CONTRIBUTORS | ISSUE 2

Emily Abendroth is a writer and artist, alternately residing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where she co-curates the Moles Not Molar Reading Series). Recent work of hers can be found in Encyclopedia, Pocket Myths: The Odyssey Edition, horse less review, eco-poetics, and Cut & Paste. Her chapbook, Toward Eadward Forward, will be published by horse less press this November. A chunky excerpt from her book-length work-in-progress Muzzle Blast Dander can be found in Edition 3 of the Chain Links book series.

Ghada Abdelqader born on December 18th, 1984 is a writer currently finishing her MFA in fiction at Brown University. She grew up in Brooklyn, NY and lived in Palestine for some time. She writes of the history and experiences from both a Palestinian and an American point of view. She travels back and forth to different time zones and unites all with her words of two languages; English and Arabic. She hopes to publish her first book in the upcoming year or two but in the meantime she enjoys the writing of life through her actions first and then on blank paper.

Mary Burger is a writer and literary editor.  Her recent books include A Partial Handbook for Navigators, writings about natural space and constructed environments (2008), and Sonny, a meditative fiction about the Manhattan Project and the dissolution of an American agrarian family (2005).  Since 1998 Mary has edited Second Story Books, featuring cross-genre writing that creates a relationship to time, place, and knowing.  The newest Second Story title, The Island by Beth Murray, is available now from Small Press Distribution.

Rachel Carvosso is a writer and artist currently based in Tokyo. Born in London, she grew up in the countryside and is influenced by both the beauty of nature and the flow of different cultures that the city contains. She has participated in solo and collaborative projects with artists, writers and musicians in the UK and Japan exploring the possibilities of text as visual, visceral and somatic experience. Deconstruction and reconstruction are key themes in work that manifests in a variety of forms. As an arts worker she has worked with vulnerable individuals in the U.K and on projects in Prague and Japan.  She is currently researching Arts and Education and therapeutic applications of creativity and writing freelance. Her next project is a book of poetry combining text and images and the ongoing development of collaborative web based work with U.K artist Simon Leake. Her poem “New now” will be published in a Chinese/English anthology of poems about the Sichuan Earthquake.

Born in 1970 in a little town lost on the mountains North of Italy, Anna Paola Civardi attended art school in Milan and she is a member of the Association of Italian Illustrators. After school she moved to New York where she lived for six years. Of the American experience she holds a strong curiosity towards all the multicultural, multiculinary, multi ethnical atmospheres and experiences. She is now based in Paris. Her drawings are a combination of handmade sketches and digital painting, with an addition of paper and fabric collage. 

Born in 1976, Marcus Civin grew up in Baltimore and lives in Los Angeles. In 2009, Marcus will complete his MFA in Studio Art at University of California, Irvine. He is a graduate from Brown University with a BA in Theater, Speech and Dance. He has collaborated with Candice Lin on Nest, at Betalevel in Los Angeles, and with Joey Morris on A Face in the Crowd, at Catalyst Gallery, Irvine. Recent group exhibitions include: The Pyramid Show at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, Neo Dolce and Many Happy Returns both at High Energy Constructs in Los Angeles, Some Assembly Required at the Lab in San Francisco and Terror? at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. Civin has published drawings, writing, collaborative and hybrid works in Try Magazine, One Less Magazine, Kadar Koli, Mirage Periodical, Fold and The Capilano Review. Marcus is a co-founder of New Urban Arts, a nationally-recognized art-mentoring program in Providence, Rhode Island (www.newurbanarts.org).

Renee Evans authors and illustrates a comic book series called The Secret Life. She spends her spare time constructing book objects, narratives and collages and her indentured time as a line cook in San Francisco’s Financial District. She keeps some of her work here:  www.thesecretlifeofauggie.blogspot.com

Cassandra Feelings is an art critic and avid mixer of media. The aesthetic, if not the content, of her teenage Positive Force punk activism informs her manifesto. Riger lives and works in San Francisco.  She curated a performance art series, Looking but not touching at Right Window gallery in 2008. In collaboration with Kirthi Nath, she's currently at work on an online art history project for San Francisco.

Linda M. Ford employs performance, video and object making in her practice to explore the histories of both the personal and the social body, and the ways in which these bodies are subsumed into specific economies. Her work addresses cultural struggles for legitimacy and the ways in which they are played out socially, culturally and economically. Her working class background which exposed her to labor and class issues, her own work as a union shop steward for the Exotic Dancers Union and the privilege of having been exposed to a secondary education, fuel these interests.
She received her MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute (2002) and was the recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship and Residency (2002).  She has shown work nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include Close Calls, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2008); The Professionals, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, CA (2007); v1b3 Video Project, Traveling Screenings, Orange, California & London, UK (2006); Summer Sonnen Fest, Takt Kunstprojektraum, Berlin, Germany (2005); Test Tube: Freezer Burn, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004); and the 6th Annual 12 to 12 Video Marathon, Art In General, New York, NY (2004).

Hilary Kaplan is a poet and translator in Providence, RI, where she is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Brown University. She was born and raised in Los Angeles. When she is not writing and translating, she is exploring and working on behalf of LA's environment. This summer she coordinated media for and kayaked in the first LA River Expedition: http://www.lalatimes.com/lariver.

Marco Lean lives in San Francisco where he's an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University.  He also studies Basque one night a week at the Basque Cultural Center.

Georgina Lewis uses sound, sculpture, photography, and drawing in work that focuses on the confluence of the human, animal, and machine worlds. Her work has been presented at the Visual Studies Workshop, National University of Ireland, REDCAT in Los Angeles, FILE Brazil, The Photographic Resource Center, and Axiom Gallery. Georgina received her MFA in sound from Bard College in 2006 and holds undergraduate degrees from Franklin and Marshall College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She lives and works in Boston where she is an employee of the MIT Libraries. Mixing research and recreation Georgina plays a Tauren Shaman on the Lightninghoof WOW server. Further information is available at www.birdfur.com.

Chana Morgenstern was born and raised in Jerusalem and now resides in Providence where she is working on her PhD in Comparative Israeli and Palestinian Literature at Brown University.  For two years she served as Writer-in-Residence at San Francisco School of the Arts Creative Writing Department. She has her MFA in fiction from Bard College and is working on an upcoming novel. Chana is co-founder of the innovative literary arts non-profit Artifact. Her plays and monologues have been performed at SPT's The Poet's Theater Jamboree, New College Theater and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. She is the author of the chapbook Touching New Jersey (Little Red Press) and the recipient of the Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship in Fiction. Recent works of hers can be read in On our Backs Magazine, Shifter Magazine, the Marjorie Wood Gallery, Tantalum, and Encyclopedia.

Juliana Mundim is a filmmaker and artist. Her works have been presented in places such as Georges Pompidou in Paris, Bauhaus in Germany, Sandplay Shibuya in Tokyo, Resfest in Brazil among others. She lives between New York and Sao Paulo and spends long periods of time traveling around the world shooting and writing. She is currently working on her feature film project.

Kirthi Nath is an award winning South Asian filmmaker, writer, educator and curator. As an artist, her body of inspired creative work fluidly straddles genres, occupying a fertile hybrid landscape of cultural poetics, experimentalism, and hybrid narrative. Tactile and dreamlike, her work explores female subjectivity, memory, desire, spirituality and racial and sexual identities. Nath’s films have shown in several festivals and events including solo shows at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Chicago Filmmaker’s Third I Series as well as the Berkeley Women of Color Festival, Ladyfest (Olympia, Scotland, Bay Area and Texas), San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. As an educator, Kirthi teaches video at the Bay Area Video Coalition to marginalized youth communities and is constantly exploring multiple ways of empowering young people to become both producer and audience; to understand genre and go beyond it. Kirthi’s curatorial work reflects her interest in promoting women, people of color, youth and queer perspectives. Also an active member in the art community, Kirthi has appeared on several panels and been guest juror for film festivals.

Mamoru Okuno was born in Osaka, Japan in 1977. In 1996 he relocated to New York to study music. Returning to Japan in 2001 he began to expand and explore the idea of rhythm and tonality in sound installations and improvisational performances. Using a “multi source, multi channel” system that was created for him he is able to him to mix several loops of audio samples with independent speakers. His performances have been shown at alternative venues, galleries, and museums and he has also collaborated with a wide range of artists including painters, photographers, sculptors, video artists, and architects. He is currently completing a residency at La Chambre Blanche in Quebec.

Soo Na Pak has lived in North America, by way of Corea, since 1990. In 2005, Soo Na received a BA from Hampshire College. She was the 2005 recipient of a Fulbright grant to Corea. Her work can be found in the anthology, Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, published by South End Press. A self-published book, Child as gift of Amnesia, is companion to her experimental documentary, The Silence Between Oceans, which screened at the 13th Annual UC Santa Cruz Film Festival in 2006. She lives on the East Coast.

Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University.  His books include 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).  Poems of his have been published in Mudlark, Conundrum, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog, Caffeine Destiny, and Spindrift among others. His critical work can be found in Jacket, Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, Media and Culture, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi, and Flak.  Francis lives in Washington DC; you can check out more of his work at his website: http://www.ravensaesthetica.com/.

Lily Robert-Foley lives in Chicago where she works as a piano teacher and assistant editor for The Green Lantern Gallery and Press.  Most recently, her work has appeared in Bathhouse, a s l o n g a s i t t a k e s, and We Magazine.  She will be featured in an upcoming edition of Xerolage, and is the author of the annotations for The North Georgia Gazette, forthcoming February 2009 from The Green Lantern Press.

Dennis M. Somera does pokin'wordsplay/brokenswordplay\blokenswerveplywoodw/a
pinch\punchubperformanceartondapage and off throughisownbody and in collaboration with other artists and genres.  He has been published online at 2nd Ave. Poetry, DeepOakland.com, Cricket Online Review and on the page with PomPom, Bay Area Poetics, Chain and Tinfish.  He first performed tHis “Westside Story” recontextualization for Small Press Traffic's "Poet's Theater," 2006 and has since performed it at numerous Oakland/SF Bay Area venues as well as across the country at Miami Beach Cinematique, University of Miami and in New York City at Galapagos Art Space and Bowery Poetry Club.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Brown University and the 2008 National Small Press Month Coordinator. Her work can be found or is forthcoming from State of the Union, the Wave Books political anthology, Xcp: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics, Sleepingfish, Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, and PoetryProject.com.