Athesia has been producing engaging works of art for over 25 years. She is a painter at heart, but is truly a multimedia artist, having worked extensively in graphite, clay, photography and digital art. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Monroe Community College, where she primarily teaches Drawing the Human Figure, Drawing I & II, Painting I & II, in addition to other courses.

Ryan Black is the author of The Tenant of Fire (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He has published previously in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Neil Kramer is a photographer and writer based in Queens, New York. His work combines staged photography, text, and personal narrative to explore family life, caregiving, masculinity, aging, and humor. His ongoing body of work centers on living with his mother and ex-wife in his childhood apartment since the start of the pandemic. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, on NPR, and on The Today Show, and exhibited at Head On Photo Festival, DongGang International Photo Festival, and Photoville. His photographs are held in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Elizabeth Tolson is an artist and educator whose work examines fertility, motherhood, and the body’s experiences through ceramics and fiber. Using materials rooted in traditional labor to explore resilience, transformation, and life’s cycles. Across both mediums, Tolson’s work highlights the strength, vulnerability, and interconnectedness of personal and shared experiences, inviting reflection on the often invisible labors that shape our lives. Tolson holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from Alfred University, and has been awarded residencies at the Textile Arts Center, Trestle Projects, Chashama’s ChaNorth, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and ProjectArt at the Bushwick Brooklyn Library.

Her work has been featured in a solo exhibition at 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, and in a two-person exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, Tennessee, as well as in group exhibitions at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York; Local Projects in Queens, New York; Target Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia; and Cuchifritos Gallery in Manhattan, New York. Tolson has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, scheduled for 2027. In addition to her studio practice, she has served as a guest juror for the Textile Arts Center’s Work in Progress Residency. Tolson is based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a part-time Assistant Professor in the First Year Program at Parsons School of Design.

Genevieve Yue is a writer and critic based in New York, New York. She is an associate professor of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (2020) and Trains, due out in October 2026.

Itala Aguilera was born and raised in Mexico City. After studying Fashion and Textile Design, her practice started shifting to the visual arts. Her practice is currently centered on finding new ways to undress, which has led her to experiment with different media: water-soluble, heat-reactive, edible, and natural materials, electronics, performance, and video.

In 2022, Itala moved to New York and joined the artist collective Flux Factory. She was a 2023 nominee in the Forecast mentorship program and a resident at Platform in Finland that same year. In 2024, she co-curated the show The Golden Colonel at Flux Factory and participated in group exhibitions such as Quinceañerx at the Textile Arts Center.

In 2025, she was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts grant, through which she produced her solo exhibition Tierra Mojada (Wet Land) at Flux IV. She was also a Work-In-Progress resident at the Textile Arts Center, where she presented her live performance Pearls (a thermodynamic striptease) with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

H.E. Fisher (she/they) is the author of the collection STERILE FIELD (Free Lines Press, 2022) and chapbook JANE ALMOST ALWAYS SMILES (Moonstone Arts Center Press, 2022), and co-editor of THE BIG BRUTAL BILL anthology (Small Harbor Publishing; forthcoming). H.E.’s work appears or is forthcoming in MER, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, EcoTheo Review, SWWIM, Whale Road Review, and DMQ Review, among other publications. H.E. was awarded City College of New York’s 2019 Stark Poetry Prize and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. H.E. is a recipient of Poets Afloat, Stonecrop Gardens, and Bethany Arts Community residencies and grants from Arts Council of Rockland and ArtsWestchester. H.E. is an editor and instructor and currently lives in the Hudson River Valley. Wells Art Contemporary Award in the UK and the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New York.

Nadia Sablin is a photographer, who works in the expanded documentary tradition, exploring the larger world through close personal narratives. Working primarily in Eastern Europe, Nadia follows stories that span years, from children growing up to elders growing old, capturing the practical, quiet ways people adapt to the passage of time in an unstable environment. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2024 Fulbright Scholar, she teaches photography at SUNY New Paltz.

Viktoriya Basina promotes ideas of compassion and humanism through her artwork. She creates mixed media works that provoke questions of sanctity, violence, and destruction that afflicts our contemporary condition, combining oil painting with mosaics, vitreous enamel, fused glass, and other materials.

Viktoriya was born in Russia. She received her MFA in Painting from Moscow State Fine Arts Academy. Since then, she created and actively exhibited studio artwork and worked on different community-involved public art projects.

In 2017 Viktoriya made a move to Brooklyn where she continued creating studio and public art as well as large scale artwork for television and film. Viktoriya’s work can be found in private and municipal collections in Europe, Canada, USA, Central, and South America. Her
public artwork can be seen in Russia, Mexico, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Sylvie Harris’s work uses the shape of domestic garments combined with contemporary and archival photographs to reference the burdens placed on women to maintain the unachievable feminine ideal in the domestic space and beyond. Her photographs are printed on silk and combined with fabric and lace scraps which hang as empty vessels and ghosts of previous generations of seamstresses in her own material lineage. Harris graduated in 2022 with an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago where she was also a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the recipient of the 2021 Stuart Abelson Graduate Research Fellowship in Krakow, Poland. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at Women Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, Foreman Gallery at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York and All Street Gallery in New York, New York, among others. Harris’s recent solo exhibitions include “The Ancestry of Home” at Arcade Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, “Lineage of Labor” at Swartley Gallery at Dwight Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey and “Labor” at Korn Gallery at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Harris was born in 1993 in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Melanie Vote holds a BFA from Iowa State University and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art. Having grown up on a functional farm before living and working in NYC for over 25 years, her practice straddles these two worlds. Her work investigates the complexities of the human-land relationship, the cyclical nature of life, and the impossibility of permanence. A visual scavenger, Vote collects passages through remote painting outdoors in temperate months, then returns to the studio to reconstruct layers of a place, weaving them into open-ended narratives.

Vote was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007 and has been awarded residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center, Jentel (WY), AHAD (Abu Dhabi, UAE), the Grand Canyon, the Weir Farm program (CT), and most recently, Cill Rialaig (Ireland). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In New York, she has shown at Flowers Gallery, The Lodge Gallery, Sloan Fine Art, and DFN Gallery. Additional exhibitions include the Indiana Contemporary Art Center, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery (CA), and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Solo exhibitions have been mounted at Hionas Gallery (New York), The Hangaram Art Museum (Seoul, South Korea), and ADAH (Abu Dhabi). Most recently, Vote presented a solo exhibition, Consulting with the Light Eaters, at Equity Gallery in May 2025. Her work was also included in the group drawing exhibition, “We Were Never Here,” at Kaliner Gallery in August 2025.

Brent Thomas Whiteside’s Midwest upbringing, combined with being born queer into three generations of pastors, profoundly shapes his artistic practice. Working across poetry, theatre, film, and visual media, his work explores faith, morality, and the supernatural through dark, surreal landscapes. He engages in ancestral excavation, blending the sacred with the profane and transforming what is traditionally damned into something divine. Brent Thomas’ practice centers reclamation and community, with a sustained commitment to how Black history and memory are witnessed and carried forward.

Kate diRienzi is an NYC-based filmmaker from Philly. Her films examine explosive emotional landscapes through a lens of strained femininity and queer freedom.

Before making films, Kate began as a theater director and choreographer. Her first short film, Before We Die, was awarded Best Short Film at the Boston Film Festival. Her recent short, Nun’s Beach received an Audience Award at NFFTY in 2025 and was an Official Selection at Hamptons International Film Festival, Bend Film Festival, & Short of the Week. Kate is currently developing her first feature, Going Dark — a psychological drama about catholic school girls and the monsters that live inside of them. She also recently wrapped production on her thesis short film The Forest Echoes Back.

Kate is a 2025 Robert Gore Rifkind Queer Production Grant Recipient, a 2025 Stowe Writer’s Retreat Accelerator Fellowship Semi-Finalist, 2025 Screenwriter Sessions PANO Scholarship Recipient, and a 2024 NYWIFT Scholarship Recipient.

Kate received her BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and is now completing her MFA in Screenwriting & Directing at Columbia University. She also participated in the La Fémis Producing Atelier in Paris and Cannes.

Kelsey Francis lives, teaches, and writes in the Adirondack Mountains. Her essays have appeared in Longleaf Review, HuffPost, Adirondack Life Magazine, The Washington Post, and the “Modern Love” column of The New York Times. Her work was also selected for the anthologies Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away (Alan Squire Publishing, 2023) and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction (Outpost19, 2023)

In 2020, Kelsey was awarded a fellowship with The New York Times Teaching Project and a residency at the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Anne LaBastille Memorial Writers Residency. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Mountainview MFA and is currently at work on a braided memoir about stillbirth and generational grief.

A. K. Herman is a poet and fiction author, born in Scarborough, Tobago. Her work records and reveals the histories, beliefs and lived experiences of the Caribbean and its diaspora that are hidden, taboo, not represented, or misrepresented in narrative —rural Caribbean women, poor children, spirit workers, immigrants.

A. K.’s story collection, How to Lose at Longing: Stories, is forthcoming in October 2026. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her debut collection, The Believers: Stories, was shortlisted for the 2025 OCM BOCAS Prize in Caribbean Literature, Fiction. A. K.’s writing appears in various print and online journals, including Doek! Literary Journal, the Waterstone Review, Lolwe, Shenandoah Literary Journal, and others. A. K. lives in Brooklyn.

River 瑩瑩 Dandelion is a poet, educator, and healing arts practitioner. He writes to connect with the unseen and unspoken so we can feel and heal. River is the author of remembering (y)our light, a poetry chapbook which was a finalist for the 2024 North Street Book Prize. He won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. River’s work has been published Apogee Journal, Asian American Journal of Psychology, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, Best New Poets, The Offing, Poetry Magazine, and anthologized with Haymarket Books, Orison Books, Sundress Publications, and Verve Poetry Press.
River earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University—Newark, where he served as a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow and taught undergraduate creative writing. He has received fellowships and residencies from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Baldwin for the Arts, Banff Centre, Headlands Center, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Tin House, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and more. He has taught and presented at New York University, Rutgers University, Dodge Poetry Festival, Kripalu Center, Restorative Justice Initiative, Wellesley College, and more. River is at work on his debut full-length poetry collection on self and collective remembrance.

Spandita Malik is an Indian visual artist based in New York City. Working at the intersection of photography, textiles, and social practice, her work explores gender, authority, and representation. Through collaborative processes and craft-based interventions, she reclaims agency by engaging with traditional forms like embroidery and shared storytelling, using these practices to challenge dominant power dynamics in documentary photography and reframe the lens through which women’s lives are seen.

Her work has been shown at leading institutions including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 21c Museum Hotels, Jane Lombard Gallery, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Malik’s projects have earned her recognition from the V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, ARTNOIR x Sotheby’s Jar of Love Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Google’s Creator Labs Photo Fund, Women Photograph Project Grant, The 30: New and Emerging Photographers Award, En Foco Photography Fellowship, and the Firecracker Photographic Grant.

She has been invited to several competitive residencies including Silver Art Projects, Light Work, LMCC Workspace, Charlotte Street Foundation, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the PES Feminist Incubator. Her work and voice have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Artsy, The Times (UK), Courrier International, Elephant Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Vogue India, Marie Claire Korea and more.

Malik received her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2019. Through her expanded documentary practice, she transforms image-making into a site of collective resistance, stitching memory, agency, and solidarity into every thread.

Vanessa Mártir, a multi-genre writer, editor, and educator, is the founder of the Writing Our Lives Workshop and the Writing the Mother Wound Movement. She is a 2021 Letras Boricuas fellow, and her work has been widely published, including in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Longreads, Aster(ix), AGNI, and the anthologies Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay and So We Can Know, edited by Aracelis Girmay. Vanessa has been awarded residencies at the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks and Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska, where she worked on her memoir and a new novel. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can find Vanessa hiking an old growth forest or tending to her garden. For more, visit vanessamartir.com.

Terry Plater is a perceptual painter born and raised in Philadelphia Pennsylvania; widely traveled, she now lives in Ithaca New York. A Black American artist working at the intersection of history and representation, Plater’s evocative large-scale oil paintings explore memory and imagination, portray loss and the need for invention, imply a sense of urgency, and infuse the painterly moment with a search for equanimity. Both private and public histories are implied in her suggestive narratives — work which speaks to singular stories as well as shared histories. Her layered, gauzy brushwork implicates the viewer in the dialogue surrounding contested spaces. A lover of many things, she holds graduate degrees in architecture (M. Architecture), city and regional planning (Ph.D.) and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art.

In 2025 her painting “Harriet” was exhibited in *Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid* at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston South Carolina (also forthcoming at the Hampton University Museum in 2026). She has curated both large and small institutional exhibitions, and she is represented in both public art and private/institutional collections.

Sasha Burshteyn is a poet. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Kenyon Review, The Baffler, The Yale Review, The Common, and other publications. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. Sasha currently serves as Translations Editor at Four Way Review. Her work has received support from the Hawthornden Foundation, Tables of Contents, and National Geographic. She was born in Russia and raised in Brooklyn and Donbas.

Danielle Draik (she/they) is a multimedia, traditional artist born and based in Queens, NY. Heavily laden in the occult, Danielle’s focus is on the idea of “high strangeness”, paranormal occurrences, and how these themes permeate history, folklore, and contemporary culture.

They are a graduate of SUNY FIT, active traveling zinester, and unexpected repository for people’s firsthand unexplained stories.

(K^nikanlahtá:sa’) Tonya Shenandoah (she/her) is an Oneida scholar, educator, longhouse community member, and mother of four based in Upstate New York at the Onondaga Nation Territory. Drawing on her experiences growing up in the city as her family was caught in the foster care system, her work exposes the manifestations of settler colonialism while honoring cultural ties with the land.

An MFA fiction graduate from UC Irvine with an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Cultural Foundations of Education from Syracuse University, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from UC Irvine, VONA, and Hambidge Arts Center with partial supports from the Highlights Foundation, WNDB, and Tin House.

Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review, One Hundred Word Story, and Red Ink. Having recently completed the final revisions of her novel, she has begun writing her memoir.

Quinn is a poet, actor, and educator. He is currently finishing his first full-length poetry manuscript which uses dadhood as a lens to interrogate our inherited notions of masculinity and the costs of sustaining tenderness. His poems are published or forthcoming in POETRY, Pleiades, The Adroit Journal, Split Lip, The Offing, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. A Poetry Editor at Bear Review, he received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has received support from the McCormack Writing Center, Brooklyn Poets, Community of Writers, and Prospect Street Writers House. His acting work can be seen on TV, on- and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters across the country. Born and raised on O’ahu, Quinn lives in Brooklyn with his wife, toddler, and cats.

Michael Palmer is a nonfiction writer who grew up in Utah and currently lives in Stone Ridge, New York. His first book, Baptizing the Dead and Other Jobs, won the 2019 Monadnock Prize and was published by Bauhan Press. His work has appeared in Bellingham Review, CutBank, Alligator Juniper, West Texas Literary Review, and numerous other publications. He is currently a Personal Narrative Reader for Electric Literature.