and raised in New York, Mary-Kim lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children.
Matthew Derby is a writer based in Rhode Island.
Most recently, he co-wrote the Spotify Original podcast Harley Quinn and The Joker: Sound Mind with longtime collaborator Eli Horowitz.
Derby's previous collaboration with Horowitz, the feature film Gone in the Night, was released in 2022.
Derby is also the author of Phreaks, an Audible Original starring Carrie Coon, Christian Slater, Ben McKenzie, Justice Smith, and Bree Klauser.
Previously, he co-wrote the serialized fiction podcast Sandra for Gimlet Media with Kevin Moffett, and also collaborated with Kevin, Eli Horowitz, and Russell Quinn on The Silent History, the first major exploratory, interactive novel designed specifically for the iPad and iPhone. Derby is also the author of the short story collection Super Flat Times. His stories have been anthologized in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Apocalypse Reader, and Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, The Believer, The Columbia Journal, Fence, and Guernica and he's contributed to The Organist, the monthly podcast of The Believer.
Sara Wintz is the author of the epic poem Walking Across A Field We Are Focused On At This Time Now and a chapbook called The Lauras. Their poems and interviews have been published in Social Text, Art Papers, and The Creative Independent. You can read their interview with Caitlin Cali on Dirt Palace's blog.
FOR MORE DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT JOHN'S APPROACH TO THE WORD SHELTER GO TO https://programmatology.com/
Despite being about to be swept aside by the everywhere-and-all-for-0.001% Generative Pre-Trained Transformer(s), John Cayley persists as a human maker of language art in networked and programmable media. He has published books of poetry and translation, and a collection of essays, Grammalepsy, its title naming one of writing's many pathologies. Meanwhile, Cayley has explored dynamic and ambient poetics, heuristic (as opposed to GPT-occult) text generation, transliteral morphing, aestheticized vectors of reading, and transactive synthetic language (as in ‘smart speakers’ and listeners). More academically, he is now investigating what language is, and is doing so in the context of ongoing philosophically-informed, practice-based research. An augmented and reconfigured edition of his digital language art poetry collection, Image Generation, was published by Counterpath Press, 2023. Those more curious about his work are often encouraged to visit nllf.net. Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Providence’s own Brown University.
- Personal site programmatology.com
- @programmatology (old-school IG only)
S. Tourjee is a writer and artist living in Providence RI. They are the author of Sam Says, Sam, published by Spuyten Duyvil; two chapbooks: Ghost and When Tongue Was Muscle, both published by Anomalous Press; and Record Of, an ongoing archival and poetry project. More at stourjee.com
BIO: hey folks!! my name is naffisatou koulibaly ((everyone calls me naffi for short)) and I am the newest resident at Dirt Palace! I was born and raised in various parts of RI, but since high school, I've been central to Providence. my body of work includes lots and lots of poetry–which has always been my one true love. these days it feels like all I have to show of this love is a collection of unfinished poems that I hope one day to return to and complete. although, I know, as do many other poets, that a poem is never truly finished. my writing is interested in examining the phenomenon of growing up. to put it another way, i like talking about the inherent heartbreak of being a 23 year old girl and everything that makes the experience so beautiful and tragic.
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