Patrick Bower makes figurative drawings, paintings and sculpture that reckon with the visual manifestations of extreme emotional events. He has lived in Brooklyn, NY for over 20 years. In 2023, he participated in The Canopy Program with mentor Clare Grill. Recent shows include Save Yourself (solo) at Vorderzimmer, Age of Rat and Bear (group) at Studio 9D and Transparent Boundaries (group) at Compere Collective, all in New York City. He’s also a founding member of Immaterial Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective.

Kathryn Cowles is the author of two books of poems: Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions), and Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize from Bear Star Press). Her newest project, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress. Her poems, multi-media writings, and poem-photographs have been published in such places as Best American Experimental Writing, Boston Review, Diagram, Free Verse, New American Writing, Tupelo, Verse, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day. She earned her doctorate in creative writing from the University of Utah and is an Associate Professor (and reluctant Chair) of English and Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She co-edits the multi-media Beyond Category section of Seneca Review and is rotating director of the Trias Residency for Writers. See more at kathryncowles.com.

Leslie Fandrich is a visual artist who makes textile sculptures and paper collages. Drawing from the traditions of sculpture, painting and photography, their studio practice is also deeply informed by feminist art history. At the core of her work is a desire to break down images and objects into parts that can be stitched and merged back together into new forms that carry an essence but become stronger and often stranger. Flat paper colleges are translated into low-relief textile sculptures and the metamorphosis invites glitches and mistranslations that allow the work to evolve and feel alive.

Leslie’s work has been shown extensively in the New York and Boston areas and in addition to Saltonstall, they have been awarded fellowships to attended residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA and the Chautauqua School of Art. She teaches Visual + Critical Studies I in the Low Residency Graduate program at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Visual Arts Portfolio, 2D Design and Digital Photography in the Visual Arts Department at Dutchess Community College.

Leslie grew up in Alberta, Canada and currently lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

Elizabeth Pedinotti Haynes is an artist living in Saratoga Springs NY. Her work is rooted in the disruption and repurposing of domestic spaces and labor, and the unreliability of memory and photography as narrator and witness. She is the recipient of several awards and grants, including 3rd place at the Discovery Award Festival in Braga, Portugal, last year. She was a runner-up for the Aperture Prize and has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally and throughout the US. Elizabeth holds an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute for which she was awarded a full scholarship. She currently works as a freelance photographer and teaches community photography workshops. She lives with her husband and her two wild little boys.

Elvina Scott is writing a memoir about parenting and caregiving a radically neurodiverse child.

Through the lens of her own grief at the physical suffering of her daughter from intractable epilepsy and multiple surgeries, she pursues what grief is hers, and what grief is learned from the broad and pervasive tragedy narrative surrounding disability.

Elvina reckons with her own ableism as she examines her resistance to being a full time caregiver. She exposes her family’s descent into life below the Federal Poverty Level to illustrate the failing social safety nets around long term care and disability. In her work, Elvina invites the reader to look at ableism as the direct relation to white supremacy, racism and sexism. She asks, whose life is determined to be of value, and why? She probes the spiritual question of what is/has been lost when we dehumanize and segregate vast populations of neurodiverse people over time.

Elvina has been awarded residencies at MacDowell (Rona Jaffe Fellowship and Rona Jaffe Fellow for 2022), PLAYA Summer Lake, Storyknife, and Looking Glass Arts. She was a Creatives Rebuild New York Capital Grant recipient, and was selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist as Entrepreneur Program. She is a graduate of Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar.

Elvina is an ultramarathon runner and cold water enthusiast.

nicole v basta is a poet with proud roots in the coal mines and garment factories of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her poetry, art practices, and teaching are rooted in wild making and intuitive practices, and connected to the traditional sense of resourcefulness of her ancestors. Her poems have found homes in Ploughshares, Waxwing, The Cortland Review, RHINO, Crazyhorse, Plume, The North American Review, Ninth Letter, etc. nicole’s first chapbook “V” was the winner of The New School’s Annual Contest and her second chapbook “the next field over” was published by Tolsun Books in 2022. She is also an educator, visual artist, and event producer. nicole has collaborated with musicians, dancers, architects, sculptors, etc. and her work has been generously supported by Art Farm Nebraska, Terra Cultura, Community Arts Partnership., The New York State Council on the Arts, and Poets & Writers.

Brian Cirmo is an internationally exhibiting artist and a 2023 recipient of the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant for American painters from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include Where Teardrops Fall, 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, NY, and All the Feels, Projektraum FN, Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Cirmo’s work has been featured in multiple art fairs including, CONTEXT Art Miami, Pinta Miami, and Aspen Art. Artist Residencies include the Lake Constance Cultural Department in Salem, Germany, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.

Cirmo has an M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Albany. He lives and works in Albany, NY.

Justine Lai is an artist and filmmaker based in Queens, NY. Raised in Sacramento, CA, she received a BA in English and Studio Art from Stanford University and an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her animation work has screened at Chicago Film Society’s Celluloid Now, SoMad (New York, NY), Mono No Aware (Brooklyn, NY), and WHAMMY! Analog Media (Los Angeles, CA). Selected group exhibitions include Asian Art Museum, Asian Arts Initiative, and Gawker Media. She has been awarded residencies at the Missoula Public Library Makerspace (Open Air, Missoula, MT) and Willapa Bay AiR (Oysterville, WA).

Joan Marcus is a memoirist and essayist living in Ithaca. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, Fourth Genre, Laurel Review, The Smart Set, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Avoidant Type, her memoir-in-progress, tells the story of her decades-long struggle with medical anxiety. Part personal narrative, part cultural analysis, Avoidant Type chronicles her experience of embodied anxiety at a time when many Americans mistrust western medicine and embrace alternative treatments, even risky or unproven ones. During her residency at the Saltonstall Foundation, she will be working on the final section of this memoir.

She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arizona and teaches memoir, personal essay, fiction, and children’s literature in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. When she isn’t writing, teaching, or hanging with her husband and grown daughters, she likes to get messy working with clay and digging in her vegetable garden, as well as hiking and kayaking. She works best when she can alternate uninterrupted reading and writing time with time outdoors, preferably in the forest.

Juan José Cielo (b. 1996) is multi-disciplinary visual artist working in painting, photography and short films. Cielo was born in Medellin, Colombia, grew up in Miami and is based in New York City. Cielo is a graduate of The Cooper Union in New York City with studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux- Arts in Paris, France. His work has been exhibited at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Piero Atchugarry gallery Uruguay, The Colombian Consulate of New York, Alliançe française Bogota Colombia, XVII Festival Internacional de la Imagen Manizales, Colombia, and The National liberty museum in Philadelphia.

Cielo has participated in residencies with Fountainhead in Miami, Piero Atchugarry gallery in Garzon, Uruguay and in 2024 will be artist-in-residence with Smack Mellon in New York City. In 2017, Cielo was artist-in-residence along with scientists and researchers at a full-scale Mars simulation program run by the private organization Mars Desert Research Station. MDRS is a full-scale analog facility simulating living on Mars that receives partial research funding from NASA.

Cielo’s work has been featured on Univision, National Geographic Traveler magazine, RCN Television, RCN Radio, VoyageMIA, Hyperallergic and ARTnews. Cielo is the recipient of the 2022 YoungArts’s $25,000 Jorge Pérez Award.

Brit Fryer (he/him) is a queer and trans nonfiction director and producer originally from Chicago’s South Side, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. His unique approach to nonfiction filmmaking explores gender and queerness through process-forward and participatory methods. He is the director of CARO COMES OUT, which premiered on HBOMax after winning the Knight Made in MIA Award at the Miami International Film Festival. His other films include Vimeo Staff Pick ACROSS, BEYOND AND OVER, and TRANS·IENCE.

His most recent film, THE SCRIPT, co-directed with Noah Schamus, examines the intricate dynamics between the trans and nonbinary communities and medical practitioners at the site of language. The film was shortlisted for the 2023 IDA Awards after premiering at CPH: DOX. The film recently found it’s online home at The New Yorker.

He is grateful to have shown work at Indie Grits, NewFest, BFI Flare, Outfest, Inside Out, MIX NYC, and Blackstar. He has received essential support from organizations, fellowships, and residencies such as The Sundance Institute, PBS, POV, Creative Culture, Chicken & Egg, Yaddo, GLAAD, Film Fatales, HBO Documentary Films, and The Gotham Film and Media Institute.

He is currently a 2023 Dear Producer Award Mentee and a BRICLab Artists-in-Residence.

sheena daree romero is an essayist, humorist, and doodler based in NYC. Her primary works-in-progress include an essay collection that bridges memoir and cultural criticism to meditate on blackness in disparate locations and an unhinged campus novel that asks what it really means to level the playing field.

Ekaterina Vanovskaya was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2015. Ekaterina has exhibited nationally including New York City and Chicago. She completed the Artist in the Marketplace Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and recently participated in the Governors Island Art Fair, New York and the AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Ekaterina has received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2017 and 2018.

Bobby Abate is a Queer artist, filmmaker and editor. Bobby’s work has been featured at prestigious venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Film Festival, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque and most recently at International Objects in NYC. In 2023, Bobby was an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Space on Governor’s Island and was awarded the DVAA artist fellowship. Bobby holds an MFA degree from Bard College. As an editor, Bobby worked on seasons 3 and 4 of the Queer docuseries We’re Here on HBO, which recently won Peabody and Television Academy awards, in addition to creating animations for the renowned drag performer Sasha Velour. In 2021, Bobby self-published The Outsider Tarot featuring 80 original artworks that reimagine the traditional Tarot in a modern, queer context. This deck and 200-page guidebook were presented at the Whitney Museum, Participant INC., and Miami MoCA, sold at Artbook in PS1 MoMA Queens, and are part of the permanent collection at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard University.

Evie Atom Atkinson is a trans woman poet, a U.S. Fulbright scholar at the University of Split, and a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, though she usually lives in New York City. Previously, she has directed the writing program at Catapult and literary programs at Chautauqua Institution, and she has taught creative writing year-round at Interlochen Arts Academy and summers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. Her writing has been supported by residencies at Ventspils International Writers’ & Translators’ House and Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh; honored with Utah’s Academy of American Poets Larry Levis Prize; and featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Black Warrior Review, Don’t Write Alone, and elsewhere.

Amanda Bailly is an American filmmaker with a background in human rights and storytelling. Her first feature documentary, 8 Borders, 8 Days, followed a single mother from Syria and her two kids as they fled with smugglers to Europe. The award-winning film screened at festivals around the world, and was the centerpiece of an impact campaign with Ben & Jerry’s calling for more humane refugee resettlement policies.

Amanda started her career on staff at Human Rights Watch (HRW) before moving to Beirut, Lebanon, and becoming an independent filmmaker. She has since produced short films and reports for HRW, Amnesty International, PBS Newshour, CNN, Welcome.US and others. She is currently directing a feature documentary in Ukraine, now in post-production.

Melissa Ling is a visual artist based in New York City. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, as well as internationally in Manila and London. She was an artist-in-residence at the studio program at PS122, as well as a recipient of FST StudioProjects Fund and The Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists. She was awarded the 2023 Jackson’s Painting Prize and was a finalist for the inaugural K11 Artist Prize. Her drawings have been shortlisted for the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and the Derwent Art Prize. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute.

Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. A Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar and a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Narrative, Beloit, RHINO, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. Her poems have received recognition from the Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival, the Center for Book Arts, Adroit’s Djanikan Scholarship, and elsewhere.

Her manuscript, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, was a semifinalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2024.

Rhoni received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Victoria Cho is a Korean American writer who was born in Virginia. Her writing explores the ancestral, spiritual, and homebuilding practices of the Korean diaspora. Victoria’s work has appeared in the anthology Nonwhite and Woman (Woodhall Press 2022), The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, Word Riot, The Collagist, Perigee, Quarter After Eight, Word Riot, and Mosaic. She has received support from Kundiman, VONA/Voices, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

Marilla Cubberley is an artist living in Queens, New York. She uses found and made objects to create installations, animations and digital collections. Her work has been exhibited at Temple Contemporary, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Wavelength Space, Atelier Art Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Atlantic Gallery, Dodomu Gallery, BWAC Gallery, The Defy Film Festival and The Coney Island Film Festival. Cubberley has been an artist in residence at I-park Foundation, NARS foundation, and Walkaway House. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

Esteban Pedraza is a Colombian-American film director and editor. Since graduating from NYU film in 2013, he has developed his career as a writer, director, and editor with several award winning and lauded projects. His latest short film, Bogotá Story, had its world premiere at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival and its North American premiere at the 2023 Hamptons International film Festival. He is currently developing his first feature film.

Mark Anthony Wilson Jr is a self-taught sculptor and installation artist using found objects. After playing football at the University of Cincinnati and earning a Master’s degree in Applied Behavior Analysis, Mark picked up art as a therapist. He marries the unveiling of African American heritage with Afrofuturism to establish instruments for liberation. Repurposing often hidden narratives as the Tennessee Rifles and Harlem Hell Fighters. Mark Anthony fuses Afro indigenous influences with history to assemble sculptural guides. He seeks to use charged materials that are familiar to self or family as adornment. ​

Mark Anthony Wilson Jr has exhibited at The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, commercially throughout New York, and internationally. He has participated in numerous residencies, notably at The Elizabeth Foundation for Arts and Worthless Studios. Mark’s public art commissions include FABnyc commercial lighting project with NYC small business services. He also serves as the co-facilitator for the Young Artist of Color Fellowship ​at FABnyc.

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores how Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured or forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem a Day, Poet Lore, Plume, Barrelhouse, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including The Future of Black, Plume Poetry 9, and Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy. Her first full length collection let the dead in was released by Alan Squire Publishing (March 2022). A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. She lives online at www.saidaagostini.com.

Evan Bobrow is a printmaker, video artist, and arts educator living in Rochester, NY. Their practice centers around queerness, sense of self, collecting, and the natural world. They are particularly interested in how tangible places and items intersect with imagination and identity. Previous residencies include Alfred’s Institute for Electronic Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, and Flower City Arts Center. Currently their focus is on describing imaginary worlds through installations and experimental video.

In addition to their studio practice, Evan is currently pursuing a Masters of Library and Information Science through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign online program.

Angela Caley is a self taught oil painter originally from Ohio, but has been living in New York State since 2001. She attended Columbus College Of Art And Design, and continued her education in NY gaining her degree in fine arts/studio arts and minoring in Anthropology and Sociology.

Within each piece she creates, there is a calling to explore her experiences, dreams, feelings and passions in an attempt to connect with her viewer. As a natural loner, Caley uses her image making process as a means to share her personal narrative and encourage others to discover new worlds through her eyes. With a heavy emphasis on symbolism amongst the stylized realism and surrealism, she aims to give an accurate account of her life and all of her internal struggles and external influences. Caley primarily specializes in mixed media techniques, combining Ink drawings with oil and acrylic paints on both wood and canvas.

In the early 2000’s Caley co-founded the Active Artist Alliance, a group of artists whose aim was to bring awareness to the arts in the local community, spotlight different artist and organize gallery shows and events in Western New York State, Pittsburgh, and as far as St. Petersburg Florida She has taken part in over 50 exhibitions with 4 solo showings since 2004 and was in 6 shows in 2023 alone. Caley was selected by jury to participate in the Artscape Banner initiative in Spring of 2023, She was awarded Honorable Mention by the Crary Art Gallery in Pennsylvania for her piece “Rim Rock” in the Allegheny Forest 100 Year Anniversary juried exhibition, and was selected to design the 2023 Chautauqua Prize Award that was presented to Siddhartha Mukherjee for his book “The Song Of The Cell” at the Hall of Philosophy at Chautauqua Institution in August of 2023.

Recently Caley co-organized and took part in the 4 person show “Natural Selection” displaying her new series “My Life Outside”, and “Revival” a two person show with her husband and artist Bill Thomas III. You can find her work at Chautauqua Art Gallery in Jamestown, New York.

Siyan Wong sees the power of portraiture to share the human experiences. A self-taught painter, an immigrant, and a workers’ rights lawyer, her everyday contact with working people informs her artistic vision. But her immigrant roots and her encounters as a Chinese American woman in America illuminate her visual interests. In two solo exhibitions, she shed light on people who scavenge cans and bottles – “Five Cents A Can: Making Visible the Invisible” (2019), and “Lives of Three Canners: New York’s Chinese Elderly Immigrants” (2023). During her residency at Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, she will be working on paintings depicting the lives of Chinese immigrant women from 1965 (end of 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) to the present, from their work life in factories, grocers, and streets, to their home life and political activities.

Siyan frequently participates in group shows and speaking engagements about art and social justice. Her art is fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and has received support by grants from the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), the Asian Women Giving Circle (AWGC), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA).

Katie Mathews is a film director, writer, & creative producer who works across documentary and fiction. Her films explore the intersections of identity and culture in our complex world.

She recently directed the feature documentary Roleplay about college students and consent that had its World Premiere at SXSW (2024). She wrote and directed the short family drama Dark Moon (2022) chosen as a Vimeo Staff Pick and co-directed an audio-first short film about the sounds of GTMO called Signal and Noise (2021), winner of the Special Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival. Previously she produced and story edited Mossville (2019), a feature documentary about environmental racism that was broadcast on PBS. She also directed and produced Post Coastal (2017), an NEA and Smithsonian-funded documentary series about Louisiana coastal communities and climate change. Her work has been published by Teen Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler, and Wired, and broadcast by PBS, Hulu, the CBC, National Geographic and Disney+.

She received the Princess Grace Award for Film in 2022 with the Wendy Ferguson honor for distinction. She recently completed her MFA in Integrated Media Arts from CUNY-Hunter College. ​

Jonathan Sánchez Noa was born in Havana, Cuba and now lives in Brooklyn. His visual art practice examines how histories of colonial extractivism have impacted notions of race, identity, and climate. Through papermaking techniques, he imprints tobacco stain patterns directly into raw pulp slabs. A process informed and influenced by personal ritual, spiritual and vision interpretation of the world. Jonathan utilizes Cuban tobacco as a medium to reconstruct narratives of displacement in relation to cultural and religious significance. His work conveys ways of understanding a particular Creole experience that is rooted in ideas of resilience.

Jonathan earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2020 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Recent exhibitions of his work include Once at Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2023); Rastros en el tiempo at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York, NY (2022); and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021)

Rosanna Young Oh is the author of “The Corrected Version” (Diode Editions, 2023). Her work has appeared or featured in LitHub, The Slowdown, Best New Poets, Harvard Review Online, and 32 Poems, and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence.

Kelsey Renko is a painter who lives in Kingston, NY. Kelsey received her MFA in 2023 at the University at Albany where she received the Terri Boor Graduate Award and her BFA from the College of Saint Rose in 2015 where she was awarded the Hy Rosen Award for Excellence in Art.

Kelsey attended the Vermont Studio Center Residency in 2019 and has an upcoming residency in Buffalo, NY. Kelsey worked at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College from 2019-2023 where she created Roommate, the Tang’s student art loan program. In addition to making her own work, Renko has curated shows and from 2018-2022 she served on the Exhibitions Committee at Collar Works, a nonprofit gallery in Troy, NY. Currently in addition to teaching painting at UAlbany and Jamestown University Kelsey works as an artist assistant to Sarah Cain.

Kelsey has exhibited widely within in New York including: LABspace Gallery, The University Art Museum at UAlbany, Joyce Goldstein, The Melrose House, Field Projects, Onondaga Community College, Olympia, Collar Works, Albany Center Gallery, The Arts Center of the Capital Region, The Laffer Gallery, babayaga (The Grand Buffet), Olympia x JIP Gallery, yngspc, and The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.

Alexandra Vanik is a Canadian writer who resides in Astoria, New York with her husband, rescue cat, and FaceTime presence of her ballerina daughter. A logophile, Alex admits to hiding in the bathroom as a kid to read the dictionary; falling in love with the sounds of words. Possessing a perpetually evolving mind and commitment to writing, these traits have helped prioritize a disciplined practice alongside her caregiving responsibilities for family and neighbors that span three generations. Her dedication to nurturing extends to the characters she creates. Of her three college degrees, Alexandra insists that it wasn’t the two in English/English Literature that taught her to write, but her Film degree.

Passionate about teaching literacy to young children and exposing them to the joy of learning, she devised an Art History syllabus that incorporates paralleling art projects for primary school students. She also created a curriculum for young, marginalized filmmakers exposing them to the lexicon of documentary with the hopes for empowerment.

A 2023 Vermont Studio Center Fellow; it afforded her time to work on her first novel. Kleos is a story honoring her parents who were born and raised in Cairo, Egypt – but with honey bees that do some really weird stuff. She is excited to finish this project so that she can begin the four other novels she has floating around in her brain. Like Kleos, they all straddle the realm of magical realism. Alexandra feels blessed that she is fulfilling her childhood fantasies of living in NYC, not unlike the characters From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Harriet the Spy. (Though she insists that she doesn’t intentionally spy on her neighbors or squat in museums at night. ) Alexandra loves spending time and is proud of the micro-ecosystem she has created in her little city garden. It is an oasis for birds, butterflies, bees, and a smattering of mythical creatures such as gnomes, fairies, and pixies – which she knows to be real.