Contributors
Alexey Adonin is an abstract-surrealist artist who has dedicated over one and a half-decade to convey his vision of hidden otherworldly realms. Alexey believes that art is not only a way to express ourselves but also a unique key to unlocking the knowledge of the hidden world. In his creative endeavor, he tries to apply a more philosophical approach and to hint at the mystical origin of all things. Alexey mostly strives to get away from banal copying of reality, preferring instead to create one of his own—something that somehow reflects his inner world.
Nazrene Alsiro is a practicing Interdisciplinary Artist located in Atlanta, Georgia US but was born in the Philippines with a mixed racial background of both Palestinian and Filipino. Her original focus at Florida State University was Video/Photography and Sculpture however, she has been focusing on painting and analog as of lately. She presents her photography in a variety of formats as well as video installations that may include sculptural forms. She writes of the “Welcome Back to The Real World Series; 1,2,3” that although we thought the coronavirus was the worst thing that could happen to Country, when Georgia chose to open the city back up with most people in fear of Illness and Poverty. Despite the risk we came back out to a culture battle that affects the African American lives. This Real World has always been there but in an abstract way the pandemic shed light to this. These photos are compression of the multiple narratives running through our time including the emotions deep within.
Rha Arayal is a fresh, unique emerging poet. she is of British Nepalese ethnicity and lives in South Wales. she started by establishing a growing Instagram poetry page, @encapsulated_emotions and never looked back. Now, she’s fallen in love with prose and always has a fountain pen and notebook by her side.
Sarah McGlinchey Aronson earned an MFA in Writing with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction in 2015 from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sarah is a teacher, writer, and marketing professional with a background in journalism and French. In our Creative Nonfiction contest she looked for pieces that showed the writer’s journey and include reflection, utilized craft techniques such as metaphor, personalization, and repetition, and incorporated characters in addition to the narrator.
Sam Baker, who grew up in Louisville Kentucky, with what is known as the 9th street divide (a street with skyscrapers on one side and very impoverished housing on the other), has witnessed severe income inequality, cultural appropriation, and some of the most negative impacts of consumerism.
Austin Brown’s photograph, “Day 42: The Spoons Are Disappearing” was taken while experimenting with reflection and minimalism. Other than some slight desaturation, no edits were made. The title of the piece is in relation to Chicago's pandemic timeline.
Ciprian Buzila is a visual artist and interior designer from Romania. His work explores the relationship between space, nature, gender & sexuality, human body, and light and shadow. He is currently studying history of architecture at Brown University. This particular artwork is dedicated to the discovery of the self and the surrounding world(s).
Florencio Campello was born in Guantanamo, Cuba, immigrated as a child to the US with his parents in the 1960s and and studied art at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington from which he graduated in 1981. In addition to numerous galleries, his work has been exhibited at the McManus Museum in Scotland, the Brusque Museum in Brazil, the San Bernardino County Art Museum in California, the Musee des Duncan in France, the Frick Museum in Ohio, the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Hunter Museum in Tennessee, the Sacramento Fine Arts Center in California, The Art League in Alexandria, The Museum of Contemporary Art in DC, the Rock Springs Art Center in Wyoming and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, the Popov Museum in Russia and the Museum of Small Art in Malaysia. He is the author of “100 Artists of Washington, DC”, published in 2011 by Schiffer Press. and a widely published art critic. His DC ART NEWS blog has been online for over a decade and visited by over five million visitors worldwide and is ranked as one of the top 100 art blogs in the world.
Ignacio Choi
Leah Dockrill’s thirty-year art practice includes abstract paintings and figurative collage. Moving between these two dramatically divergent art forms provides her with a satisfying synergy. Her works in this issue are abstract acrylic /mixed media paintings, have different motifs, but a consistent colour palette. She believes the most enjoyable way of creating abstract art is to set up no constraints, and decide when the piece is done is what its all about. It is the creative process itself that is the point.
Lori Dorfman’s photograph is a quarantine self portrait reflecting on the obsession of the need for masks, their temporary quality and the ease at which they are discarded. Within the photograph may be found a commentary on social media, social distancing, disposability, or more.
Brian Eckert is a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University, where he studied English and Creative Writing. He plans to complete an MA, MFA, and the Appalachian Trail, before pursuing a career in higher education. His poetry has appeared in Think Magazine, The Red Cedar Review, and Case Reserve Review.
Amy Estes is a queer writer, stand-up comedian, and educator living in Sacramento, CA with her wife and their two dogs. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, Huffington Post, The Financial Diet, Pulp Magazine and in various other places online. She is currently at work on a memoir.
Emily Gillcrist’s artwork inspires and is inspired by her scholarly research—which synthesizes post-colonial, materialist, psychoanalytic, and existential critiques of techno-industrial expansion in light of the global environmental crisis. In her paintings, she utilizes abstract expressionist techniques, spontaneously creating layers of texture and color, at times incorporating mixed media (such as sand, fabric, paper, metal leaf, etc.) She often balances these surfaces with detailed brushwork influenced by romanticism and natural forms—figures, landscapes, and natural patterns. She is drawn to themes she encounters in her research: the uncanny, memory, worldhood, materiality, and the tension of the nature/culture relation.
Codi Gugliuzza is a quiet, queer poet living in the DMV area. She has been published in Stylus and A Celebration of Poets. She writes freelance book reviews for the online literary journal Lines + Stars. She has ups and downs handling the anxiety and depression she has known since childhood; these struggles feature increasingly in her work. When not writing, she is making art, drinking tea, and petting all animals in sight.
Reyila Hadeer is an ethnic Uyghur from Northwest China and now lives in America where she pursues her passion for writing, visual art and educational qualitative research during her doctoral program. Her work often explores how diasporic communities are attempting to carve an invisible home for themselves through human creativity. She uses her photography to give voices to the ordinary and the forgotten. She has a Bachelor’s in journalism, and Master’s in Teaching English as a Second Language. She believes in the power of slowness, empathy, and honesty. She tries to embody these elements in her work as well as her everyday life. Her work may be found on her website:https://slowphoto.weebly.com/ or Instagram@Reyilah
Kimberly Henry is an emerging writer and radio journalist. She is a writer and graduate student in the MA Cinema Studies program at the University of Southern California. Her writing and production work have been featured on Vermont Public Radio. She is a recent East Coast transplant living in Los Angeles.
Hyeseon Kim is a senior attending North London Collegiate School Jeju in South Korea. She is currently preparing a portfolio to attend university. Her other hobbies include contemporary dance, piano, and soccer.
Rayoung (Madeline) Lee is a senior at Seoul Foreign School. She uses art as a way to unleash her creativity and advocate for change in the environment. Her art consists of various media such as pencil, clay, photoshop, and acrylic paint. In her free time, she creates resin art and charms for her friends.
Yuchen Liu is a media, culture and communication major at NYU Steinhardt. She created this series of works during quarantine and finished them in June 2020. She used the names and locations of Manhattan subway stations as the theme of each painting, and put them in the colors of the rainbow, in memory of the efforts made by all New Yorkers during quarantine.
In November 2017, Jemila MacEwan dug an impact crater into the earth using only hand-tools, every day, for the duration of one lunar cycle. MacEwan gave live transmissions each morning as the Human Meteorite, via social media to a globally scattered audience, from their remote location in California. These intimate transmissions contained reflections on the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences of the Human Meteorite, and provided a window into the performance as it progressed. Human Meteorite is a project about extinction and creation.
Emily Martin is a student at St. Francis high school. She received second place in the 2018 Power of Wind and Water poetry contest, and in 2019 she placed in a poetry contest at St. Francis High School. She is at work on a manuscript which covers the topics of climate change.
Alison Miller is a first-year MFA student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. A native Texan, Alison received her bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her dog Zeus.
Thomas Misuraca studied Writing, Publishing and Literature at Emerson College in Boston before moving to Los Angeles. Over 80 of his short stories and two novels have been published (and a couple of poems here and there). Most recently, his story, “Symbolic”, was published in Eighteen Seventy. He is also a multi-award winning playwright with over 100 short plays and 11 full-lengths produced globally. His musical, Geeks!, ran Off-Broadway in 2019.
Julian Santiago is an adjunct instructor at Miami-Dade College. He has an MA in Creative Process from the National University of Ireland. He currently lives and writes in Miami and is working on securing representation for his novel.
Soonest Nathaniel is a poet and spoken word artist. He is the author of “Teaching My Father How To Impregnate Women,” selected as winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award. He was poet Laureate for 2014 Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Silver Blade, The Pedestal Magazine, FIYAH, Silver Blade Poetry, Northridge Review, Praxis Mag, Raven Chronicles, Wiki Column, Saraba, Loudthotz, Northridge Review, Reverbnation, Elsewhere, Scintilla, Erbacce UK, Kalahari Review, Sentinel Nigeria, and many more.
Sara Pirkle is the author of The Disappearing Act, which won the 2016 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Her poems have been published in Rattle, Reed, Entropy, TAB, The Raintown Review, Emrys, and Atticus Review, among others. Sara has received writing fellowships from The Anderson Center, I-Park Foundation, and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. She is the Assistant Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama, where she also hosts the Pure Products Reading & Lecture Series.
Anthony Procopio Ross is a Poetry MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato. When he’s not teaching composition students, Anthony spends his time writing poetry and creating hand-cut collages for himself and to support the literary arts, making flyers and covers. Anthony’s poems have appeared in Thrice Publishing’s 2019 Surrealist Anthology, Levee Magazine, and forthcoming in the Laurel Review.
Florence Roberts is a 28-year-old actress living in London. She writes short stories that encapsulate the female experience and all its nuances relating to desire, security, intimacy, self-preservation, independence and consent. Her story “Fully Automated Nikon” zones in on a single day in the life of a secretary in the mid-70s, and deals with the tangled topic of consent and the defense of our personal space, namely the limitations of the weapons we have at our disposal (both literally and metaphorically) to defend this space. The story was inspired by a photography piece of the same name by Laurie Anderson (1973). Anderson decided to take photographs of her cat-callers, writing "I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge."
Rae Rozman is a femme dyke/school counselor/bookworm living in Austin, Texas with her partner and their two rescue bunnies. Her poetry, which often explores themes of queer love (romantic and platonic), loss, and education, has been featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. Rae can be found on Instagram @mistress_of_mnemosyne sharing poems, book reviews, and tons of bunny pictures.
Hannah Soyer is a queer disabled writer interested in exploring representations of othered bodies. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Entropy, Mikrokosmos Journal, and Hot Metal Bridge, among other places. She is a cat and chocolate enthusiast, and the founder of This Body is Worthy, a project aimed at celebrating bodies outside of mainstream societal ideals.
Emily Uduwana is a poet and Ph.D. student based in Southern California, with recent publications in Miracle Monocle, Eclectica Magazine, and the Owen Wister Review.
Lucero Velasco is a Hispanic Studies graduate student from Mexico City at Brown University, and she also studied Latin American Literature at Iberoamericana University in her home country. A middle class woman who has always wanted to find unexplored vantage points to see the world and its phenomena, she is passionate about contemporary poetry, especially that written by Latin American women who have moved to the United States or other countries to study or teach. She has creative texts published in LIJ Ibero: Revista de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil Contemporánea and INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica. Lately, she has been writing simultaneously in English and in Spanish, with translation being a fundamental part of her creative process.
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist whose work often touches upon raising environmental awareness of her everyday surroundings. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards. The pieces from her series Trees Scream in Silence explore human interactions with trees, how trees will reabsorb carvings we make in their surfaces and attempt to heal prior wounds. Some damages cannot be undone but even the cutting of a new limb can be healed over time.
KJ Williams is an abstract expressionist. She has studied art at Newbury College and The Art Institute of Boston before moving to New Hampshire. Through her work, KJ has expressed her physical pain from an accident in 1993 to the depression and frustration of trying to work while in pain. She has been compared to Frida Kahlo in that respect. In the past few years, her paintings have leaned more towards abstract representation of her thoughts, causes, and passions. Her paintings, and drawings range from animals and people to abstract and self portraits. A piece can be dream orientated or a cause that she feels passionate about. Her strong use of earth tone colors capture a somewhat dark feel. She has sold many of her works. She is one of the artists featured in The Pain Exhibit. Her work can also be seen at Deviant Art, and Artmajeur.
Margaret Wiss is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. Her work seeks to be shaped by each environment and the individuals who contribute to its development. She values the vitality of collaboration. She has an MFA in Dance from New York University's Tisch School for the Arts. She believes dance is a reflection of the fluid collaboration of interpersonal and site-specific dynamics; these interfaces can be shaped, transformed, and taught in many different ways. Technology’s role in dance education and choreographic documentation excites her; it has allowed for expansion and transdisciplinary integration of the field. The photographs in this issue are from the series up in the air. It is a document of a daily movement exploration and meditation in the Time of Corona. Capturing the essential moment, the series highlights the tender absence of others but also the expansion and abundance of the natural world.
In her 2D work, Cynthia Yatchman works primarily with acrylic and latex paints, inks, papers and charcoal. Her images contain many diverse layers of meaning from the universal to the specific and personal. Her works are often abstract. She is frequently interested in pattern and/or creating a rich sensual surface by making layer upon layer of marks. There is often an unseen history within these layers as images are obscured and revealed. Her work frequently gives reference to her experience with nature and she usually has an ongoing series that is more representational focusing on flowers, birds and animals and the human figure. At times her work speaks to issues of social justice, revelation and connection and currently on these Corona times.
Tatiana Yoon writes both fiction and non-fiction, mostly in Russian. She is published on the sites takiedela.ru, plug.ee, literratura.org, ostrota.media, mother-muse.com, in the 4th issue of the almanac "Pashnya" issued by Creative Writing School, and in the collection of short stories "Twist na banke iz-pod shprot" 2020 (coming this year). She also wrote a book about learning Estonian as a foreign language; it’s coming out this September in Estonia.