[close] Tisa Bryant was born on a U.S. Air Force base during the Vietnam War, and raised in Boston & Plymouth, MA.

As a writer, poet, and radical cineaste, Tisa Bryant’s work often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history, splicing, juxtaposing and threading seemingly disparate elements from personal history, film, and observations as a global citizen, into multi-layered texts that demand new forms.
Just as Tisa’s chapbook, Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000) collages concerns of breast cancer, Barbados genealogy research, a Passover seder and a film by Yvonne Rainer, her first book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. In her introduction to Tisa’s recent reading, Stacy Szymaszek, director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York, said, “Like the great Edouard Glissant, her work is at once novel, essay and poetry, these modulations emerging and transmuting in a practice he calls “spiral retelling”.

Maintaining an active engagement with visual arts and literary community, Tisa has served as a juror for the San Francisco International, Gay and Lesbian, and Independent film festivals, has written essays for the gallery shows of visual artist Laylah Ali, and is a founding editor/publisher of the hardcover annual, The Encyclopedia Project. [close]