Bio

 
Madison McCartha (she/they) is a poet, critic, multimedia artist, and the author of FREAKOPHONE WORLD (Inside the Castle, 2021), her debut book of poetry and visual art. Her second, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.

McCartha's writing appears in BOMB, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and The Spectacle, among others, and has been exhibited through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, the Poetic Research Bureau, and digitally through Small Press Traffic. She has received support from The Electronic Literature Organization, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.

Their peer-reviewed essay, "Notes toward a Virtual Poetics," excerpts from which appear in Action Blog, was published by Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience in 2022. McCartha holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 



McCartha’s dissertation weaves, or ‘cross-site scripts’ as an experimental act of literary criticism, between material-centric readings of drone surveillance footage made public by the FBI, of the large-scale multi-planar work by abstract artist Julie Mehretu (what she calls ‘story maps of no location’), and of the still-emerging body of poems by the contemporary poet Benjamin Krusling.

Working across literary and media theory, McCartha explores the ways a poem might square the fraught relationship between, on one hand, the ideological, economic, and technologically mediated abstractions that seek to bind contemporary black life, and then the subversive potential of abstraction, on the other, in acts of poiesis, to be both a critical and richly expressive form of play.