cris cheek Biography | Poet

cris cheek (intentionally uncapitalized) is a poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Born in London in 1950, he lived and worked in that capital until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. In 1981 he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space and for much of that decade he worked alongside musicians from the London Musicians Collective, choreographers and live artists to make interdisciplinary works. Between 1994-2005 he was based in the most easterly English town of Lowestoft, before emigrating to the United States. His musical collaborations include Slant (a trio with Philip Jeck and Sianed Jones). His radio program "Music of Madagascar" for the BBC won a Sony Gold Award in 1995. A large body of interdisciplinary performance writing was produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers under the author function Things Not Worth Keeping. He taught on the Performance Writing course (1995-2002) at Dartington College of Arts where he was a Research Fellow in interdisciplinary text (2000-2002). He was the Altman Humanities Fellow in 20011-12, co-presenting the Networks and Power symposium and a conference on Network Archaeology from which an issue of the journal Amodern, co-edited with Nicole Starosielski and Braxton Soderman, was published. He lives on the plateau of the southwest Ohio River Valley, with his son. He is director of the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford and co-organizer of South (west) Ohio Poets.