Contributors - Issue 5
Click on the contributor in the table below to go to a brief biography and links where available.
Kazim Ali, author of many books of poetry and prose, teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin College and is the founding editor of Nightboat Books (www. nightboat.org).
Stephanie Ashenfelder is the program coordinator for the Department of Art at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. She has exhibited in galleries and museums from San Francisco to New York.
Rose Ausländer (1901-1988) was a survivor of a ghetto created by the Nazi occupiers of her Jewish community in Austria during WWII, and her experiences as a prisoner and escapee reveal themselves in her post-war poetry.
Sarah L. Averill is a medical resident at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse. She writes a weekly blog for The Differential, a Medscape Med Students blog site, which is a subsidiary of WebMD.
Jasmine Barnes is currently a freshman at Hobart William Smith College in Geneva, New York. Her story in this issue was written when she was a senior at Fowler High School in Syracuse.
AnnaMaria Begemann was born in Germany and came to the U.S. in the nineties. A student of Kabbalah, she has collaborated with elana levy on translations of Rose Ausländer’s poetry.
Roberley Bell is a professor in the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. B Bruce Bennett is professor and chair of English and director of the creative writing program at Wells College in Aurora, New York.He is the author of nine poetry booksand over twenty chapbooks.
Alice K. Boatwright is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program,currently living in Paris. Her book LeavingVietnam was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Cedric T. Bolton is an award-winning poet (spoken word artist) known as Blackman Preach, and founder of Poetic Black Fusion, a writers’ workshop that provides access and opportunities to poets of African heritage.
Luke Buffenmyer has an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and currently teaches at Chester College of New England in Chester, New Hampshire.
Molly Burdick was born in Syracuse and is currently a sophomore at Nottingham High School in Syracuse.
Michael Burkard, author of nine books of poetry, has taught in the Syracuse University
M.F.A. program in creative writing since 1997.
Carrie Chalmers, a photographer based in Ithaca, New York, is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has received grants from the Cornell Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), to whom this volume is dedicated, was a renowned poet from the Buffalo area and an inspiration for many of the poets included in this volume.
Anne Cofer is an installation artist and instructor in the School of Art at Syracuse University. Her work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics Art and Perception, and The NewYorkTimes, and was selected for the spring 2009 publication 500 Ceramic Sculptures.
Peter Conners is a Rochester-based writer who has published several books of poetry, a memoir, and a novella.
Natalia Cortes Chaffin, currently living in Las Vegas,was a finalist in the recent Glimmer Train New Writers’ competition. “The Wall” is part of a linked story collection in progress.
Elinor Cramer's book of poems, She Is a Pupa, Soft and White, will be published by Word Press in 2011. Elinor lives in Syracuse where she practices psychotherapy.
Jessica Cuello teaches French at Marcellus High School. Her poems have appeared in several journals, and she won the 2010 Vivienne Haigh-Wood Prize from the online journal Melusine.
T. Jackie Cuevas, originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, joined the faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University in 2010. Cuevas also runs a small press called Evelyn Street Press and belongs to Macondo, a creative writers’ collective founded by author Sandra Cisneros.
Num Cung was born in Burma and is now a junior at Nottingham High School. In his free time, or not-so-free time, he enjoys writing poetry and music lyrics.
Roger De Muth is an award winning illustrator, designer, photographer and gardener. His work has appeared in the Society of Illustrators in New York and Los Angeles. He teaches in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.
Susan Deer Cloud, a poet and fiction writer of Blackfoot, Mohawk, and Seneca heritage (Metis), has published three books of poetry, and has served as editor of the multicultural anthology Confluence, and of Yellow Medicine Review.
Rachel Guido deVries is a poet and fiction writer from Cazenovia, New York. Her most recent book of poems is The Brother Inside Me (Guernica, 2008). A past director of the Women’s Writers’ Center and the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, she currently teaches poetry in the schools.
José Lauriano Di Lenola is an incarcerated writer. As each year passes behind the wall, and another memory of youth slips away, this essay is his attempt to hold on to his memories. “TheYears in Between” is his first published essay.
Lauren DiCioccio currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has been shown in many prominent galleries throughout the country. In 2010-11, she has been an artist-in-residence at the McColl Center for Visual Arts in Charlotte, North Carolina,and the Quimby Colony in Portland, Maine.
Francis DiClemente is a writer, photographer, and video producer in Syracuse, New York.
Daniel DiStasio was born and raised in Syracuse. He received his M.F.A. from Spalding University, and his fiction has appeared in several literary magazines.
Majay Donzo came to the U.S. from Sierra Leone in 2005 and is now a senior at Fowler High School in Syracuse.
Jolene Dosa is a sophomore at Nottingham High School in Syracuse and took Gear Up summer classes at Syracuse University in summer 2010. She works in all media.
George Drew is the author of three collections of poetry and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His book American Cool won the 2009 Adirondack Literary Award for best poetry book that year.
Cornelius Eady, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a poet and playwright from Rochester, New York, who currently holds the Miller Chair in Poetry at University of Missouri.
Vykky Ebner’s paintings have been included in the Everson Museum’s 60/60 exhibitions in 2009 and 2010. As an artist with schizoaffective disorder, a main goal of Vykky’s is to highlight the stigma and suffering associated with mental illness.
Courtney Egelston is a 2010 graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied magazine journalism and political science. She teaches high school English in Dallas, Texas, through the Teach for America program.
Elizabeth Emery is a mixed media artist currently living in Cleveland, where she has a studio in a former sausage factory. After college graduation, she worked in the New York City rag trade, designing textiles, and then raced bicycles professionally for ten years before pursuing a career in art.
Benjamin Entner has an M.F.A. from Syracuse University’s sculpture program and has shown nationally and internationally, most recently with solo shows at the Houston Art League, the Earlville Opera House, and his living room.
Myron Ernst taught French and Italian at SUNY Plattsburgh for almost thirty years, and with his wife was co-owner/director of a Montessori preschool in Vestal, New York, where they still reside. Ernst’s poems are forthcoming in several literary journals.
David Eye earned a midlife M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 2008, which followed a 17-year career in the theatre and four years in the military. So he may be the only poet to have served time in both the U.S.Army and Cats. He currently teaches writing and poetry at Manhattan College in New York City.
Lisa Feinstein shares her little ghetto hideaway in Rochester, New York, with a fat cat, a stubborn hound, and a good man who was hard to find. Her work has appeared in many journals and literary reviews.
Brett Finlayson has an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. His recent work has appeared in New Delta Review, The Offending Adam and Third Coast.
Matthew Gehring has exhibited widely on both the East and West Coasts and has had works featured in ArtReview, Art Journal, and ArtWeek. He lives and makes art in Central New York and Brooklyn, while teaching at SUNY Suffolk on Long Island.
Eric Geissinger lives in Watkins Glen, New York, and works as a technical writer. He has published short fiction in several journals.
Mary Gilliland, recently retired from teaching poetry at Cornell University, has numerous publications to her credit, and has recently won awards in such journals as AGNI, Notre Dame Review, and Stand.
Tula Goenka teaches documentary production and Indian cinema at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. Her book, Bollywood and Beyond: Conversations with Indian Filmmakers, is forthcoming later this year.
Wendy J. Gonyea, a member of the Beaver Clan of the Onondaga Nation, is a former teacher-counselor and editor of the Onondaga Nation News. She is actively involved in education and in speaking and writing on behalf of the Onondaga Nation.
Julie Grossman has a joint appointment in the English department and the Department of Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College. Besides numerous articles on film, literature, gender, and popular culture, she is author of Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009).
Christine Hamm is a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University, specializing in 20th century poetics. She won the MiPOesias First Annual Chapbook Competition, and has since published two books of poems. She is also the founder and editor of Fat Gold Watch Press, currently seeking creative/critical works that celebrate Sylvia Plath’s life and work.
Cliff Henderson wrote travel and arts and entertainment articles for years as an avocation.Having lived in Upstate New York for about 20 years, he is experiencing a late vocation in poetry.
Gail Hoffman teaches in Syracuse University’s School of Art,and has also initiated significant university-community art collaborations in downtown neighborhoods and the Syracuse City Schools. Her work has been featured in several major shows in Chelsea and Soho in New York, in recent years.
Ani Hoover has had several solo exhibits in Buffalo, New York, and has been in group shows throughout the country. In 2009, she participated in the New York Foundation of the Arts’ MARK program, and in 2010, she worked at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, creating one of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings.
Akua Lezli Hope is a writer and visual artist who works in a variety of media. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and literary magazines. She has lived in the southern Finger Lakes region since 1985.
Randall Horton is a Cave Canem Fellow and assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven. The poems that appear in this issue of Stone Canoe were greatly influenced by the connection made with Lucille Clifton at the Cave Canem retreat in 2006.
Margie Hughto is nationally recognized for her ceramic paintings, collages and tiles. She is professor of ceramics in the School of Art at Syracuse University and co-author of A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878-1978.
Michael Jennings has published eight books of poems, most recently Bone-Songs and Sanctuaries, New and Selected Poems 1970-2008, which is reviewed in this issue. He is also an internationally recognized breeder and judge of Siberian Huskies and has written several books on the breed.
Ron Jude teaches in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College. His photographs have been featured in The New Yorker and other magazines, and are in many permanent collections. His latest book, emmett, will be the subject of a 2011 exhibition at Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.
Mike Jurkovic is currently co-director of Calling All Poets, and VP of The Howland Cultural Center, both in Beacon, New York. He has also produced three music CDs, and reviews music regularly for Elmore Magazine and Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange.
Mary Karr, a Guggenheim Poetry Fellow, has published four volumes of poetry and three best-selling, critically acclaimed memoirs. She is currently the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
Julia Kelley graduated from Syracuse University in 2010, earning degrees in both magazine journalism and music, with an emphasis in clarinet performance. She is spending the 2010-11 school year as an English teaching assistant in Nice, France.
John Knecht is the Russell Colgate Distinguished Professor of Art & Art History and Film & Media Studies at Colgate University. His films, videos, and installations have been shown all over the world. Recent exhibitions include “First Person Cinema” series, University of Colorado, in October 2010.
Chrissy Kolaya’s poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. She has received a Norman Mailer Writers Colony scholarship, an Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies fellowship,a Loft Mentor Series Award, and grants from several public and private foundations.
Daniela Kostova is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the fields of video, performance, photography and installation, and has numerous international exhibitions. In 2003, she was granted a graduate fellowship from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she currently teaches.
Angela De Santis Krueger’s publishing credits include Prairie Schooner, The English Journal, girlSpeak Journal, and Finger Lakes Anthology. She owned and operated Inkblotz Studio and Gallery in Geneva, New York, and has taught English at the high school and college levels.
Ilyse Kusnetz is a poet whose work has appeared in several journals, and her manuscript Tips from the Underworld was a finalist for both the Autumn House and Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prizes in 2009. She is on the English and creative writing faculty at Valencia College.
Kristin LaCroix is currently a lecturer in the School of Letters and Sciences at Arizona State University. She is the recipient of the 2001 Katherine C.Turner Award in Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent work appeared in NightTrain and Third Coast.
Susan Lakin is an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her artwork has been exhibited widely, received many awards, and is included in permanent collections at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the Lishui Photography Museum of China.
Charlene Langfur is a teacher, rescued dog lover, and organic gardener from California, whose work has appeared in numerous reviews and journals. She is a graduate of the Syracuse University graduate writing program and a grateful student of the late W.D.Snodgrass and Philip Booth.
Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla is assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics at Syracuse University, and project coordinator of La Casita Cultural Center.
Patrick Lawler teaches English at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. His many accomplishments (too numerous to mention here) include his talents for connectivity. He nails a hum to his poetry, a prism to his stories, and a hunger to his parenthetical statements (for which he has been asked many times to apologize).
Tatianna Lebron is currently a sophomore at Fowler High School in Syracuse.
Jay Leeming is a poet from Ithaca, New York, who has taught at Butler University and SUNY Plattsburgh. His first book, Dynamite on a China Plate, was published in 2006. He recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is currently Tompkins County Poet Laureate.
Naton Leslie is the author of a book of narrative nonfiction and seven volumes of poetry. A collection of his short fiction, Marconi’s Dream and Other Stories (2003), won the George Garrett Fiction Prize. He teaches writing and literature at Siena College in Loudonville, New York.
Elana Levy has retired after teaching math at Onondaga Community College for twenty years.She has read poetry in many venues in Upstate New York,and her chapbook, Contradictions, was published in 1991. She is also a translator of German poetry.
Lyn Lifshin has been called “Queen of the Lit Mags” and “The Queen of Modern Romance Poetry.” Over 120 books and chapbooks of her work have been published. She has also edited four anthologies, and was the subject of the award-winning documentary film, Not Made of Glass.
Mary Lum is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow who makes collages, paintings, and installations that explore the poetic undercurrents of urban space. Recently, she has been an artist-in-residence at St. John’s College, Oxford, UK, and has had solo shows in New York, Paris, and Boston. She is on the faculty at Bennington College.
Charles Lupia has B.A. and J.D. degrees from Syracuse University, and practices law in Syracuse. His plays have been produced numerous times, and he has taught playwriting at Studio 24 in Syracuse.
Rogelio Martinez was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, and came to this country in 1980 on the Mariel boatlift. A graduate of Syracuse and Columbia Universities, he has produced a number of his plays in various venues in the New York City area. He is a recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Tim McCoy is an M.F.A. graduate of Syracuse University who currently works as an adjunct professor at Onondaga Community College, Cayuga Community College, and SUNY Oswego. His first poems were published in Ekphrasis and The Comstock Review.
Rachel McKibbens is a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of the poetry collection Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009). Her poems and short stories have appeared in several journals, and she is currently working on a memoir.
Deborah Meadows is a Buffalo native who now teaches in the liberal studies department at California State Polytechnic University, where she curates a poetry and jazz series and participates in travel exchanges with writers in the University’s Cuba program. She is the author of several books of poetry.
Philip Memmer is the author of three books of poems, most recently Lucifer:A Hagiography, winner of the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry, and Threat of Pleasure, winner of the 2008 Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry. He is Executive Director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse and the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center.
Len Messineo is a poet and playwright who is occasionally heard on PBS affiliate WXXI’s Fiction in Short, and whose stories have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Writers & Books of Rochester and is a jazz musician in the Artisan Trio.
Lucy Mink earned her M.F.A. from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, studying under David Rich and Ari Munzner. She lived and worked in the NYC area, then moved to Syracuse in 2007. Recent work has been shown in the St. David’s Celebration of the Arts, and at the Gandee Gallery in Fabius, New York.
Tom Moran’s books include Fantasy by the Sea, The Photo Essay, and A Family in Mexico. He began teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1995, where he is currently a professor in the Center for Multidisciplinary Studies.
Laura Moriarty is a self-taught artist whose work has been featured in twelve solo exhibitions, including UPHEAVAL, at Artspace, New Haven (2009), as well as group exhibitions throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Laura has recently received two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and was selected for NYFA MARK 09. She lives and works in Rosendale, New York.
Jim Morris is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Among his awards have been a summer Fulbright to Malaysia and Singapore, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, and an NEA Mid-Atlantic Fellowship. He lives in Batavia, New York.
Harryette Mullen, currently at UCLA, was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester. Her book Sleeping with the Dictionary was a National Book Award finalist. In 2010, she received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University.
Yvonne C. Murphy grew up in and around the small farming communities surrounding the Finger Lakes. She currently teaches at SUNY Empire State College in Long Island, and will be returning to live in the Central New York area in 2011.
Rebecca Murtaugh’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the country. She has been published in The New York Times, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, ArtWeek, Artworld Digest, Metro UK and Shamenet Magazine, and is currently associate professor and chair of the Art Department at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
David Musselwhite is a recent graduate of Cornell University, where he has studied contemporary poetry with Alice Fulton. His work has previously been published in The Write Room. He is currently teaching social studies in Detroit, Michigan, through the Teach for America program.
Kathy O'Connell is the director of Radiant Abilities, LLC, which is committed to helping people with disabilities live life more fully.Her contribution to SC 5, “Firewalk,” is a chapter from a book she is working on called Firewalk: Embracing Different Abilities.
Claire Olsen is an assistant professor in the Syracuse University School of Architecture, whose current work focuses on installation design. She has had award-winning exhibitions in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, and Graz, Austria, and has managed multimillion dollar projects in Los Angeles.
Valerie Patterson teaches art in Saranac Lake and lives in Malone, New York. Her award-winning paintings have been exhibited extensively across the United States in both solo and group exhibitions.
Mike Petrik is a native Central New Yorker who is now pursuing his Ph.D. in fiction writing at the University of Missouri. His literary interests include the creation, continuation, and alteration of the American myth through creative writing, as well as the pathology of communities in isolation.
Kendall R. Phillips is associate dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Controversial Cinema: The Films that Outraged America (2008) and Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (2005). He also hosts “Classic Movie Night” weekly on PBS affiliate WCNY-TV.
Margarita E. Pignataro is a second-year visiting assistant professor at Syracuse University. She is a U.S. Latina of Chilean descent.
Lin Price has taught painting and drawing at Ithaca College since 1995. Her exhibition highlights include the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute/Museum, the H.F. Johnson Museum of Art/Cornell University, the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in New York.
Bob Proehl was born just outside of Buffalo, New York and went to college in Geneseo. After that he strayed from Upstate New York for a bit, before ending up in Ithaca, New York, where he now lives with his wife and stepson. His first book, The Gilded Palace of Sin, was published in 2008.
Emily Pulfer-Terino was born and raised in Syracuse. She recently earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, and now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches English at a boarding school for girls.
Ishmael Reed is a novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, publisher, and composer whose many awards and prizes include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award. A native of Buffalo, he currently lives in Oakland, California, after teaching for 35 years at Berkeley. He is a founder of the Before Columbus Foundation and publishes the online magazine Konch.
Melissa Reider’s first story was published in the newspaper when she was in third grade, and she has been writing ever since. “Central New York—its gritty gravel roads, its blinding snowstorms, its unapologetic ‘ruralness’—has always been my situating place.”
Nicholas Rivers is a veteran and an aspiring novelist, essayist, and poet. “Black Life” is his first published poem.
Kristian Rodriguez was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised there in a Puerto Rican household. He recently graduated from Syracuse University with a B.F.A. in drama. He was recently appointed an SU Engagement Fellow and holds a position as an artistic associate at the Redhouse Arts Center.
Susan Fox Rogers teaches at Bard College and is the editor of eleven book anthologies, including Antarctica: Life on the Ice, which won a silver medal from the Society of American TravelWriters. “Swimming the River” is part of a larger work titled My Reach:Love and Loss on the Hudson River, soon to be published by Cornell University Press.
David A. Ross pioneered the serious consideration of video as art as the first museum curator of video at the Everson Museum. He is former director of New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and has been a leader in the Artist Pension Trust.
Kate Rushin is the author of The Black Back-Ups, a graduate Fellow of Cave Canem Foundation, and a creative writing teacher at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. Recipient of the Rose Low Rome Memorial Poetry Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize, she is widely anthologized and has been published in many journals.
Shane Ryan is a native of Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks who settled in Brooklyn after graduating from Duke University. He recently received a Roy H. Park Fellowship from the University of North Carolina, and is currently attending their M.A. in journalism program. His work has previously been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Ghost Magazine.
George Saunders teaches in the Syracuse University creative writing program. He is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and In Persuasion Nation. In 2006, Saunders won both a MacArthur Foundation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Lynn Schwarzer lives with her family in rural Madison County, New York, working as an artist and teaching printmaking and drawing at Colgate University. The state of the globe is addressed in her work—politically, economically, and environmentally—as is the state of her domestic sphere.
Amos Scully is an associate professor teaching 3D Design and Industrial Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. He makes objects and installations both individually and collaboratively with his wife, Stephanie Ashenfelder. Recent work invites physical forces to play out with elements of installations that may degrade, become contaminated, or simply end in disarray.
Carlton Semple is a junior at Nottingham High School who loves to sing, perform in musicals, and breakdance, in addition to writing poetry. The poem selected here is his attempt to break away from writing about “love,” which is a topic he and his friends always write about.
Mary McLaughlin Slechta is a poet and fiction writer and author of a poetry collection, Wreckage on a Watery Moon. She has slowly felt the Syracuse area—“its history, beauty, ugly, all—become part of the me who moved from rural Connecticut to attend grad school and never returned. I’m seriously at home here.”
Amber Christine Snider worked as a poetry instructor for the Poetry Outreach Program in New York City’s public schools. After winning several writing awards, she relocated to Syracuse to work on her writing full time. She has published two chapbooks, and is planning to enroll in a Ph.D. program for English literature.
Matthew J. Spireng lives in Lomontville in Ulster County. His book Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and his book What Focus Is is due in 2011 from Word Press. Clear Cut, a limited edition chapbook of poems with photographs by Austin Stracke, is forthcoming from Hampden-Sydney College.
Sylvia Steen is a self-taught artist, born and raised in Upstate New York. She is interested in painting images of early modern women, using body language and facial expression as a means of communication. Her work has appeared in numerous juried competitions in and around the Upstate region.
Amy Swartele has had recent solo shows in Binghamton and Montreal, and group shows in Brooklyn, New Rochelle, and Albany, New York. Upcoming exhibits include a two-person show in Belgium. She is an Upstate New York resident, but her work is strongly influenced by her international upbringing.
Linn Underhill lives in Upstate New York and teaches photography at Colgate University. The series “No Man’s Land” is a riff on the portraits by the gay photographer George Platt Lynes, taken of famous men in the arts in the 1930s-1950s.
Lou Ventura was born and raised in Geneva, New York, and attended St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York, where he now lives. His poems are often grounded, to some degree, in Upstate New York experience.
Bill Viola is an internationally recognized artist. For over 35 years his works have included videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. He focuses on universal human experiences [with roots in both Eastern and Western art and spiritual traditions]. He was a 2010 recipient of the George Arents Award, the highest honor given Syracuse University alumni.
Jackie Warren-Moore is an internationally published poet. She is a born and bred Syracusan who makes her living as a freelance writer. She appears most recently in the new anthology The 100* Best African American Poems (*But I Cheated), edited by Nikki Giovanni.
Kheli R.Willetts teaches African American art history and film in Syracuse University’s Department of African American Studies, and is executive director of the Community Folk Art Center. She writes about diasporic arts, art of the Black Power Movement, arts education and access, museum studies, and representations of blackness.
Marion Wilson is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Syracuse and New York City. Her work has been displayed in major venues throughout the country, such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), and SPACES (Cleveland). Her work for this issue was on display in the Building Show at Exit Art in New York.
Amanda Wojick is sculpture program head at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, after prior stints at Colgate and Alfred Universities in New York State. She has exhibited widely throughout the U.S., and was among the Artforum Critics’ Picks in 2008.
Matthew Works, an activist, writer, and performance artist who has been living homeless on the streets of Boston for fifteen years, devotes his artistic energies to educating the public about the plight of homeless people and overcoming stereotypes associated with them.
Tricia Wright moved from London to New York in 1999. She works out of her studio in Dobbs Ferry, and exhibits regularly in New York City and throughout the larger New York area. In 2009, she was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts MARK Program. Exhibitions in 2010 included solo, two-person, and group shows in Chelsea, Kingston, Hudson, Corning, and Buffalo.
Arjan Zazueta is a Mexican American artist currently living with his family in Syracuse.He received his B.F.A. in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and his
M.F.A. from Syracuse University. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
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