Philip Trussell is a painter and a poet who lives in Austin, where he also mentors artists, writers, and other truants. Born in South Texas in 1943, he was trained as a painter at The University of Texas at Austin and at Yale School of Art & Architecture. In the late 1960s & 70s, Trussell worked with Harvey Brown at Frontier Press in West Newbury, Massachusetts, drawing ads and designing books for Stan Brakhage, Al Glover, and Ed Dorn, with whom he became lifelong friends. Trussell returned to Austin in 1982, and became a sort of godfather to the outsider artists and literary scenes there, hosting salons, guiding the reading of counter-academic students, and connecting spiritual isolatoes like himself. On Dorn's tip, he worked closely with Skanky Possum Press and made art for their publications for over a decade. In 2012, he started writing discontinuous sentences as a daily practice. He soon began arranging them into sequences on postcards, and mailing them out to map what he calls a 'speculative geography' of his fellow dog-paddlers in the river of shit.