Sy Abudu
Sy Abudu (@syjabudu) is from Los Angeles and now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she creates visual art and zines under the moniker great/grand/golden. Her work has been shown at the Boston Zine Fest, the Feminist Zine Fest, and the Overture Center for the Arts.
Sara Cress
Sara Cress is a writer who lives in Houston, Texas, which is not as bad as you think. She started writing poetry in junior high, inspired by the lyrical stylings of Debbie Gibson. Her poetry project, Breaking Poems, is an homage to her past as a journalist with the Houston Chronicle and her creative writing degree from the University of Houston. She writes poetry inspired by current events, and publishes them a few times per week on her website, BreakingPoems.com. She read her poems at a comedy show once while wearing a Statue of Liberty costume. Her work has been featured by Bust, Inprint Houston, and bluestockings magazine.
JESSICA EPSTEiN
Jessica Epstein is a sometime writer who was born in France and lived in 13 countries before returning to her technically native NYC in 2012. She has worked as an editor and project manager with nonprofits and publishing houses in Brazil, Mexico, and Taiwan. She edits and ghostwrites books as a side gig, journals obsessively (almost daily since she was seven)—and should probably make a book from that someday as there are some stories to be told. Jessica speaks seven languages to some degree, and is often dabbling in learning a bit of a new one or more of a known one. Mostly, she is enamored with the English language, especially the kind they speak in Britain. When not working or studying, Jessica is likely to be found walking or running the streets and parks of NYC—still reveling in just how fabulous it is to live here, reading a novel (all time favorite series: Dune), watching football (aka soccer) at a neighborhood pub, or on a trip to Europe.
Jordan Franklin
Born in 1990, Jordan E. Franklin is a poet born and raised in Brooklyn. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brooklyn College in 2012 earning a BFA in Creative Writing. An avowed lover of music, her tastes and preferences often pepper her poems. She can frequently be found performing in various reading series around NYC including "Having A Whiskey Coke With You" and "The Buzzards' Banquet."
She is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing at Stony Brook Southampton.
Lily Gist
Lily Gist is a visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY. In her series, Metrics, she explores new ways to measure, study, and share experiences to account for the biases and blindspots in our self perception.
Her work has been featured in several group shows in the NYC and Boston areas, and her Hundreds of Graphs of You was included in the Gutai Card Box at the Guggenheim Museum's "Gutai: Splendid Playground" (2013). (lilygist.com)
Saquina Karla C. Guiam
Saquina Karla C. Guiam is a writer from General Santos City, Philippines and a full-time graduate school student. Her work has been featured on The Rising Phoenix Review, The Fem Lit Mag, and Transcending Shadows Review. She is the Roots nonfiction editor for Rambutan Literary, a literary magazine by Southeast Asians to showcase Southeast Asian literature.
JUNE K. INUZUKA
June is a poet and filmmaker living in Denver, Colorado. She is currently putting the finishing touches on her manuscript, A Name and a Place, A Poetry Memoir, about four generations of a Japanese American family. She's a graduate of the VONA summer program for writers of color and just completed the two-year Poetry Book Program at Lighthouse Writers in Denver. This summer she travels to Belgium for a writing retreat at the Emily Dickinson House. In addition, she is hot on the trail of a film script starring ass-kickin’ Asian cowgirls in the Old West. She finds inspiration in her family, her rebellious spirit, and her cat, Muse.
Olivia Mardwig
First generation New Yorker, writer of poems, drinker of reds. Female identifying heterosexual with the ego of a 20th century man.
@readingpodcast for occasional radio.
Kat Meads
Kat Meads is the author of IPPY winner For You, Madam Lenin and 15 other books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Her recent play about Laura and Eleanor Marx, Daughters of, was staged by Theatre du Mississippi in April 2016. (www.katmeads.com)
Claire Molek
Claire Molek is a Chicago-based curator who specializes in working with emerging contemporary artists as well as producing small and large-scale art events. She began her career working for Tony Fitzpatrick, and then by opening a quickly celebrated store-front apartment gallery in 2009 with now filmmaker Erin Babbin and food artist Nick Jirasek. She went on to open and run pop-up Hauser Gallery in 2012 with photographer Marc Hauser and later founded and directed Brave New Art World, an interdisciplinary, widely attended art walk which paired galleries with food and beverage companies, brought guerilla performers and installations into the street, and celebrated our togetherness within the industry, throughout 2013. She now works primarily as a project, art and industry consultant, as well as an independent curator/dealer. She is known throughout Chicago and in the media as a "local darling," a "ball-busting iconoclast," industry innovator, guerrilla curator, facilitator, and all around support system for young artists. (clairemolek.com)
JUDY T. Oldfield
Judy T. Oldfield's work has appeared or is forthcoming in JMWW, So to Speak, The Portland Review, The Pinch (online feature),Gravel, and others. She grew up in the Metro Detroit area and earned her Bachelor's of Arts degree at Western Michigan University, where she studied English and Comparative Religion. An adventurous eater, Judy has dined on rotten shark in Iceland and tarantula in Cambodia. She lives in Seattle but you can find her on Twitter at @J_T_Oldfield.
Vic Priano
Vic self-published their first comic at twelve and tried to sell it at the local head shop for three dollars. Raised on vinyl and vanilla board wax, they stole cigarettes and surfed into their mid-teens. After playing guitar in a five-piece So-Cal punk band, they quit to focus on making comics back in their hometown of New York City. Sometimes they gaze out the frosted windows of the world that they left behind. Sometimes they leave the apartment and pretend to be a well adjusted member of society. But more realistically speaking, they're too busy for the next twelve years trying to make a career in sequential storytelling to come to your noise show.
Kristen Rouisse
Kristen Rouisse is a Florida-based writer who holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, Hobart, Milk Journal, Cheap Pop, and elsewhere. She’s a former poetry and nonfiction editor for Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art and tweets at @kristenrouisse.
Gerry Visco
Gerry Visco is a performer, writer, and photographer. She is illegally blonde and lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
She has performed at such venues as the Cutting Room, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, The Museum of Arts and Design, the Creative Time Gala, The Wild Project, Chantal’s House of Shame in Berlin, Envoy Gallery, The Slipper Room, and nightclubs all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. She has appeared in several films, music videos, and TV shows, including Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, Mozart In the Jungle, Oddities, Love, Lust, or Run, Hellaware, and Abel Ferrara’s 4.44 Last Day on Earth. Visco currently writes for Interview magazine, Vice, and online art magazine Hyperallergic. She has written hundreds of articles which have appeared in NY Press and Out. Her photography has appeared in NY Magazine, The Village Voice, The Daily News, and Gawker and has been shown at the Munch Gallery in NYC, and Gallery U in Montclair, NJ and Detroit, Michigan. The Village Voice named her Bravest Nightlife Photographer of 2010. Gerry holds a BA in Literature, an MFA in Writing, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and is a certified yoga teacher from the Iyengar Institute. She also has a day job in educational administration.
She is currently writing a tell-all memoir about her colorful life as muse, fag hag, and rent girl, in the gritty glamorous world of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.
You can find her on The Internet
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