POETS
Laurel Anderson (Website, Twitter) is a plant ecologist and poet. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Terrain.org (semi-finalist in the 12th Annual Poetry Contest), Split Rock Review, The Fourth River, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. Laurel teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University and lives with her family in central Ohio, USA. Learn more about her work at laurelandersonpoetry.com and follow her on Twitter @LaurelSciPoet.
Glen Armstrong (Facebook) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. He has three current books of poems: Invisible Histories, The New Vaudeville, and Midsummer. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and The Cream City Review.
Debbie Benson’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2013, Mid-American Review, Antioch Review, and other journals. Awards include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (Southern California Review), Vern Cowles Prize for a Trinity of Poems (Southeast Missouri State University Press), third prize in the William Matthews Poetry Contest (Asheville Poetry Review), and longlist mention in the Poetry Society of the UK's National Poetry Competition. She lives in NYC and works as a clinical psychologist.
Kizzíah Burton is a recipient of The Ledbury Poetry Prize, 2nd Place, judged by Liz Berry, and Honorable Mention in Poetry, San Miguel de Allende’s Literary Festival in Mexico. Her poems have been longlisted in The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition; The Poetry Book Society/Mslexia Women’s Poetry Prize, judged by Dame Carol Ann Duffy; and The Sappho Prize. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Religion. With Honors from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Foundation, Burton is a Graduate Fellow of The University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Janine Certo (Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) is the author of ELIXIR, winner of both the New American Poetry Prize and the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize (New American Press and Bordighera Press, 2021). A winner of Nimrod International Journal’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University.
Jenny Grassl’s poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review, and Bennington Review will publish her poem in an upcoming issue. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kelly Houle’s poetry has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Red, Rock Review, Sequestrum, Written Here and There: Community of Writers Poetry Review, and other anthologies. She is also a visual artist. She lives in Mesa, Arizona, with her husband and son.
Luke Johnson (Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) lives on the California coast with his wife and three children. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Levis Prize through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award, and The Felix through the University of Wisconsin. You can read more of his work at Kenyon Review, Narrative, The Florida Review, Frontier, Thrush and elsewhere. Connect with him on Twitter at @Lukesrant.
A graduate of Vassar College, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle received an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop as well as a doctoral degree in nineteenth-century American literature from the University of Iowa. She also holds MA's from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and New York University. Her latest book, Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South, was the 2015 selection for the Gender and American Culture Series of the University of North Carolina Press. In addition to scholarly publications, her poetry has appeared in many journals. Chosen as the 2020 Chapbook Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press, Black Wick: Selected Elegies was published this year. Kennedy-Nolle was named the poetry winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2021 creative writing contest. She lives and teaches in New York.
Ellen Kombiyil (Website) is the author of Histories of the Future Perfect (2015), and a micro chapbook Avalanche Tunnel (2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill. She was a finalist for Radar’s Coniston Prize (2019), and is a two-time winner of the Mary M. Fay Poetry Award from Hunter College, a recipient of an Academy of American Poets college prize, and was awarded the Nancy Dean Medieval Prize for an essay on the acoustic quality of Chaucer’s poetics. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Hunter’s MFA program, she currently teaches creative writing at Hunter College. Find out more at ellenkombiyil.com.
Michael Mark’s (Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Grist, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Salamander, Salt Hill, The Southern Review, The Sun, Waxwing, and The Poetry Foundation's American Life in Poetry, and other lovely places. He’s the author of two books of stories, Toba and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).
Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program. Her poems have appeared in The Atlas Review, Callaloo, Little Patuxent Review, Muzzle Magazine, Pinwheel, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Megan Pinto’s (Website, Twitter, Instagram) poems can be found or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Plume, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
Leigh Sugar (Website, Instagram) is a Michigan-born, Brooklyn-based disabled artist. She holds an MFA from NYU (where she studied on fellowship), and has taught at CUNY's Institute for Justice and Opportunity, NYU, Hugo House, Justice Arts Coalition, and various prisons in Michigan. Poems appear or are forthcoming in POETRY, Split This Rock, Pigeon Pages, jubilat, Honey Literary, The Margins, and more.
L.J. Sysko (Website, Twitter, Instagram) is the author of Battledore (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, Rattle, Painted Bride Quarterly, and SWWIM Every Day, among others. A Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow, Sysko holds an MFA in poetry from New England College and has been a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellow; other honors include several Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards, an Academy of American Poets prize, and finalist recognition from Marsh Hawk Press, The Fourth River, The Pinch, and Soundings East. She is a reader for The Common and lives in Wilmington, Delaware.
Krystal Anali Vazquez is an attorney in New York City. She holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University, Georgetown, and Columbia Law School. At Georgetown, her was work was supported by a fellowship from the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Her full-length poetry manuscript, carne, 1970, was recently selected as a finalist for the 2021 POL Prize in connection with Fordham University Press, as well as a finalist for the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry. She currently resides in Brooklyn.
D.S. Waldman (Website) teaches creative writing in San Diego, California. His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems and Colorado Review.
Visual Artists
Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier (Website) is an Indigenous artist/photographer creating cover images for Synkroniciti, Pine Cone Review, Feeel Magazine, Dyst, Arachne Press, Wild Musette, Gigantic Sequins, The Unmooring, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Gateway Review, Doubleback Review, and many more. Walking her Siberian Husky named Kiowa under an aurora borealis is forever a dream. Visit www.kcbgphoto.com for all her endeavors.
Photographer-director, Cyril Caine (Website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Vimeo) began his artistic career as an actor in numerous plays, a TV host, and a director for French television. He has filmed numerous documentaries and won several awards. Cyril traveled and stayed for a few years in the United States, where he worked as a fashion photographer and for some music bands, and also in Canada, where he made documentaries. Back in France, he launched a unique project on disfigurement called “In vU Entre-Sort.” He was the first photographer to treat this subject in this way, a visual protest against normative ideas about beauty. His images can be very cinematic and social. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, magazines, and television channels in the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, and China. He has taught photography and documentary courses at the University of Lille (France) and Paris. Today, he is working on a new series of photos and on the development of his feature film; in parallel, he is directing documentaries, art films, and shoots regularly for cinema and television. He is also working on a TV commercial about “disfiguration and acceptation of an other kind of beauty.”
Nick Farhi (Website) was born 1987 in Manhattan, NY. He currently lives and works in Morningside Heights, NY. Nick is an MFA student at Columbia University in the class of 2023.
Sarah Walko (Website) is an artist, director, curator and writer. She is currently the Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and has directed non-profit arts organizations for fifteen years. Her visual art exhibitions have included Raising the Temperature at the Queens Museum of Art, Preternatural at The Museum of Nature in Canada and So That I Might Speak to You of Your Magnificence, a solo exhibition at The Teaching Gallery inTroy, New York. She is a published author of fiction and nonfiction essays, co-author of the graphic memoir With Our Whole Broken Hearts and is a contributor to several anthologies that will be published in 2022.
Katie (Beatta Hovden) Wolff (Website, Instagram) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL currently pursuing her MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her studio practice includes painting, printmaking, fibers, drawing, and collage. With an understanding of art making as question asking, Katie engages with materials to seek connections between ideas surrounding the body, intimacy, memory, sensuality, and story.
Thank you to The Art Institute of Chicago, Getty’s Open Content Program, and the Library of Congress.