About

Catherine Alexander, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, has published stories in 42 literary journals, including North Atlantic Review, Rosebud (two successive issues), Bryant Literary Review, Rockhurst Review and won "Jurors' Choice" in Spindrift. Paul Auster read her story, “Dancing on 74th Street,” on NPR. Jorja Fox from television’s CSI performed “Backyards” in a WordTheatre production. For fifteen years, she has taught fiction and memoir at venues such as the University of Washington, Edmonds College, Seattle Public Library, writing conferences, senior centers and to homeless groups. She now leads a private class in Seattle. Living in Edmonds, Washington, with her cat and two dogs, she has completed a novel, a novelette, and a short-story collection.

Natalie Bradford, explores the ideas of memory, absence, mortality, and the passage of time in my prints. Our memories are naturally inconsistent and fleeting; it’s impossible to remember everything in our lives clearly, especially as we age. Important memories move from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Every time we recall memories from our long-term memory, in particular, some of the information either gets lost in the retrieval or our brains fill in small gaps with other memories, resulting in a slightly different and ever-changing “false” memory.

Through those countless retrievals, our memories of those precious loses its “truth” as our brains start to fill in the blanks with other memories or narratives that aren’t consistent with what really happened.

Website: www.nataliebradford75.wixsite.com/mysite

Instagram: @natalie.bradford

Jackie Chu, graduated from Connecticut College in 2019 with a BA in Creative Writing. Her collection of poems combine stories and moments that reflect on her experiences post-graduation. Her writings are an outlet for her thoughts while questioning the anxiety so many people feel when leaving school.

Instagram: @jackiechu12

Thomas Valianatos, is an audiovisual artist, his work combines new media and audio-reactive live visuals. The aim of his practice is to create experimental 2d/3d graphics in real time, with various techniques and artistic media such as generative art, music visualization, virtual reality, depth cameras and synthesizers. The art works, in their final form, are presented as live audiovisual performances, video screenings, digital prints and original drawings.

Website: Thomas Valiantos

Instagram: @thomasvalianatos

Noeme Grace C. Tabor-Farjani, has authored Letters from Libya, a chapbook of short memoirs about her family's escape from the Second Libyan Civil War in 2014. Her poems have recently appeared and/or are forthcoming in Your Dream Journal, Global Poemic, Luna Luna Magazine, Fahmidan, Rogue Agent, and Agapanthus Collective. In 2018, she successfully defended her PhD dissertation on flow psychological theory in creative writing pedagogy. In between gardening and yoga, she teaches literature and humanities at the high school level in the Philippines. She is currently working on a chapbook of poems on spirituality and the body.

Sanjana Saxena, Art is to put frames to the elements that exist in our surrounding living spaces with the vision to disclose the hidden aspects of living. So I see board games as a potential tool that helps me to depict the unnoticed aspects of living, as to my concern I see life as a game and relate board game with life From the last few years in the hustle and bustle of life, this practice got somehow stopped, and with the desire to disclose the reasons behind the vanishing of this practice she started to work on the theme of human life as a game. With the passing of age, the representation of entities that surrounds human living keeps on changing.

Broad games got substituted by virtual games at most which somehow has deprived the functionality of human mental states and lead them to an illusionistic outside world where they were forced to forget their identity as individuals and enter into the illusion of a materialistic world.

Instagram: @sanjanasaxena00

Patricia Walsh, was born in the parish of Burnfort, Co Cork,and educated at University College Cork, graduating with an MA in Archaeology. Her poetry has been published in Stony Thursday; Southword; Narrator International; Trouvaille Review; Strukturrus; Seventh Quarry; Vox Galvia; The Quarryman; Brickplight, The Literatus, and Otherwise Engaged. She has already published a chapbook, titled Continuity Errors in 2010, and a novel, The Quest for Lost Éire, in 2014. A further collection of poetry, titled Outstanding Balance, is scheduled for publication in early 2021. She was the featured poet in the inaugural edition of Fishbowl Magazine, and is a regular attendee at the O Bheal poetry night in Cork city.

Farrukh Adnan, is based in Lahore. He completed his undergraduate in Visual Communication Design from National College of Arts, Lahore in 2009 and graduate program in Art and Design Studies from Mariam Dawood School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore in 2014.

He started teaching Photography at National College of Arts, Lahore (2015) also teaches Graphic Design, Drawing and History of Art at National College of Business Administration and Economics, Lahore (2016-2017). Currently, teaching drawing at National College of Arts, Lahore.

Rachael Pennington, originally from the north of England, is a translator and emerging writer who lives in Barcelona. She has also worked as an assistant managing editor for the literary translation journal Asymptote. Her poems and short stories have been seen in Loud Coffee Press, Tast and Parentheses, and are forthcoming in The Broken Spine.

The poem “Cambium” was first published this autumn in the fourth edition of Parentheses, a Barcelona-based magazine with a focus on local artists who write in English, Spanish and Catalan. Inspired by an imagined shipwreck on the rugged topography of Britain’s northern coastline, this poem explores the tug-of-war between the physical locations of the place we call home and the place we choose to make our lives, which often goes against the grain of the life we learnt.

The poem “Flying Picket” is forthcoming this winter in the second edition of The Broken Spine. With a focus on narrative poetry, this poetry and arts collective are partial to pieces that explore the north of England. This poem came about during a trip to the UK just before Brexit referendum in spring 2016. It represents a fog of feelings that arose upon arrival about the political and life choices of my parents and old friends, and explores not only the mark ’the North' may have left on me but also the mark I left on it.

Neerja Chandna Peters, Though a physician by profession, I discovered my passion for art a decade ago. I began my journey of painting, for the sheer joy of it. My medical background exposed me to various strata of the society and their day to day struggles and challenges. My own life and it’s trials and pain moulded my sensitivity and form of expression. Through art I found an expression of my experiences.

Art to me is a form of meditation and creating a piece of art gives me the same peace, joy and satisfaction. Meditation requires introspection, focus and discipline and so does creating an artwork. My recent geometric abstracts take the viewer into a meditative zone, and through these I am developing a unique language to communicate and share the peace that comes to me through art.

Website: http://duendethestudio.com/

Instagram: @neerjapeters.art

Xena Brar is a multidisciplinary designer based in New York, NY and Baltimore MD. She has obtained her BFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art in May 2020.

The following essay was written out of a need to get these frustrations out of my system. I think the definition of submissive is being seen as weaker or lesser. The dictionary definition is “ready to conform to the authority or will of others; meekly obedient or passive.” I don’t want my identity to define who I am, but, when you’ve been exoticized and fetishized by almost every romantic partner you’ve been with due to your skin color it makes you think and in turn makes one wonder “so, what am I if I’m not just my race?” Strange, huh? Let me return back to my dictionary definition of submissive, the reason I bring this up is in part due to the portrayal of women of color in the media, in society, as a whole have been seen as a submissive “exotic” being that is often “spicy” and ethnic; often times leading anglo or non latino men to expect certain things from you in a relationship because they are seeing these portrayals and believing them to be true. This essay explores these harmful stereotypes and dives into the racial fetishization women of color face by white men.

Instagram: @bedfullofdirt

Tiago de Oliviera, originally from Brazilian, currently lives and work in Orlando, USA. He graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, majoring in Art History and studied at the Fundamentals of Contemporary Art - Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage.

The series entitled “Burlesque Show” is an offshoot from a previous series called, “Luxury and Explosion” performed in 2016. The “Luxury and Explosion” series portrays sexy pin-ups from 40s and 50s, who were angry at the exposure and dissemination of their image as a product of self-destruct. I have removed the figures ehads and in their place inserted a great explosion of colors. Thus causing discomfort, embarrassment to look at the image. Although they are beautiful, well dressed and sexy, their bodies are to be seen and consumed as a product.

The concept of uncomfortable self-destruction remains adding glitter as a way of emphasize irony as a turning point and critical of the work. Such criticism occurs in at least two ways: beyond the massive exposure of the body as object and its objectification, transforming such an image into an object to be consumed - generally for a male audience.

Website: http://www.tiagosegundo.com

Instagram: @tiagosegundo