POETS
nicole v. basta (Coal Towns And Floods That Never Let Up) is the co-founder of the Brooklyn-based art community + performance night Say Yes Electric Collective. Her chapbook V was chosen by Rigoberto González as the winner of The New School's annual contest. nicole's work appears or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Bone Bouquet, Compose, By & By Poetry, Forth, and Juked, among others. Find her hologram at nicolevbasta.com.
Anthony Borruso (Self-Portrait With An Open Skull) has an MFA in Poetry from Butler University, is an associate editor at Sibling Rivalry Press, and has been a reader for Booth: A Journal. He suffers from Chiari Malformation and sometimes examines this in his poetry. Currently, he splits time between Indianapolis and his hometown of Staten Island.
Kristene Kaye Brown (Requiem In November With Kleptothermy) is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in Diagram, Columbia Poetry Review, Harpur Palate, Meridian, Nashville Review, and others. Kristene lives and works in Kansas City.
Joellen Craft (Extraction) lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she co-founded Durham’s Two Writers Walk into a Bar reading series. Her poems have recently appeared in Hunger Mountain, Fugue, The Nashville Review, Grist, and The Collagist, who nominated her poems for a Pushcart Prize.
Kelly Hoffer (I Cannot Live With You, Hyacinth) is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was recently a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Her work was recognized as a finalist for the 2017 American Literary Review Award in poetry and as a finalist for the 2018 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her poems have appeared in BathHouse Journal. She currently lives in Ithaca, NY, very close to a waterfall.
Hannah Kroonblawd (Things We Call Barren) is a PhD student at Illinois State University. She is also trying to accumulate as many winning slow-cooker recipes as possible. A graduate of the MFA program at Oregon State University, her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, cream city review, BOAAT, and Sycamore Review, among others.
Jennifer Manthey (Puer Malus) is an MFA student at Hamline University in St Paul, MN. She has served as the Assistant Poetry Editor for Water~Stone Review and is the current Associate Editor for Runestone Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Tinderbox Poetry, Rhino and Natural Bridge.
Jennifer Moore (Once You Leave The Forest, Wisteria) was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (University of Akron Press), and her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. An associate professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Ruth Elizabeth Morris (Chuck Berry's Music Is Floating Through Space On Voyager I) has a BA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She has been nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize, and she was the First Prize Winner for the 2015 Writer’s Digest Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Glass: Poet's Resist, Poet Lore, The New Orleans Review, The Seventh Wave, [PANK] and JMWW.
Liz Robbins' (Sixteen) third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award; her second collection, Play Button, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award. In 2015, she won the Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry and, in 2016, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Fugue. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, BOAAT, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Rattle, and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. She has poems forthcoming in Poetry East and Salt Hill. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.
Donna Steiner’s (Concussed) writing has been published in literary journals including Brevity, The Sun, Fourth River, Under the Gum Tree, and Stone Canoe. She teaches creative writing at the State University of New York in Oswego. A chapbook of five essays, Elements, was released by Sweet Publications.
Brandon Thurman (Smokewood Apiary) is the author of the chapbook Strange Flesh (Quarterly West, 2018). His poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, RHINO, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas with his husband and son. You can find him online at brandonthurman.com or on Twitter @bthurman87.
Nancy Lynée Woo (The Dying Season) is a 2015 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow and the author of two chapbooks, Bearing the Juice of It All (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Rampant (Sadie Girl Press, 2014). She’s also released a poetry-music CD, Face the Blaze (Blacksheep Music Productions, 2014) and has had poems published in numerous journals. Currently, she teaches poetry workshops called Surprise the Line and is co-founder of the Long Beach Literary Arts Center. She has a degree in sociology from UC Santa Cruz and lives in Long Beach, Calif. Find her online at nancylyneewoo.com and patreon.com/fancifulnance.
VISUAL ARTISTS
Amy E. Bartell (Entrance, Shadows In Suspension) is an artist and activist whose work is focused on social justice issues. Through her business, A.E. Originals, she has collaborated on commissions and public art projects around the country including: Washington State University, California State - Long Beach, Carleton College, Towson University, Syracuse, University, Wells College, the Food Bank of Central New York, AIDS Community Resources, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the National Women's Studies Association. Her published work is featured at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She teaches illustration and coordinates community art exhibitions for SUNY Oswego.
Christian Ruiz Berman (Cover, Rites of Passage, Oort Cloud) 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 Chase (All In Knots, Slow Growth Bloom) grew up on the move. She was born in New York, but has since lived in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and, most recently, Arkansas. Chase received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the University of Arkansas in 2013, graduating Summa Cum Laude. In April 2013 she was chosen as a recipient of the Windgate Fellowship Award, a $15,000 grant for graduating seniors working in a craft medium or process, as well as an award to study at Penland School of Craft. She has studied and traveled extensively in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Maryland and Tennessee, including a solo show of her work at Living Arts Tulsa in 2015. She attended a 10 week residency at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in early 2016, and in January moved to Tulsa as an incoming member of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, a competitive one to three year residency program for 2017-2018. She currently works out of a studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her recent work focuses on paper as a sculptural media, using it to explore her continuing interest in narrative, ideas about home, and the relationships between clothing and identity. Learn more at emilychaseart.com.
Ellie Davies (Stars 12), born 1976, lives in Dorset and works in the forests of Southern England. She gained her MA in Photography from London College of Communication in 2008. In 2018 Davies held solo exhibitions at A.galerie Brussels and Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan. Her work was exhibited for the first time in India at Gallery 1AQ in New Delhi as part of India Arch Dialogue 2018: Moments in Architecture in early 2018. Recent solo exhibitions also include Into the Woods at Roe Valley Arts in Northern Ireland in 2017 and at Crane Kalman Gallery in London in 2016. Stars 8 was selected Fine Art Single Image Winner in the Magnum Photography Awards in 2017. Davies was also a Selected Winner in AI-AP’s American Photography 33 (2017), The Celeste Prize 2017, and Landscape Winner in PDN’s Curator Awards 2016. Interviews and photo features include BBC Radio 3, National Geographic, Lens Culture, The Guardian, and Gardens Illustrated. Recent publications include Le Magiciennes de la Terre: L’art et la Nature au Feminin by Virginie Luc (Les Editions Ulmer, Paris, 2017) and Matter and Desire (Chelsea Green, Vermont, USA, 2017). Davies' work is held in private collections in the UK, the US, Central and Eastern Europe, South Korea, Hong Kong, Russia, and The United Arab Emirates. Learn more at elliedavies.co.uk.
Allison May Kiphuth (The Beacon, Scrub Jays) is a NH Seacoast/Maine-based artist, perpetual collector of things, and lifelong nature and conservation enthusiast. Learn more at allisonmaykiphuth.com.
Sara Pedigo (Hold Up, When Midnight Chimes) grew up in the American South. She received her MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2007. She is currently an Associate Professor in Fine Art at Flagler College located in Saint Augustine, Florida, her undergraduate alma mater. Pedigo has exhibited nationally, with solo exhibitions at Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina, College of Southern Nevada, North Las Vegas, Nevada, Wynn Bone Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland, and Barton College, Wilson, North Carolina. Group exhibitions include the Cue Foundation, First Street Gallery, and Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, and the Naples Art Museum in Naples, Florida. In 2006, she was included in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, and received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Learn more at sarapedigo.com.
Julia Simoniello (Parasitic Thoughts) is an artist, illustrator, and musician based in NYC. All of her work is about love and fear. Learn more at juliasimoniello.com and follow her on Instagram @juliasimoniello.
A self-taught artist born and raised in South Louisiana, Byron Sonnier (The Illuminating Power of Redemption) 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.com.
Tessa Tapscott (Grown Of Many) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. Born and raised in Portola Valley, CA, she went on to complete her BFA in Fine Art from the University of California-Santa Barbara. During this time she interned under book artist, Mary Heebner, and became enamored by book and paper arts. From there she moved to London, England to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art. She has shown internationally and participated in artist residencies in England, Greece, and the United States. Tessa believes that there is fantasy in the mundane and loves nothing more than discarded objects marked "free" on the side of the road. Learn more at www.tessatapscott.com.
Lara Torrance (Untitled) is an artist & designer raised in London, UK. She is a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design and received an honors BFA in Graphic Design. She considers herself very open-minded when it comes to ideas and her work. Having mastered the Adobe Suite, curiosity took her to learn programming in order to code and create Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences. This opened the doors to her newfound love for creative technology. Learn more at laratorrance.com.