Authors & Artists

Garrett Caples :

A freelance writer and music critic living in Oakland, CA, Garrett Caples is the author of three collections of poetry, The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle Press/Black Square Editions, 1999), er um (Meritage Press, 2002), and Complications (Meritage Press, 2007) as well as The Philistine’s Guide to Hip Hop (Ninevolt/Kolourmeim, 2004), a collection of articles on hip hop (with an introduction by Shock-G of Digital Underground, no less) and Surrealism’s Bad Rap, (Narrow House, 2007), a spoken word album. In addition to operating Kolourmeim, he writes on hip hop and art for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and is editing a lost manuscript of Philip Lamantia’s called Tau, along with the poems of John Hoffman for City Lights Books. He received a PhD in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003.

William Diaper :

William Diaper (1685-1717) was an exceedingly minor eighteenth-century English poet best known for his underwater pastoral, Nereides, or Sea-Eclogues (1712), which replaces the usual fauns and nymphs with tritons and mermaids. Born in Bridgewater, Somerset, and receiving a BA from Balliol College, Oxford in 1702, Diaper appears to have spent most of his life as a poor clergyman, though he later received patronage from the likes of Lord Bolingbroke. His main contact with the London literary world was Jonathan Swift, who wrote, in his Journal to Stella, “His name is Diaper. Piss on him.” Though he became increasingly ill in his later life, the exact manner of his death is unknown. Among his other works are Dryades, a topographical poem; an imitation of the seventeenth epistle of the first book of Horace; and the first two of the five books of the Halieutica, a didactic poem on sea-fishing by the Greek poet Oppian.

Shock G :

Gregory E. Jacobs (born August 25, 1963), also known as Shock G and Humpty Hump, is an American musician and rapper. He is perhaps best known as the head vocalist for the hip hop group Digital Underground. In 1993, Shock-G produced Tupac Shakur's breakthrough gold single "I Get Around," Tupac's "So Many Tears" on the album Me Against the World, and co-produced Tupac's debut album 2Pacalypse Now. In 2004, Shock released a solo CD, Fear of a Mixed Planet.

John Hoffman :

John Hoffman (1928-1952) is a legendary Beat poet who died of unknown causes in Mexico at age 24. An archetype of the Beat-era hipster—tall, lean, goateed, and bespectacled—Hoffman was close friends with Philip Lamantia and is depicted, along with Lamantia and others, in “Howl,” as well as in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums (1958). In 1955, at the famous “Six Poets at Six Gallery” reading at which Ginsberg debuted “Howl,” Lamantia read Hoffman’s poems rather than his own. Following the extremely-limited Kolourmeim edition of Hoffman’s poetry, his work has been published in #59 of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey to the End by John Hoffman.

Jeff Mellin :

Jeff Mellin got his start as garage band caterwauler and suburban troubadour, playing coffeehouses, driveways, church basements, galleries and subway stops from Boston’s North Shore to Greenwich Village. After studying poetry, prose and politics at Rutgers University, Mellin returned to Boston to front a jangle-pop band called the Eddies and has since released a number of recordings as a solo mod-folkie on the Stereorrific Recordings label, including Jeff Mellin Saves the World, Parts 1ne & 2we and Good for a Gander. He’s also an award-winning art director and illustrator for national and regional publications. Now based in Philadelphia, he helps run Waxfruit Arts Media, Inc., a not-for-profit organization that will support and create projects connecting indie music with other media arts.

Joel Mellin :

Joel Mellin started his career as a systems engineer for a NASA funded gamma ray observation satellite, but left the space program to pursue graduate studies in music composition at NYU. There, he worked on innovative digital music systems using genetic algorithms and sonar-based instrument controllers for real-time performance.

Mellin uses computers for their robust calculation capabilities, their efficiency handling complex, tedious tasks and their objective, apathetic relationship with aesthetics and memory. He strives to realize the unheard, experimenting with new techniques, methodologies and musical paradigms. His works include a 30,000+ rain drop thunderstorm, an automated Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar orchestra and a swarm of insects that follow a score. Often, his works takes shape in collaborative settings with other artists, performers and dancers.

As a programmer, Mellin developed database applications for the USDOE's Safe and Drug Free Schools initiativeto help the NYC public school system better manage at-risk students, developed a dynamic music licensing library called FlickTracks, and is responsible for developing innovative online classroom and distance learning as the Senior Information Architect for Gotham Writers' Workshop. His software is used by thousands of people around the globe every year.

He hold a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Hampshire and a Masters in Music from New York University.

Joel lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anna Naruta :

Anna Naruta formed Panty Productions with Garrett Caples, and make experimental films in their beloved home of Oakland, many of which feature music by Stereorrific Recording artists. Now her Double Bull imprint marks Anna's collaborations with Oakland artists in making hip hop videos. On the street, she works with ways communities can activate established protections to achieve self-determination for treatment of their cultural heritage.

Christopher Nealon :

Christopher Nealon grew up in upstate NY, was a newspaper reporter in Boston for Gay Community News briefly after college, and now lives in SF and in Washington, DC. He teaches in the English department at Berkeley, and has a chapbook of poems, Ecstasy Shield, from Kolourmeim/Black Square Editions, a critical book, called Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall, from Duke UP (also 2001), and a recent full-length book of poems, The Joyous Age (also Black Square).

John Soares :

Boston based photographer John Soares has been called the “King-Daddy of Inventiveness.” He’s always trying something unexpected, whether it's shooting portraits in a bowl of milk or projecting stuff onto other stuff or kicking tripods while the flash is going off. And while the process is unequivocally slapstick, the outcome is consistently raw and emotional and always content based. He shoots for a lot of major magazines and has won a bunch of big awards.

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