Contributors
Winter 2018
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Reem Abubaker lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she is the fiction editor for Black Warrior Review. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, NANO Fiction, Day One, and other journals.
Alex Albeck is an East Coast photographer who specializes in lifestyle and portraiture photography. She's her happiest when the tie between her feminist ideals and artistic fantasies are merged into a cohesive representation. Alex is inspired by women, romance, philosophy, and moments of sporadic nomadic venture. Whether coming or going, she never forgets to observe, and admire.
Joe Baumann's fiction and essays have appeared in Tulane Review, Willow Review, Hawai’i Review, SNReview, Lindenwood Review, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and teaches composition, creative writing, and literature at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. He was recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2016. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Gateway Review: A Journal of Magic Realism.
Julia Bohm is a writer based in Ann Arbor, MI. Her work can also be found in Drunk in a Midnight Choir.
Ariana Brown is a Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin. A "part-time curandera," Ariana is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to the Kumbia Kings, or validating black girl rage in all its miraculous forms. She is currently earning an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.
Joseph Capehart is a nationally touring Liberian American poet, performer, speaker, and educator. His work has been featured in multiple online publications such as Button Poetry and MTV. Joseph combines powerful imagery and compelling stories to connect with and inspire every audience he steps in front of. He believes that by engaging topics of racism, hyper-masculinity, grief, faith, family, and desire as they pertain to his own life, he may experience freedom and invite others to experience that freedom as well.
Gerardo Castro was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. He obtained an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 1996. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Spain and major US Cities.
Alan Chazaro is a high school teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and a June Jordan Poetry for the People alum at UC Berkeley. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals including BOAAT, Frontier, Huizache, Borderlands, Juked, andIron Horse Review. He is most proud of his sneaker collection, his recent Pushcart Prize nominations, and being selected by 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Tyehimba Jess, for an AWP Intro Journals Award.
Imani Davis is a student of their Blackness. A Mellon Mays Fellow and member of the Excelano Project, their poetry appears with BET, Rookie, Brain Mill Press, Voices of the East Coast (Penmanship Books, 2016), and elsewhere.
Shadi Ghadirian is a Tehran-based photographer known for portraits that probe issues of gender, religion, and geopolitics. Ghadirian's work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008 and group shows at the Saatchi Gallery and Barbican Art Centre in London, Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.
Dave Harris is a poet and playwright from West Philly. His poetry and essays have been featured at Huffington Post, Up the Staircase Quarterly, BOAAT Press, Black Napkin, amongst other. He is a Callaloo poetry fellow, a Best of the Net nominee, and was recently longlisted for the Rattle poetry prize. He graduated from Yale University in 2016 and is a candidate for the MFA in playwriting at UC San Diego.
Destiny Hemphill is a poet and healer based in Durham, NC. She is a 2017 Callaloo Fellow and a 2016 Amiri Baraka Scholar at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program. Her work has appeared in The Wanderer, Narrative Northeast, and Scalawag. She is the author of Oracle: a Cosmology (Honeysuckle Press, forthcoming).
Oluwabambi Ige is an engineer and a writer who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. He is an alumnus of the 2016 Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop.
Inam Kang is a Pakistani-born Muslim poet, student, and curator currently living in Cleveland, OH. He is an MS candidate in Medical Physiology at Case Western Reserve University. He is also a co-curator and founder of the POC-centered reading and dialogue series FRUIT in Ann Arbor, MI. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HEArt, Tinderbox and other journals and anthologies. He is probably crying in rush hour traffic.
Shayla Lawz was raised in Jersey City, NJ. She graduated from Rutgers University, where she studied English and Philosophy. She writes fiction and poetry that most often deal with childhood, displacement, and the body. Currently, she lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate at Brown University.
Mick Powell is a queer black fat femme feminist poet who likes revolutionary acts of resistance. She is currently an MFA in Poetry candidate at Southern Connecticut State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Apogee, Crab Fat Magazine, two anthologies focusing on black feminisms and Beyoncé, and others. Mick loves onion rings, smooth hip hop instrumentals, and loving on her loved ones.
Simone Quiles is a Chicago based interdisciplinary artist whose work is primarily influenced by her Puerto Rican and mixed race identity. Most of her work explores the negative experiences of being a mixed race woman such as the societal exploitation and fetishization of her body. She portrays these themes through the medium of oil paint, in which she paints self-portraits and other women of color. These paintings often use vibrant colors and tropical fruit, alluding to the visual aesthetics of the Caribbean. She currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and will earn a BFA in 2019.
Laura Chow Reeve is a writer living in Jacksonville, FL. She has an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. Laura is a VONA/Voices alumna and winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words in fire to wake the world ablaze: free verse that breaks a rule every day, illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, a phoenix-red & gold immolation that blazes from his heart, like a chambered bullet exploding through cause to implement effect. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance and is currently working on a book of connected short stories. His work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by LAROLA.
Hannah Siobhan is a feminist writer who loves Sandra Cisneros and every dog in the world. She currently lives in Minnesota.
Jake Skeets (Diné) is Black-Streaked Wood, born for Water's Edge. He is an MFA candidate at the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Rez MFA. His work has appeared both online and in print. He is the founding editor of Cloudthroat, an online Indigenous journal of writing and art. He currently resides in the Navajo Nation.
Tamara Stoffers is a Dutch visual artist expressing herself through collage. She recently graduated the Minerva Academy of fine arts in Groningen, after which she dedicated all her time to develop as a professional artist. The subject of her work revolves around the Soviet Union. It will be introduced to a bigger public for the first time during Rotterdam art week in February.
Cristina Troufa is a Portuguese artist born and based in Porto, Portugal. Cristina holds a Licentiate Degree in Painting (1998) and a Master’s Degree in Painting (2012), both from The University of Fine Arts of Porto. She has exhibited throughout Portugal, in solo and group shows since 1995 and international exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Australia, France, Canada, Denmark, Taiwan, England, and the USA.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American writer of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University. Her first book of poems, Water & Salt, is published by Red Hen Press. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize for her chapbook Arab in Newsland. She has been published in International and American journals including Kenyon Review Online, diode, Al-Ahram Weekly, Barrow Street, Glass, Hermeneutic Chaos, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Massachusetts Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Michelle Yang is a writer and poet originally from New York but is currently a second-year at the University of Chicago. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards and published in Blacklight. She has also competed in Young Chicago Author's Louder Than a Bomb College Slam. Besides writing. She loves plants and cats.