Anna Sims Bartel. Once described as “part activist, part administrator, and part academic,” I earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell and have worked at the intersection of higher education and public life, including most recently The Scholar as Human: Teaching and Research for Public Impact, from Cornell University Press.

My interests all center on making the world a healthier, more beautiful place, which is also how I come to poetry (as Amanda Gorman says, trying to cleanse ourselves with words). I am also stewarding 72 acres of Northern Allegheny Plateau outside of Ithaca, which has reminded me that what we plant is more important than what we kill. The basis of most wisdom traditions is the recognition of pattern, the respect of whole systems and the sacred purposes they contain. My writing grows from this impulse: to learn, to plant, to praise.

As a survivor of a violent alcoholic household, I enjoy the things that support chronic hope: the chaos of my young family; being in, on, or near moving water; the smell of dirt and the good things that grow in it.

Molly McIntyre is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two young sons. In her cut paper work, she builds on her training as a printmaker to create images that exist in the intersection of craft, fine art, and illustration.

She currently works for an artist-run company drawing live illustrated portraits at all kinds of events around New York City. Her cut paper animatics were featured in the 2020 Netflix show Worn Stories. She worked for several years with The Postpartum Stress Center in Philadelphia, creating a campaign of comics to help new parents struggling with mental health. These comics were published as the book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts (Karen Kleiman, Familius Press). She also illustrated the book Water Talks by renowned feminist artist Betsy Damon.

Her cut paper works explore the way it feels to be in the world and occupy space as both subject and object. Youth, pregnancy, and aging have all emerged as themes. She is interested in subtly incorporating humor into her cut paper work.

Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Best New American Voices, the Iowa Review, The Master’s Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Studies in the Novel, Zeta, the Brooklyn Rail, American Letters & Commentary, Experimental Fiction and the Buffalo News (among other places).

She is an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo where she is currently the Interim Director of UB’s Humanities Institute. Recently, she won the Patron’s Prize from Thornwillow Press which published her winning short story “The Girling Season” in a special letterpress chapbook edition. It is one of the stories in her new (almost completed) collection called Now You See Her which she will be working on during her residency at Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.

Nzingah Oyo is a curator and an award-winning photographer with reviews in numerous publications, including Art In America, The New York Times, Art in Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer Arts Review, and La Stampa (Italy).

She has an MFA in Photography from Temple’s Tyler School of Art and is a Fulbright Scholar. She has taught photography at the University of South Florida as a Visiting Assistant Professor and has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally and nationally. Her work creates layered narratives that examine and celebrate culture, politics, and global social dynamics.

Micki Watanabe Spiller is a reader, paper purist, and lover of books as objects to be held and enjoyed. Books act as containers for ideas and serve as places for escape. She loves how words become love letters and stories to be shared among friends or strangers; how book recommendations bring friends closer; how book clubs build community. She creates works using books as source material.

Her studio practice can be evenly divided into reading, writing, and making. Though her background is in sculpture, she also combines performative aspects to her practice, creating spaces for events where storytelling can take place.

She is a faculty member at Pratt Institute and Parsons School or Design. She is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner, Printed Matter and the NYS Council on the Arts Grants, and her works are in the collection of many private and public collections.

Wah-Ming Chang lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is writing a book about her father’s art, forthcoming from Bored Wolves in 2024.

Carl Grauer is a painter based in Poughkeepsie, NY in the beautiful Hudson Valley, currently showing with several galleries including Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY. He primarily works representationally within the concepts of time, space, ritual and mortality.

Born in rural Kansas, Carl Grauer was raised in a town of 800 people and a graduating class of sixteen. He had a great aptitude of studies as well as art from a very young age but with a limited exposure to the arts. Following high school he left to complete his degrees in human biology and his MFA in medical illustration from the University of Kansas and the University of Michigan, respectively.

Eventually moving to New York he found solace in the arts and culture in abundance and committed his life to an authentic pursuit to his passion of art making. He spent two years in London studying figurative and portrait painting with several studios and garnered success showing work nationally and internationally, including exhibiting with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, being shortlisted for the 2015 Wells Art Contemporary Award in the UK and the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New York.

Kathy Z. Price is an author, poet, and musician. Her latest literary poetic book, MARDI GRAS ALMOST DIDN’T COME THIS YEAR (2022, Atheneum), depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, received starred reviews from The Horn Book Review, ALA Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly. An earlier book received favorable reviews in the NYT and was a Children’s Literature Assembly Notable Book. Tri-Quarterly Review, Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, and Pleiades have featured her work. She has poems in the upcoming issues of Bombay Gin, and North Dakota Review among others.

She’s a two-time Pushcart nominee, and received Poetry Fellowship award with New York Foundation of the Arts. She’s been awarded artist residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Edward Albee Foundation, and Cave Canem, Community of Writers and Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown.

Kathy’s newest projects include poetry that offers a fresh perspective and musically crafted approach to Josephine Baker. At Saltonstall, she will be working on a collection of poems featuring Butterfly McQueen. The project at Saltonstall will develop a collection of poems that speak to politics of those times with unsheathing truth versus mythology learned from the ancestors. A second project at Saltonstall Residency is to construct poems as a narrative verse novel of poetry, after the style of Edgar Master’s Spoon River Anthology, House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Gwendolyn Brook’s Bronze Town depicting a coming-of-age, coming-of-strength female protagonist.

Víctor María Chamán is the Writer-in-Residence at the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a small grassroots, labor, non-profit committed to workplace and economic justice. He writes prose both in Spanish and English, self-translating according to need. The only short story of his published in the United States appeared in 2014, in the centennial issue of the The Southwest Review, where it won the quarterly’s Nathan Meyerson Prize in Fiction.

In July of 2022, Chamán received a two-year grant from the Creatives Rebuild New York Foundation to pursue his own literary projects while compiling and editing an anthology of non-fiction tales in collaboration with the mostly rural, migrant, indigenous membership of the Workers’ Center. Chamán travels across upstate NY interviewing and inviting the collaboration of worker-storytellers who, through a committee, guide both his part in this communal effort and the project, as a whole, which the workers’ own.

The writer’s previous accolades include the Calliope Nexus MFA Scholarship; two of Syracuse University’s top graduate fellowships (MFA 19′); The Parker Prize in Fiction from UT Austin; The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity’s National Prize in Ethics Essay Competition; and a Man of the Year accolade, awarded by San Antonio Magazine in 2012.

Chamán lives in Syracuse, NY, and is originally from Torreón, Mexico.

Alison McNulty is an interdisciplinary artist based in Newburgh, NY. Her work explores the layered histories and poetics of ordinary reclaimed materials, precarious places, and entanglements with other species toward invoking long and discordant views of time, a sense of place, and relational awareness beyond the human.

In 2022 Alison was a recipient of the Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University in St. Louis and the Empowered Artist Award from Arts Mid-Hudson in support of her work in Newburgh and her residency with the Artist in Vacancy initiative of the Newburgh Landbank (2022-23).

Her sculptures, architectural interventions, site-responsive indoor and outdoor installations, videos, and works on paper have been presented at museums, galleries, conferences, farms, historic sites, forests, performance spaces, and abandoned sites throughout the US and in Europe.

Renana Neuman is a Brooklyn-based, Israeli-born visual artist and educator. She creates multimedia installations using video, animation, sculpture, and text, fusing together eras, continents, and modes of consciousness.

Her work received support through awards and residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Artis Residency Grant, Ox-Bow Faculty Residency and Winter Intensive, Yotzrim Culture Fund, and Vermont Studio Center.

Her work has recently been shown at The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NY, The Zimmerli Art Museum, NJ, Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, Kunstraum LLC, NY, and Barbur Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.

Renana received her MFA from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, and a BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.

Carol Bruns: I graduated NYU in 1966, then attended the Art Students League and l’Academie de La Grande Chaumiere, Paris, 1967-8. My first exhibition was in 1975 at OK Harris Gallery in NYC where I showed small-sized wall works with a sculptural shape and colored plaster. I participated in many exhibitions in Soho 1975-1994. In 1976-77 artist Robert Jacks and I organized a community project to assemble artists’ xeroxed drawings, assembled into books and bound, called Artist’s Pages.

In 2001 I received a printmaking fellowship at the Women’s Studio Workshop, and was a guest artist at the Caraccio Etching Studio. In 2013 I was interviewed by Gorky’s Granddaughter in a video. Continuing to show in New York and Atlanta, I received numerous commissions from New York designers including bronze tables photographed in Architectural Digest 2020. My most recent exhibitions were at Courtside Gallery, Knoxville, 2019, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY 2019, The Parlour Bushwick in 2015, Sculpture Space in Long Island City, SRO Gallery in Brooklyn in 2017-18, and Zurcher Gallery 2022.

In 2021 my review on Louise Bourgeois’s exhibition at the Jewish Museum was published by artcritical.com and my review of Jacqueline de Jong’s painting was published by d’Art International in 2022.

Gemma Cooper-Novack is the author of We Might As Well Be Underwater (Unsolicited Press, 2017). She is a queer writer whose poetry and fiction have appeared in more than forty journals, including Glass, Midway Journal, and Lambda’s Poetry Spotlight, and been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net Awards.

Published chapbooks include “Too Much Like a Landscape” (2015, with Warren Tales) and “Bedside Manner” (The Head and the Hand, 2020). Gemma’s plays have been produced in Syracuse, Chicago, Boston, and New York. She was a runner-up for the 2016 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and has been awarded artist’s residencies from Catalonia to Virginia and a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund.

Gemma is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Literacy Education at Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

Emily Sanders Hopkins is writer, editor, and artist whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker magazine and other publications. Her advice column “Emily Writes Back” was selected as a 2022 Substack featured publication. Her essay “Exotic” appears in The New York Times 2020 notable book Pretty Bitches.

As a developmental editor, Emily has worked on several award-winning books, including Tom Jones’s From Willard Straight to Wall Street and Marianne Krasny’s In This Together: Connecting with Your Community to Combat the Climate Crisis.

Emily is an Army veteran and graduated from West Virginia University and the Writing Seminars at the John’s Hopkins University.

Erin has been published in Autofocus, Tolka, and HAD, among other venues. Her literary artwork and installations have been featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Hennepin Theatre Trust, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Susquehanna Art Museum.

She has been in residence at Soaring Gardens, Hewnoaks, Tofte Lake Center, the Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency, and Spruceton Inn. Erin is the co-founder of Fear No Lit and is currently based in the Adirondack Park.

Phyllis earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and has maintained a studio practice since the early 1980s. She has furthered her work in plein air painting and encaustic wax by attending events and workshops in the US and abroad. Phyllis has presented workshops and is a past painting instructor at the Memorial Art Gallery and currently serves on the boards of The Dove Block Project in Geneva, NY and the Genesee Valley Plein Air Painters. She has exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally, receiving multiple awards and recognitions over the years. Her work is included in many private and public collections. Phyllis is represented by the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, NY.

CJ Mazzalupo has been exhibiting their work since 1993, with solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. CJ had five solo exhibitions while represented by Mixed Greens Gallery in NYC from 2000-2012. Their first solo exhibition was at NYC’s White Columns Gallery in 1998.

Group shows include New Langton Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Artist’s Space, New York City; BLANK Studio, Brighton, UK; Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA and LaMaMa Gallery in NYC.

CJ’s press includes The New York Times, Zing Magazine, France’s Art Actuel (featured artist), Art21, and Hyperallergic. Mazzalupo’s work has been presented at The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The School of Visual Arts (NY), and School of the Museum of Fine Arts (MA).

In their work, CJ explores our collective search for meaning and connection through the study of identity, memory, intimacy, and the limitations of language.

Wendy Xu is a Chinese American poet and writer, most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021), and Phrasis, named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review.

The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, The New Republic, Tin House, The New York Review of Books, and widely elsewhere.

Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, she lives in Brooklyn and is currently Assistant Professor of Writing in the Department of Literary Studies at The New School.

Hannah Hirsh ’19 is the Managing Editor of American Chordata. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and has received support from NYU, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Community of Writers, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.

Her work has been published in Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Narrative, The Yale Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Brooklyn.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College and has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soaring Gardens and Vermont Studio Center.

In 2020, she was named a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. She lives in Sunnyside, Queens.

Anna Warfield (b. 1995) is a soft sculptor and poet based in Binghamton, New York. Her predominantly fiber works engage with the body, unlearning, language, and claiming space.

Her debut solo museum exhibition, “Placid Thoughts From Behind Her Eyelids,” opened in August 2023 at the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York. Her work has been honored in recent years through a NYSCA Artist Support Grant in 2023; Gertrude Herdle Moore Award at MAG Rochester and Juror’s Choice Award in the Southern Tier Biennale in 2021; and through a collaborative NEA, NYSCA and NYFA grant in 2020.

Warfield spoke at the “Text and Techne; Textile Poetics and Poetic Textiles” conference at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in June 2023, and has guest lectured with Binghamton University, Cornell University, and NYFA. She has worked on projects with and for a number of artists and institutions including: Na Chainkua Reindorf (Venice Biennale, Ghana Pavillon, 2022), Carrie Mae Weems (The Shape of Things, Park Avenue Armory, 2021), and LUMA Projection Arts Festival (Production Director, 2020 – 2023).

Warfield holds a B.F.A. and B.S. in Communication both from Cornell University where her thesis received the Charles Baskerville Painting Award.

Marc Weissman is a parent, poet, art seeker and brand & innovation consultant. He frequents open mics at Brooklyn Poets, and is part of Wah-Ming Chang’s Low-Key Reading Party. His work has appeared in Epiphany. He lives in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

Andrea Wenglowskyj is a photo-based artist and portrait photographer based in Buffalo, N.Y. Her personal work focuses on her Ukrainian cultural heritage through language, traditions, current events and customs in her family, the diaspora and the homeland. As a mother and community builder, she is also interested in the power of group learning and shared experiences.

She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant in Ukraine, where she traveled the country and explored Ukrainian culture through its contemporary artists and organizations. Her photography has been exhibited at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA, Galerie Amu in Prague, The Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, to name a few. She has taught at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The International Center of Photography, and through numerous art institutions including Chashama, Brooklyn Museum, The New School, and Montserrat College.

She was the co-founder of Kind Aesthetic, a creative agency based in Brooklyn, and DELVE, a suite of services and events for artists and creatives. She worked for Storefront for Art & Architecture and as an art liaison for UBS Wealth Management. In 2023 she has been awarded an artist residency at Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in Ithaca, NY and The Kirkland Arts Center/Garrett on the Green in Clinton, NY.

Kindall Gant is a Black femme poet and New Orleans native based in Brooklyn. She experiments with visual storytelling as liberation through themes of home, heritage and history, bringing poems into conversation with expressive forms like film, visual art, music and photography.

She has received support from Cave Canem, Obsidian, the Poetry Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, and MASS MoCA, among other arts institutions.

Her work appears in ‘TORCH,’ a literary magazine for Black women writers, the ‘What a Time to Be Alive’ zine carried at the Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, and the ‘1619 Speaks’ anthology forthcoming from the Sims Library of Poetry.

Thomas Matyas was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where he now lives and works. After receiving a degree in art history from Canisius College, his main creative pursuit was music composition until he began making sculpture and painting in 2014, inspired by memories of the industrial landscapes of the North Buffalo neighborhood where he grew up.

Thomas is an Exhibiting Member of the Buffalo Society of Artists, and shows his work frequently in Western New York. In October of 2021 he presented his first solo exhibition at the Carnegie Art Center in North Tonawanda, New York. His work has been recognized with awards in regional and national juried exhibitions, and can be found in private collections in the U.S., Britain and Italy.