Issue 4 Contributors & Extended Bios

Adam Syty lives and works in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania.  He teaches high school English and coaches track and field.

Alex Quinlan’s poetry, nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Tampa Review, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. He has received awards and fellowships from the AWP Intro Journals Project, the Academy of American Poets, the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. He has served as editor-in-chief of The Southeast Review, as well as a contributing editor at Tusculum Review, and a staff reviewer for Scout: Poetry in Review.

Ali Kinsella, a former Peace Corps volunteer, has been translating from Ukrainian for ten years. Her latest work, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories, an anthology in support of Ukrainians today, is soon out from Deep Vellum Press. Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella’s translations of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems from the Ukrainian, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021 and has been shortlisted for the 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Alina Zubkovych holds a PhD in social science and is the director of Nordic Ukraine Forum, Sweden. She was working on the non-fiction book aimed at reflecting life in Ukraine based on her individual experience, but her plans were cut short by the war she encountered in Kharkiv, Ukraine on February 24. https://alinazubkovych.nu/

Andrew Najberg is the author of The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press, 2007). His poetry and prose has appeared in dozens of magazines including North American Review, Good River Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cimarron, and Another Chicago Magazine.

Bari Bossis is a publicity assistant at Lydia Liebman Promotions, a boutique jazz publicity agency based in New York City. She is a graduate of Bard College with a degree in American Studies and a focus in Literature. Bari grew up in South Florida and is currently Brooklyn-based. In addition to her work in public relations, Bari is a freelance food writer. Several of her recipes were recently published by the nationally recognized nutritionist, Dr. Janet Bond Brill.

Bryce Cobbs is a 25-year-old artist from Roanoke, Virginia. He specializes in portrait work using mediums such as oil paint, pencil, graphite, and digital illustration software such as Photoshop and Procreate.

Brooke Bourgeois is an artist and educator living in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Brynna Hall - updating

Cayla Bleoaja talks to trees and studies political sociology at Oxford. She is a creative and curator of beauty.

Chet Weise’s poems and stories have appeared and been anthologized in publications such as Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, Copper Nickel, Peach Mag, and We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988–2001. Weise currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is Editor-in-Chief at Third Man Books and plays guitar and records with Kings of the F**King Sea (named after a book of poems).

Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the author of the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade from Bull City Press. His works have appeared in December, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Courtney Brothers is a Cloud Network Engineer living in Virginia.

Dana Kanafina is a writer from Almaty, Kazakhstan. She is an alumna of Between The Lines (BTL) of the International Writing Program in 2019, a graduate of the prose faculty of Open Literary School of Almaty and was the ambassador for Almaty Writing Residency in 2021, the first creative writing residency in the country.

Danny Young is a musician and director based in NYC.

Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart prize poet, award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books, is the author of six poetry collections including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella’s translations of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems from the Ukrainian, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2021 and has been shortlisted for the 2022 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Emily Meffert is a story-teller. She lives in Oklahoma.

Isabella Bruzzese is a writer and illustrator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She lives and bartends in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jessie Janeshek's full-length poetry collections are NO PLACE FOR DAMES, MADCAP, The Shaky Phase (Stalking Horse Press, 2017), and Invisible Mink. Her chapbooks include Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish, Rah-Rah Nostalgia, Supernoir, Auto-Harlow, Channel U, and Hardscape. Self-reflection during the past few years has led her toward a transition from her career as a college professor and administrator into a second service career as a licensed Funeral Director. Read more at jessiejaneshek.net.

Kathleen Driskell is the author of four poetry collections, including Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her poems have been published in Shenandoah, Southern Review, Rattle and other literary magazines. She is professor of creative writing and chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, she serves as chair of the board of directors to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the largest organization of creative writers and creative writing programs in North America.  

Kyla Fleming is an artist who works in community development and grew up in Murphy, Texas.

Lena Mazel is a journalist and aerial performer. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her partner and their three rescue parrots.

Lisa McCarty is an artist, curator, and writer based in Dallas, Texas where she is Assistant Professor of Photography at Southern Methodist University.

Lucy DK (@lucyydk) is a RnB/pop artist and writer based in London. You can find most of her work on a music streaming service near you.

Matt Urmy received his undergraduate from UT Knoxville and his MFA from Spalding University. He has published two collections of poetry, Ghosts In A House (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The Rain In The Bell (Iris press, 2015). He is the co-founder and CEO of Artist Growth, a software company that serves the creative media industry. He lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, known for her lyricism and the quiet power of despair, became a hallmark of Ukraine’s literary life of the 1980s, especially her poem, “We’ll Not Die in Paris,” which was the hymn of the post-Chornobyl generation of young Ukrainians that helped topple the Soviet Union.

Nimue Hastings is a film photographer located in the Pacific Northwest. Her focus is on the body — human and earth — to capture the sacred intimacy of being. She primarily shoots landscape and nude portraiture, utilizing the unpredictable nature of expired film to enhance the dreamlike aura of her work.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment (2017) and the chapbook Memory Project (2018). Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her translation from Ukrainian of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.

Phillip Christian Swafford is a painter and songwriter who hails from Chattanooga and resides in Chicago. Swafford painted in his teenage years, before giving it up to focus on composing and producing music. In his 20s, he moved to Chicago where he was a founding member of the Young Camelot art collective and where he resumed painting. He only takes advice from his painting teacher, whose works he actively dislikes.  

Richard Jackson is the author of 17 books of poems and numerous editions, anthologies, translations and critical books. A winner of Guggenheim, NEH, NEA, Fulbright Grants, and the Slovene Honor of Freedom Award, his poems have been translated into 18 languages.

Sebastian Matthews is a writer and artist living in Asheville, North Carolina.

Travis Payne is a graphic and comic artist living in Knoxville, Tennessee who works in both digital and traditional mediums. He received his BFA in art from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and is currently drafting a graphic novel.

V. G. Anderson is an author and freelance editor who spends all year chasing 70 degrees with a taco butler. Explore her work at VGAnderson.com.

Victoria Juharyan is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German and Russian at UC Davis. Victoria completed her PhD in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University in 2018 with a dissertation on Tolstoy’s philosophy of love titled The Cognitive Value of Love in Tolstoy: A Study in Aesthetics. She also holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth Colleague and a BA in Literary Editing from St. Petersburg State University in Russia. Victoria is an avid traveler, and, in addition to teaching philosophy and literature, practices photography, painting, translation, and creative writing.

Vivian Saxon is a masters student at Duke Divinity School studying theology, art, and the environment. Right now she is very interested in the history of the beatific vision and what it means to live well on a dying earth.