Bios

Issue 7 :: Spring 2016
(biographies)

Fernando Martí is an artist, community architect, and activist. He was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and since 1992 has made his home in San Francisco, where he has been deeply involved in and in uenced by community struggles in the Mission and South of Market Districts. He practices community architecture and planning with Asian Neighborhood Design and the Council of Community Housing Organizations and creates political poster art with the JustSeeds Artists' Cooperative (justseeds.org). His art explores the clash of the Third World in the heart of Empire and the tension between inhabiting place and the urge to build something transformative.

Danzante 1 (art)

Sueño con Serpientes (art)

Danzante 2 (art)

Joseph A. W. Quintela marshals words unto the battlefield with little regard for their souls. That is a lie. In fact, he cries each time a word is felled. In solitude. Where the tears cannot be mistaken for a waterfall. Beautiful. Innocent. He raises letters and tells them that a story is a lie that is necessary for their existence. He raises punctuation marks and tells them they are letters. When they all grow up to be morticians and serial killers, he feigns surprise, draws a knife across his supper, and says, "Nothing can be told without death." (josephquintela.com.)

:le streghe (witches' dance)::::::::::::::::::::::::: (poetry)

Okasha Skat’si is a writer/artist/photographer, ex-academic, and current art student whose work centers on environmental and mythic themes. She is Tsalagi by blood and was multicultural before there was a word for it--born in Mexico, spoke Spanish before English, lived most of her life on the Texas/Mexico border. She writes about the history and environment of the border region under the byline Penelope Warren. As Okasha Skat’si, she is coauthor of The Growing, an SF novel that made the 2007 Gaylactic Spectrum Best Novel shortlist.

Tío Checo and the Baby Jesus (stories)

Jon Radlett has been taking photographs for about forty years, but has only relatively recently started doing table-top work with dolls. The attraction of using dolls, apart from subverting ideas of innocence, is the ability to explore the psychology of human interaction through nonverbal communication and to do things with inanimate objects that he would never want to do with real people. When not taking photographs, Jon is a psychologist and teacher.

Woman's Hand With Cigarette (art)

Dance and Doubts (art)

Old Train (art)

Dara Weinberg is from Los Angeles and lives in Kraków, Poland. She writes poems and texts for performance. Her opera libretto PENNY, with music by Douglas Pew, premieres at the Washington National Opera in 2015. Website: darastrata.com.

Zdravka Evtimova was born in Bulgaria, where she lives; she works as a literary translator from English, French, and German. She has published the following collections: Bitter Sky (SKREV, 2003), Somebody Else (MAG, 2005), Miss Daniella (SKREV, 2007), Good Figure Beautiful Voice (Astemari, 2008), Pale and Other Postmodern Bulgarian Stories (Vox Humana, 2010), Carts and Other Stories (Fomite, 2012), Time to Mow and Other Stories (All Things That Matter, 2012), Impossibly Blue (SKREV, 2013), and Endless July (Paraxenes Meres, 2013). She has also published two novels: God of Traitors (Book for a Buck, 2007) and Sinfonia Bulgarica (Fomite, 2014).

The Hawthorn Bush (stories)

V. V. Saichek writes stories that explore the flow of consciousness and how one's several inner personas battle for supremacy. Ms. Saichek utilizes this pull of inner conflict to develop characters and craft stories with strange, dream-bound resonance. Ms. Saichek's artwork explores the archetype of the Shadow and other mythical impulses, using flamboyant colors and disconnected imagery to draw the viewer into relating with "The Other".

Howdy Stranger (art)

Mithran Somasundrum was born in Colombo, grew up in London, and currently lives in Bangkok, where he works in an electrochemistry lab. His recent short stories have appeared in GUD Magazine Issue 4, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Sun Magazine, and the minnesota review, among others. He is currently working on a novel.

Adrenaline Inc. (stories)

Christine Schrum's writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, A Verse Map of Vancouver, Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, The Writer, and other publications. You can find her online at christineschrum.com, and on Twitter: @Schrumza.

Two Reasons (poetry)

Ross Hickerson is an EMS-helicopter dispatcher from Omaha, Nebraska. His work has previously appeared in The Nervous Breakdown and also Paddlefish. Ross once ate a sandwich with Amiri Baraka. If he was a guitar, Ross would be a Danelectro '56 single-cutaway with lipstick humbuckers. He can be reached at rhickerson7@gmail.com.

Five Women, Five Stories (poetry)

Patricia Russo has had stories published in Fantasy Magazine, ChiZine, Lone Star Stories, Talebones, Tales of the Unanticipated, Not One of Us, Electric Velocipede, and many other places, online and off. Her stories have appeared in the anthologies Corpse Blossoms, Zencore!, The Best of Not One of Us, 52 Stitches, and The Best of Talebones. Her novella Hearts Starve was published as an e-book by Eggplant Literary Productions, and her first collection of short stories, Shiny Thing, was recently released by Papaveria Press. She doesn't have a website, but the book does: www.shiny-thing.com.

With the Blue Heart People (stories)

Lezli Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who works in site-specic performance, installation, video, drawing, and photography, to explore her relationship with her environment. Through her own body, and using common, available natural or man-made materials, she carries out simple actions that connect her intimately with her locale and with the physical as well as the cultural, social, and metaphoric context of the site. She has performed and exhibited in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Europe, and her performance videos have been shown at many different venues. lezlirubinkunda.com.

Wrapped in Morning Glory (art)

David Gullen was born in South Africa. Three years later King Neptune baptised him at the equator when his parents returned to England. His novel Shopocalypse, a near-future story of talking cars, shopping, and nuclear war, is available from Clarion Publishing (2013). His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. One story was shortlisted for the James White Award; another won an Aeon Award. His collection Open Waters (theEXAGGERATEDpress) appeared in early 2014. He recently coedited the charity SF anthology Mind Seed. David lives with the fantasy writer Gaie Sebold. He is represented by the John Jarrold Agency.

Just War (stories)

Eve Sweetser lives in Berkeley, and teaches in the Linguistics Department, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Celtic Studies Program at UC-Berkeley. She's interested in metaphor, categories, frames, language-accompanying gesture, and the meanings of words and grammatical constructions--also medieval Welsh poetry and Breton satirical novels. She's looking, among other things, for ways to connect understandings of culture, cognition, and language with understandings of literary style. Her major hope for this project lies in the younger generation, whose categories are less entrenched.

Categories, Genres, and Labels, Oh My.... (reports)

Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein is an Oregonian printmaker from Hawai‘i who uses the ancient craft of woodcutting to explore giant robots, things with claws, and the boundaries of the human. But mostly claws. Her website is rhiannonrs.tumblr.com.

Lovebirds (art)

Robert T. Jeschonek is an award-winning writer whose fiction, comics, and poetry have been published around the world. His young-adult fantasy novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist's Top 10 First Novels for Youth. His cross-genre science-fiction thriller, Day 9, is an International Book Award winner. Simon & Schuster, DAW Books, PS Publishing, and DC Comics have published his work. Visit him online at thefictioneer.com. You can also find him on Facebook and follow him as @TheFictioneer on Twitter.

I Love You More Than the Color Pink, Mirrorballface (poetry)

Lisa Haag Kang is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Spillway, Third Wednesday, The Examined Life Journal, and others. In June of 2013, her poetry chapbook Recombinant Loves was published as a runner-up in the Main Street Rag poetry-chapbook contest. Her poetry chapbook A Benign Sort of Cannibalism was the winning manuscript in the 2013 Clockwise poetry-chapbook competition and will be published later this year by Tebot Bach.

Field Dressed (poetry)

Joshua Ben-Noah Carlson was born in Duluth, MN. He lives in Minneapolis, plays piano, builds boats, does yoga, and reads and writes.

Coconut Pie (stories)

Lisa A. Grabenstetter: Born in the nonstate of America, zie enjoys absorbing and creating anything (writing, images, material, binding) that might go into a book. More of hir work can be found at magneticcrow.com.

I grew this so you would visit. (art)

zac carter is pretty goddamned something. deathtohemingway@gmail.com.

its the cradle and the home and the bumps in between (stories)

Tony Mangia. Reporter/photojournalist. NYC bar owner for twelve years. Boxer. Photo website: mangiamedia.net. Contributor to sports website: yardbarker.com/…. Work published in The New York Times Magazine, the Associated Press, The Boston Globe, New York Post, and The Village Voice. Just spent a month in Kenya with the Kenyan Defense Force, photographing the struggling tourist villages along the Somali border. Would like to return and photograph the Somali refugee camps.

Hoboken (art)

Rustin Larson is the author of Crazy Star (Loess Hills Books, 2005) and The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009). He is the host of the radio talk show "Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost": kruufm.com. Read his blog at The Iowa Source online: iowasource.com/blog/…-rustin/.

Bum Canto 1 (poetry)

Polenth Blake lives in England with her pet cockroaches. She's had work published in Nature, ChiZine, and Strange Horizons. Her website lurks at polenthblake.com.

Monkey Bait (poetry)

Sabrina Vourvoulias is the author of Ink (Crossed Genres, 2012), a speculative novel that draws on her memories of Guatemala's armed internal conflict and of the Latin@ experience in the United States. It was named to Latinidad's Best Books of 2012. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, in Crossed Genres, and in a number of anthologies, including Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, forthcoming in May. Follow her on twitter @followthelede.

Paper Trail (stories)

Alicia Hoffman lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of Like Stardust in the Peat Moss (Aldrich Press, 2013), her poems have appeared in Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, Poets/Artists, Camroc Press Review, Tar River Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently completing her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, where she is guest poetry editor for A River & Sound Review.

Invitation (poetry)