POETS
Brandon Jordan Brown (Inheritance) is a former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, winner of the 2016 Orison Anthology Poetry Prize, a scholarship recipient from The Sun, and has served as a poetry instructor with PEN in the Community. His work has appeared in Grist; Scalawag; Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review; Forklift, Ohio; Winter Tangerine Review; and elsewhere. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Brandon currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
M.G. Martin (Vesper For The Middle Of The Ocean) is the author of One For None (Ink, 2010). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Powderkeg, Juked, iO, ZYZZYVA, Sink Review, PANK, and from Greying Ghost Press. He teaches middle school and lives on Maui with the poet, Tess Patalano and the dog, Ihu.
Megan Denton Ray's (Cattleheart, Heaven Hill) work has appeared recently or soon in The Sun, Salt Hill Journal, Cimarron Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Indiana.
Laura Read's (Jellyfish, We're Out Of Tin...) first collection of poems, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was published in 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA in fall of 2018. She teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College.
Jim Redmond (The Sublime Object...) received his MFA from the University of Michigan. He’s lived in Michigan for most of his life, but now he’s in Denton, Texas, where he’s currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Redivider, PANK, and Diagram, among others. His chapbook, Shirts or Skins, won Heavy Feather Review's chapbook prizes in 2013.
Karen Rigby ([not the ghost of a rose]) is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). A 2007 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her poems have been published in Field, The London Magazine, Bennington Review, jubilat, and other journals. Her website is www.karenrigby.com.
Hayden Saunier (Cold Morning With New Catastrophes) is the author of three poetry collections: How to Wear This Body (Terrapin 2017), Say Luck (2013 Gell Poetry Prize), and Tips for Domestic Travel (Black Lawrence Press 2009), and a chapbook, Field Trip to the Underworld (2013 Keystone Chapbook Award.) Widely published, her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize and the Robert Fraser Award. She lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Bo Schwabacher's (An Adopted Korean Girl's Good Daddy, ...Wish For Her Birth Mother) poems have appeared in Cha, diode, Eleven Eleven, Foundry, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Offing, and others. She teaches at Northern Arizona University.
Marvin Shackelford (Owlbear) is author of the collections Endless Building (poems, Urban Farmhouse) and Tall Tales from the Ladies' Auxiliary (stories, forthcoming from Alternating Current). His work has, or soon will have, appeared in Kenyon Review, Hobart, Blue Fifth Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. He resides in Middle Tennessee, earning a living in agriculture.
VISUAL ARTISTS
Christian Ruiz Berman (For Just A Moment, Kami#3, Para Jairo) is completing an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. He was born in Mexico City and has lived and worked in New England, California, Costa Rica, and Australia. He was recently selected to be shown in New American Paintings MFA Edition, 2018. Christian was also recently selected out of several thousand people to participate in an 8-person group show (“Contemporary Visions 8”) at Beers Gallery in London. His work has been featured in Hyperallergic.com, and he had a solo show at Outlet BK in Bushwick in 2015. Christian has participated in numerous group exhibitions in NYC and beyond, with locations including Spring Break Fair, Dorsky Projects, and Morgan Lehman Gallery. He has curated 7 group exhibitions since 2010. Christian was a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant in 2015. He has completed residencies at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY, the Contemporary Arts Center in Troy, NY, and has been accepted for residencies at ChaNorth (NY) and at Marble House (VT) in 2018. Learn more at cruizberman.com.
Emily Denton (From Green Is Blue Plus Yellow, Placater With Beets) is a mixed-media artist in the MFA program at Purdue University. She is the recipient of a 2018 PROMISE Award and Delta Phi Delta Summer Scholarship. Her work has appeared in both international and national group exhibitions, including the Suwon International Photo Festival in Seoul, South Korea. She currently lives and teaches in Indiana.
Julie Farstad (She Wants Inside, Haunted Summer) is an artist, Professor of Painting and Chair of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Ms. Farstad makes oil paintings, watercolors, and quilted fabric paintings that explore girlhood, mysticism, and landscape. Born and raised in Elmira, New York, Farstad earned a BFA in Painting from the University of Notre Dame in 1997, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000. Her work is represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. Ms. Farstad has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows most recently at Zg Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, Plug Projects in Kansas City, Missouri, and Studios Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri. She was awarded a three-year residency at The Studios Inc in Kansas City in 2010 and her work was exhibited in Women to Watch 2010, Body of Work: New Perspectives in Figure Painting at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Julie Farstad lives in Kansas City with her husband and two children. Learn more at juliefarstad.com or follow her on Instagram @therealjuliefarstad.
Born in San Bernardino and raised on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Mary-Austin Klein (Cover Art, More Mesa Morning) found inspiration in the California landscape at an early age. The Otis Art Institute took her inland to the Echo Park district in Los Angeles, where she has been a resident for 27 years. After purchasing a Mojave Desert cabin in 2001, Klein returned to painting landscape. Her collectors, including the American artist Wayne Thiebaud, appreciate her small-scaled and highly detailed paintings. She takes numerous trips throughout the year for artistic inspiration and returns to her studio to produce new works. Mary-Austin Klein’s work has been exhibited at the Riverside Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, Bakersfield Museum of Art, and Santa Paula Art Museum. The alt-country band I See Hawks in L.A. featured a song titled "Mary-Austin Sky" on their 2012 album, A New Kind of Lonely. She is featured in artist Kim Stringfellow's book Jackrabbit Homestead, and in The Guide to the Wild Mojave, a publication sponsored by the California Wilderness Coalition. Learn more at maryaustinklein.com.
A self-taught artist born and raised in South Louisiana, Byron Sonnier (Inheritance) began his art career as a photographer. After moving to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2000, he began exhibiting his photographs throughout the Southeast in numerous regional galleries. While still pursuing photography, Sonnier began to explore other mediums including painting, sculpture, and installation. He now concentrates on creating imagery that focuses on his and others' cultural roots and practices. From 2009 to 2013, Sonnier was employed as an art assistant to internationally revered artists Cam Langley and Janice Kluge. In 2009, Sonnier was chosen to curate the critically acclaimed Graffiti Show at Bare Hands Gallery. A follow up show focusing on freight train graffiti culture was staged in 2012 at Art Folk Gallery. Learn more at byronsonnier.org.
Zoë Sturges (Untitled 17) 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.
Born into a small family, Dorian Vallejo's (Dream Study, Reflections) career began in his late teens illustrating paperback book covers while attending the School of Visual Arts in New York. As the field increasingly began to incorporate the use of computer-generated images, Vallejo felt the need to pursue other avenues with his art. His love of traditional media and the figure drew him to portraiture and to focus on personal work, which he shows in galleries. These days, Vallejo spends most of his time creating paintings and drawings for sale through galleries and privately. Learn more at DorianVallejo.com.
Jin Zhu (Tim, KZSU) is an artist who creates video and installation work focusing on the dynamics of settlement and dispossession in the history of the Americas. She also works with filmmakers and artists in the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project to record oral histories and video narratives of tenants threatened by eviction. In her work, home is a site of rootedness in place, as well as the epicenter of potential loss of community when threatened by displacement. Jin received her MFA from UC Berkeley and holds a BA in Art Practice from Stanford University. Her work has been shown at SFAC galleries, Southern Exposure, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Embark Gallery, BAMPFA, the Cantor Center for the Arts, Kala Institute, Berkeley Art Center, and Artist Television Access. Learn more at killeryellow.com.