Poets
Clare Banks (Instagram) is associate editor for Smartish Pace. A recipient of Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Poet Lore, among others. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore City.
Marietta Brill’s (Instagram) poems and essays can be found in The Los Angeles Review, wildness, Radar Poetry, Thrush Poetry Journal, The Dialogist, Hyperallergic.com, The Adirondack Review, The Rumpus, Interim Poetics, and others. Her poem was chosen by Mark Doty for the Walt Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest (Brooklyn Poets), and she has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She lives in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
Mónica Gomery (Website) is a poet and rabbi whose writing explores queerness, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her collection Might Kindred won the 2021 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). She is a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, a nominee for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, and the winner of Palette Poetry’s 2022 Sappho Prize for Women Poets. Her poems appear most recently in American Poets, The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest. Learn more at www.monicagomerywriting.com.
Saba Keramati (Website, X/Twitter, Instagram) is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. Her debut poetry collection Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and a finalist in the National Poetry Series, is forthcoming in 2024. A winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, Saba’s work has been published in AGNI, Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, The Margins, and other journals.
Described by the San Francisco Book Review as “a force to be reckoned with in literary circles,” Shabnam Piryaei (Website, Instagram) is an award-winning poet, playwright, artist, and filmmaker. In addition to authoring the books Nothing is Wasted (The Operating System, 2017), Forward (Museum Books, 2014) and Ode to Fragile (Plain View Press, 2010), her films have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and public installations around the world. She’s been awarded the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Award, Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize, the Brain Mill Press Editors’ Choice, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her play “A Time to Speak” was staged at the MAD Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. She is currently directing a documentary film entitled No Separate Survival about asylum seekers across the U.S.-Mexico border. She’s the founder and curator of the online art and interview journal MUSEUM. Her art has been exhibited at the Unlike Art Gallery, Elysium Art Gallery, New Gallery London, Youyou Gallery, Jotta, and Galleria Perelà, Kala Art Institute and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (Instagram) is a queer, sick/disabled, Colombian/Latine, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She has been awarded a Mellon Arts and Practitioners Fellowship with Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, was a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and has been a 2021 Radar Productions Fellow, a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. She currently lives in Southern California.
Adrie Rose (Website, Instagram) lives next to an orchard in western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her chapbook Rupture is forthcoming with Gold Line Press in 2023, and she has a micro chap forthcoming in 2023 with Porkbelly Press. She is a Poetry MFA student at Warren Wilson College. Her work has previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Nimrod, The Night Heron Barks, the Ploughshares blog and more. She won the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, and the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize in 2021, and the Anne Bradstreet Prize, the Eleanor Cederstrom Prize, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Prize in 2022. Find her on Instagram @AdrieRose_.
Mara Adamitz Scrupe (Instagram) is a visual artist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Her publications include four full poetry collections: REAP a flora (2023, Shipwreckt Books), in the bare bones house of was (2020, Brighthorse Books Prize in Poetry), Eat The Marrow (2019, erbacce-press Poetry Book Prize/ UK; shortlisted 2020 Rubery Book Award/ UK), and BEAST (2014, Stevens Manuscript Publication Prize, National Federation of State Poetry Societies/ U.S). She has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. Mara is a MacDowell Fellow and serves concurrently as Lance Williams Resident Artist in the Arts & Sciences, University of Kansas, and Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts Philadelphia.
Visual Artists
Deliece Blanchard (Website, Facebook, Instagram) paints landscapes, with lyrical and rhythmic marks that reveal her background in music. Her plein air and studio paintings are colorfully impressionistic, and frequently depict her favorite environment, the Blue Ridge Mountains. A cellist, as well as a painter, Deliece has degrees in biology and music from the University of Virginia and has received painting fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Cook Foundation, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.
Kiley Brockway is an obsessive storyteller, and that is displayed through her work. Capturing images that demand an audiences attention and teases their imagination is always her goal. It is her belief that even the simplest of stories are begging to be told, and it is up to the artist to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Nancy Campbell (Website, Instagram) is a painter known for her portrayals of the small town of Saugerties and its surroundings in the Catskills. She is an instructor of landscape painting at The Woodstock School of Art, in Woodstock, where she is Vice President of the Board of Directors. She has also served as President, and was Executive Director from 2010-2015.
Working across painting, sculpture, performance, music and game design, John C Gonzalez (Website) explores systems of creativity, meaning and labor. His work is included in several art collections including the Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Massachusetts College of Art, the W. Van Allen Clark Jr. Library at Tufts University and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has attended several artist residencies, including Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, MacDowell, Wassaic Project and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Martina Sestakova (Website, Instagram, Instagram, Facebook) engages in wearable art, painting, and art education. Martina creates scarves that invoke stories from life experiences. Her scarves have been featured on Voice of America and at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In her artworks on Yupo, she communicates the perceived meaning of words through colors and textures and explores healing aspects of art through abstraction. As an art educator, Martina brings creative projects to communities with limited access to the arts. Martina Sestakova resides in Kensington, MD.
Allison Webster (Website, Instagram) is a writer, video artist, and ever expansive person living in Los Angeles. She likes to read, write, paint, swim, watch movies, make movies, and pee outside.
Rachel Wold (Website, Instagram) is an abstract artist based in Seattle, Washington. She grew up drawing, painting, and exploring the Pacific Northwest and finds solace and inspiration in nature. Although prolific early in life, Rachel fell out of a creative lifestyle in her mid-twenties after pursuing degrees and a career in science. She works in ocean science at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab and has led research cruises throughout Washington waters. Ideas for artworks would occasionally surface but she didn’t know where or how to start. After suffering first a miscarriage, then postpartum depression after the birth of her second child, she picked up an old sketchbook in search of emotional relief. Putting pen to paper again after a decade hiatus reignited her creative passion. She now makes time for her healing art practice around her fulfilling work and raising two small children.
Annie Wood (Website, Instagram) is an internationally exhibited, creative-compulsive Israeli-American born and raised in Hollywood, California. Annie is an intuitive mixed media expressionist who often draws, paints, shoots, and collages soulful humans, using any medium within her reach. She firmly belives that everyone has boundless creativity within them just waiting to bust on out. Why keep it waiting? Visit her website at anniewood.com.
Thank you to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.