POETS
Tim Carter (Blur Sparrow, The Translucent Bell) is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee. Recent poems can be found in The Seneca Review, Copper Nickel, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Birdfeast. He lives in Syracuse, NY, where he attends Syracuse University's MFA program and leads poetry workshops for high school students in the community. Find more poems at www.thcarter.info.
Robert Campbell’s (I Cannot Shed Entirely The Shapes I Have Assumed) poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and many other journals. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Murray State University and an M.S. in Library Science from the University of Kentucky. Read more about him at robertjcampbell.wordpress.com.
Margaret Cipriano (And Now, Everyone Is Married) is from Chicago, IL and currently lives in Columbus, OH where she is an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University. Her visual and written work has appeared or is forthcoming in Quarterly West, The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, West Branch, Ninth Letter, Mid-American, Copper Nickel and others. She was recently a finalist for Greg Grummer Poetry Award and serves as the Managing Editor of The Journal.
Dana Koster (When My Father Was A Private Investigator) is the author of Binary Stars (Carolina Wren Press, 2017). She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems have appeared in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, MUZZLE, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Collagist, and many others. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two sons, where she works as a wedding photographer.
Abby E. Murray (Why Women Write Poems For Their Sons, How I Continue To Fail At Parenting) teaches creative writing at the University of Washington Tacoma, where she offers free poetry workshops to soldiers and their loved ones and serves as editor in chief for Collateral, a journal that publishes work focused on the impact of military service. Her poems can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Stone Canoe, and the Rise Up Review.
Emilia Phillips (Butterfly-Shaped Organ) is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Signaletics (2013) and Groundspeed (2016), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). Her poems and lyric essays appear widely in literary publications including Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her third book, Empty Clip, will be published by the University of Akron Press Spring 2018.
John Sibley Williams (Speaking Of The Coal Beds...) is the editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies and the author of nine collections, including Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. A ten-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Shenandoah Sowash's (Intention) work has appeared or is forthcoming in Four Way Review, The Collagist, Menacing Hedge, Smartish Pace, Vinyl Poetry, RHINO, PANK Magazine, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Kimmel Nelson Harding Center for the Arts, she was a finalist for the Smartish Pace Beullah Rose Poetry Prize and the Devil's Lake Driftless Poetry Prize as well as the Baltic Writing Residencies Chapbook Contest, the ATLAS Review TAR Chapbook Contest, and the Bull City Press Chapbook Contest. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference through a work-study scholarship ("waitership") and also traveled to Lithuania through an Editor's Choice Award (full tuition scholarship) from the Summer Literary Seminars. Currently completing her first book, Shenandoah lives in Washington, D.C., and works at American University. Learn more at shenandoahsowash.com.
Valerie Wallace's (ars poetica :: hibernaculum, Aubade with Almonds & Oranges) first book of poems, House of McQueen, was selected by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry and will be available in March 2018. Her chapbook is The Dictators' Guide to Good Housekeeping (Dancing Girl Press). She lives in Chicago. Learn more at valeriewallace.net.
Ross White (Patron Saint Of The Savings & Loan, Portrait Of My Father As A Junk Bond) is the author of two chapbooks, How We Came Upon the Colony (Unicorn Press, 2014) and The Polite Society (Unicorn Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and directs Bull City Press. His manuscript in progress, Guilt Ledger, was selected by Edward Hirsch for the 2016 Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend from Warren Wilson College.
Amie Whittemore (Camel Meditation) is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and co-founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series in Virginia. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Sycamore Review, Smartish Pace, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
VISUAL ARTISTS
Chelsea America (Cover Art, Common Casualties, Self-Portrait With Everything I Own-Yellow) was born and raised in Denver, CO. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute, earning her BFA in New Genres in 2009. She went on to study photography, spending a semester at the Siena Art Institute. Working in painting, drawing, photography, video and performance, she investigates themes around self worth, vanity, materialism, and the dynamics of sex and power in the domestic landscape. She lives and works in Modesto, CA. Learn more at chelsea-america.squarespace.com.
Matthew Bergey (Satyrs Dancers, House, Crying) is an artist studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Professionally, he is focused on developing the language of visual communication, developing an alphabet that allows for vulnerable, empathetic communication. Personally, he believes in the power of the process of art making - in particular, that painting and drawing allows one to gain control over one's own life and provides purposeful work. In his own life, that purpose has eaten away at the all-consuming, all-encompassing black hole of apathy. It isn’t completely squashed yet, and he is not yet living an unbridled existence of pure transcendent emotion, but every time he gets back to the studio he feels a bit closer to it. He hopes as a viewer of his work, you feel a little bit closer as well. More of Matthew's work available at: behance.net/Bergey.
Resa Blatman (They Gather In Such Profusion, Oranges, Coitus) received an MFA in painting from Boston University in 2006 and a BFA in graphic design from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1995. She taught graphic design at MassArt from 1997-2012. Resa has received several grants and awards, including the Arctic Circle Residency (June 2015), where she sailed up the west coast of Svalbard, Norway to hike the glaciers and explore the icebergs and unique landscape. Her work is included in many private and public collections, including Fidelity; Twitter; Hilton Hotel; The WH Ming Hotel, Shanghai, China; United Arab Emirates; Europe. Selected upcoming and recent projects included in 2018: Dorsky Gallery, NY; The Museum of Art at University of New Hampshire. 2017: 1630 pop-up gallery in Boston; work featured on the cover and interior of Boston Society of Architect’s winter quarterly magazine; University Gallery, Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL; Massachusetts College of Art. Resa’s work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications—several recent articles and a podcast on Resa’s work and climate change can be found at the links on her homepage. To read these and to see more work, please visit her website at resablatman.com
Jenny Blazing (Promise, Semblance) was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She is an artist now living in Durham, North Carolina. She graduated from University of California, Davis with degrees in Environmental Design & Economics and subsequently earned a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work focuses on the ephemeral beauty of our world and our need to do our best to respect and preserve it. Learn more at jennyblazing.com.
Angela Kwon (In Safe Hands) is a BFA student studying illustration at Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD).
Aaron Olson-Reiners (Selfobject #1, Untitled) is a painter interested in duality, contradiction, and the self. His work has exhibited at venues including Next Door Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Northwest Art Center in Minot, North Dakota. He earned a MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a BA from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Olson-Reiners lives and works in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. See more at www.aaronolsonreiners.com.
Iman Serag (Musical Lights) is an Industrial Design senior studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is interested in designs about medical products and interfaces that help bridge the gap between patient and doctor understanding. Her aim is to make the hospital environment less confrontational and less sterile and more inviting. She enjoys making jewelry in her spare time.
Zoë Sturges (After After Tandem) is a Columbus, Ohio-based artist specializing in painting and mixed-media. Her work focuses on materiality and cataloging. Using a combination of found material and handmade paints, her work asks the viewer to consider both the inherited history of the found material and the created history of the surface. She earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Ohio State University (2017). You can see more of her work at zoesturges.com and on Instagram @zoesturgesart.