From 1977 to 1979, Verburg served as the research director and photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by nineteenth-century frontier photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. In the late 70s and early 80s Verburg created The Visiting Artist Program for Polaroid Corporation, promoting artistic/technical innovation by inviting Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Jan Groover, and Jim Dine, among others, to experiment with Polaroid’s new giant instant cameras.  Since then, she has worked independently and collaborated across disciplines with poets, theater artists, and dancers. Her photos and videos were exhibited and published by MoMA and Walker Art Center as PRESENT TENSE: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg.

She lives in Minnesota, USA, and Spoleto, Italy.

Jim Moore has published seven books of poetry, most recently UNDERGROUND: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 2014 (Graywolf Press).  Graywolf will also publish his next book in 2021 or 2022. His poems appear in such periodicals as The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Sun. Over the last 33 years he has spent a lot of time living and writing in Spoleto, Italy where these poems had their origin.  He also lives in Minneapolis in the United States where he has taught, until recently, in the MFA Program at Hamline University.  He also frequently teaches at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In recent years his work has focussed on the intersection–sometimes collision–between the inner life and life lived in the public sphere.

Para-phrase is an online project that commissions pairings of images and text, where a photographer is invited to submit images and a writer is invited to respond to the selection. It offers a platform for exchanges and responses between artists, writers, and curators whose work produces and promotes the discipline of lens-based media. Para-phrase draws on the multiplicity of artistic processes and aims to encourage their exchange. It supports a wide range of voices from an expanding network of practitioners open to collaboration and exchange and shows that the outcome reflects the many, varied approaches of how to interpret both image and text. Both the acts of writing and photographing attempt to interpret the world, to decipher the symbols, figures, data, complexities of our respective realities.