The Loft Hour: Cecily Nicholson + Ana María Ochoa Gautier

Cecily Nicholson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at University of British Columbia. Nicholson is the author of four poetry books, Triage, From the Poplars, Wayside Sang, and Harrowings, and  past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2015) and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry (2018). She is the first honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society (2023) and 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley.

Ana María Ochoa Gautier is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, and faculty member at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Her recent book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology.  She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003).  She writes on music and cultural policy, forced silence and armed conflict, and genealogies of listening and sound in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current projects explore the bioacoustics of life and death in colonial histories of the Americas. She has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008).  She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Démos project at the Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She will be a visiting professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Music in Spring 2025.

Tom McEnaney is Associate Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese, and the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. His research concerns the intersection of literature, sound technology, and politics. He is the author of many articles and the book Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas. His new book, with Judith Peraino, will be out in August and is titled We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond.