Vernal Cabaret Performers:

David Abel is a poet, editor, and bookseller in Portland, Oregon, where he organizes the Spare Room reading series (www.flim.com/spareroom). David was the proprietor of the Bridge Bookshop in New York City (late 1980s), and Passages Bookshop & Gallery in Albuquerque (mid 1990s). His recent publications include Twenty- (Crane’s Bill Books), Let Us Repair (with Anna Daedalus; wax paper scissors), and Black Valentine (Chax Press).

Bare Hand Wolf Chokers make "comedy" in "New York”, where they have set audiences chortling at comedy clubs such as the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Their current artist projects include wrestling with such ideas as "Is it worth it?", "What time is it? I'm tired", and "Seriously, is it worth it?" The New York Times recently spotlighted them out as “best humor on the Web (laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/bare-hand-wolf-chokers/ ), but they’ll be here, live.

Author of Polyverse (Sun Moon Press) and The Sleep That Changed Everything Wesleyan University Press), as well as song cycle The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Lee Ann Brown loves to sing her poems and read them out loud. She teaches at St. John's University (NYC). This coming summer, she will be starting The French Broad Institute (of Time & the River) in Marshall, North Carolina and teaching at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, along with trips to Burning Man and Rome, Italy.

Scott Chaskey is a farmer, poet and educator, who learned to garden in the Cotswolds and in Cornwall. Employed by the Peconic Land Trust as a steward of land, he has farmed garlic, potatoes, greens (and fifty other crops) for eighteen years at Quail Hill Farm, one of the original Community Supported Agriculture farms in the country, and currently serves as President of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. In 2005, This Common Ground, Seasons on an Organic Farm was published by Viking/Penguin.

Andy Clausen’s many books includes 40th Century Man: Selected Verse 1996-1966 (Autonomedia), Without Doubt (Zeitgeist Press), The Streets of Kashi (Roadkill) & Songs of Bo Baba (Shivastan). He also coedited Poems for the Nation (Seven Stories Press), a collection of contemporary political poems compiled by the late poet Allen Ginsberg.

Brenda Coultas is the author of A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003) which won the Norma Farber Award from The Poetry Society of America, and a Greenwall Fund publishing grant from the Academy of American Poets. Other books include Early Films (Rodent Press) and A Summer Newsreel (Second Story Press). Her writing can be found in Conjunctions, Explosive, Brooklyn Rail, and Bombay Gin. A resident of the East Village for the past ten years, Brenda currently is a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellow, and was featured reader at Nesenkeag Farm Day in 2007.

When he’s not traveling the galaxy as Space Ambassador of Love, performance artist Jason Eisenberg appears in many outrageous incarnations. He has engaged and enraged audiences at venues including New York's Bitter End and The Bowery Poetry Club, the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Cambridge's venerable Club Passim, London's Hackney Empire Theater, and Canada’s Atlantic Jazz Festival. He often performs with his Jazz Orchestra of the Royal Court and with David Amram.

Grant Hart was the drummer and co-songwriter for the seminal Midwest indie punk band Hüsker Dü he founded with Bob Mould and Greg Norton in 1979. Most recently, he’s released solo albums, including Ecce Homo (1996) and Good News for Modern Man (1999), and is recording a new album in Montreal. Hart is a visual artist, poet, and master of classic Studebakers as well as a vocalist and guitarist, and comes to the Gershwin Hotel by slow-train from Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Russ Gershon is a renowned jazz saxophonist, who founded Cambridge’s Either/Orchestra and the recording label Accurate Records. Russ was nominated for a Grammy for his arrangement of the E/O recording of "Bennie Moten's Weird Nightmare,” from The Calculus of Pleasure CD. His study of African jazz led him to Ethiopia where the band performed at the Ethiopian Music Festival. Russ’s most recent recordings include Neo-Realism, and Ethiopiques 20 – Live in Addis.

Kimberly Lyons is the author of Saline (Instance Press, 2005) and Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000). Phototherapique is forthcoming from YoYoLabs/Ketalanche Press. She has recently had poems in EOAGH (chax.org/eoagh/issuetwo/lyons.htm), Critiphoria (www.critiphoria.org/Issue1), and OCHo. She is a clinical social worker and a cook. Favorite vegetable: eggplant.

Long-time denizen of the East Village, Edgar Oliver is a playwright, poet, actor, and author of the novel, The Man Who Loved Plants (Panther Books). His plays have been staged in many downtown theatres in New York, and he appears in two recent independent feature films, That’s Beautiful Frank and Henry May Long.

Simon Pettet, English-born poet and long-time resident of the Lower East Side, most recently published More Winnowed Fragments (Talisman, 2006). His Selected Poems is available from the same publisher and a new volume of poetry (tentatively titled Hearth) will be out in the fall. Simon is also the author of two collaborations with photographer-filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt, Conversations About Everything and Talking Pictures.

Nicole Peyrafitte (www.nicolepeyrafitte.com) is a multimedia performance artist who was born in the mountain town of Luchon in the French Pyrenees amidst the hustle and bustle of the family’s hotel and restaurant (her family has been in the food business since 1789!). Nicole carries her passion for food and art into her performances which include cooking and serving food to the audience, singing, painting, filming, and even yoga. She was awarded "Best Performance Artist of the Capital City 2005" for her one-women show “La Garbure Transcontinentale /The Bi-Continental Chowder.”

Janine Pommy Vega had her first book of poems published by City Lights in 1968, and has since published over a dozen more, including Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents (1997), Mad Dogs of Trieste (2000), The Green Piano (2005), and most recently Across the Table (2007) a CD recording of her performances with musicians from Woodstock, Bosnia, and Italy. She also translated the poetry of Latino migrant farmworkers, presented in Estamos Aquí [We Are Here] (2007). She has been a member of the PEN Prison Writing Committee, and continues to teach in prisons.

Eero Ruuttila, poet, farmer, photographer, and organic agriculture activist, is as likely to show up at a Touareg Music Festival in the Sahara north of Tombouctou as to give the key-note address to an assembly of organic farmers at Desert Island, Maine—when he isn’t out on his tractor at Nesenkeag Cooperative Farm where he’s served as manager for the past 21 years. Editor of Sitting Frog Magazine in the early days of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, his most recent work can be found in Uncontained, Writers & Photographers in the Garden and the Margins (edited by Jennifer Heath) and on display in Boulder’s Norlin Library.

Sparrow divides his time between studying French, doing Sudoku, and running for President of the United States. (Look for his campaign literature on http://www.groundreport.com/sparrow.) Sparrow plays ocarina and mop handle in the band Foamola. (See them on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDUvCICER1Y.) He owns one (pink) watch, which he bought at a 99¢ store, and which is 2 hours and 36 minutes slow.

Steven Taylor is a musician and writer who has been a long-time collaborator with many poets including Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Kenward Elmslie, and Anne Waldman. Since 1984 he has been a member of the Fugs, and he has been on the faculty of the Kerouac School at Naropa University since 1995. In 2004 Wesleyan University Press published his False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground, a memoir of touring with the New York alternative rock band, False Prophets.

Laki Vazakas is a video maker and educator. His video work includes "Huncke and Louis," "Burma: Traces of the Buddha," and "Cherry Valley Arts Festival 1998." He is Video Artist in Residence at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital and is a visiting artist at the Clifford Beers Family Guidance Clinic in New Haven.

George Wallace is the author of sixteen chapbooks of poetry, including Summer of Love Summer of Love (Shivastan Press, 2008), and editor of Poetrybay and Polarity. He has read at the Beat Museum, the Woody Guthrie Festival, Howlfest, Insomniacathon, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, and the Dylan Thomas Center in Wales, and was guest reader at Nesenkeag Farm Day in 2004.