Star Black
Photo by Chip Cooper
Star Black is a poet, photographer, and visual artist. She teaches in the MFA Writing and Literature Program at Stony Brook Southampton and works in New York City as a photographer. She was born in Coronado, California, and raised in Washington, D.C. and Hawaii. Star Black has also taught at The New School, has lectured at the Bennington Writers Seminars, and wass the co-founder of the KGB Bar Poetry Series in the East Village. She teaches in the MFA Writing and Literature Program at Stony Brook Southampton and works in New York City as a photographer.
She is the author of three books of sonnets: Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood; a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas. Her poems have been anthologized in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet; 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11, and The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to the Present. Her collages and handmade books were exhibited at Poets House and The Center for Book Arts and published in One of a Kind: Unique Artists Books by Pierre Menard Gallery.[2]
[From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Black and from her book Balefire.]
Selections of her photographs are housed in the Berg Collection at The New York Public Library and at The Library of Congress. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor.
Interview
https://themorningnews.org/post/star-black
1995
1995
1997
1999
“The sonnet, the phoenix of poetry, burns and rises in Star Black…molten and malleable [she] expands syntax and compresses discourse, pulsing at the brink of 21st century poetics…With only the straps of her rhymes to hang on to, she dares—and flies.”
– Molly Peacock
2000
2003
“Like a set of études, Star Black’s sonnets …fluently and gracefully, chart the amazing course of the quotidian.”—John Ashbery
https://poetshouse.org/event/a-poets-eye-for-collage/
2007
2010
An artist/poet collaboration that is the flipside of 2006’s Stigmata Errata Etcetera Reversing their roles in the 2006 volume, Star Black serves as poet, and Bill Knott takes on the role of artist. Bill Knott’s colorful, mischievous, semi-abstract paintings compliment Star Black’s meditations on love and relationships, as well as the divide between what time holds captive and what eludes time. In Velleity’s Shade the temporal collides with the imagined and the passing years become a confluence of queries, shifting views, odd inventories, and light-hearted challenges as if time were a rocking-chair on a flying carpet and turbulence was nothing to fret about.
[Amazon]
2019
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/black.html
Publications
- Velleity’s Shade (poems), with art work by Bill Knott – (Saturnalia Books 2010)
- Ghostwood (sonnets) – (Melville House 2003)
- Balefire (poetry) – (Painted Leaf Press 1999)
- October for Idas (collaged free verse) – (Painted Leaf Press 1997)
- Waterworn (sonnets) – (A Gathering of the Tribes 1995)
- Double Time (double sestinas) – (Groundwater Press 1995)
Collages
- Stigmata Errata Electa, poems by Bill Knott, collages by Star Black – 2007
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