Contributors

Clay AD makes and thinks collectively and individually around themes of sci-fi [feminist], illness [how it can be weaponized], holistic healing [of the collective, planetary and personal body] and ecology [the queered sort]. Born between a monsanto corn field and suburb in Indianapolis, Indiana and now based in Berlin, AD studies somatic bodywork and movement. Last spring they published their first novel, Metabolize, If Able (Monster House Press). Their forthcoming chapbook S/he wrote Shit Theory, a biographic story on teenage illness, punk and intergenerational healing will be self-published this spring. 

A four-time Pushcart Prize, five-time Best of the Net & Bettering American Poetry nominee, Lana Bella is an author of three chapbooks, Under My Dark (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2016), Adagio (Finishing Line Press, 2016), and Dear Suki: Letters (Platypus 2412 Mini Chapbook Series, 2016), has work featured in over 500 journals, Barzakh, EVENT, The Fortnightly Review, Ilanot Review, Midwest Quarterly, New Reader, Notre Dame Review, Sundress Publications & Whiskey Island, among others, and Aeolian Harp Anthology, Volume 3.

Shan Calandrillo is a tattooer and multidisciplinary artist who lives in Brooklyn.

Vilde Chaya Fenster-Ehrlich grew up in New York and migrated to the Midwest to live in small houses with lawns and gardens. She presently resides amongst the rivers, cliffs and hillsides of Pittsburgh, PA on  Haudenosaunee land, where she teaches about plants and runs a sliding scale clinic as part of the Stonefruit Community Herbalists. By night she is a fearsome systems analyst/hacker at a neuroimaging laboratory.  She carries on family tradition as a musical-theater-inclined, anti-authoritarian Jewish radical, and has been doing health justice work for ten years in her communities. Plants and body-awareness work have been critical allies to her as a trans woman, and she has been teaching, researching and facilitating discussion about herbs for trans folks and allies since 2013.

Pushcart Prize nominated for her fiction “Wash Away My Sins” Abigail George is a Port Elizabeth-based South African blogger at Goodreads, and Piker Press, essayist, playwright, poet, and writer. Her writing has appeared numerous times in print in South Africa, in various anthologies, and online in e-zines based across Africa, Australia, Asia, Canada, Europe, Ireland, and the United States. She is the writer of eight books including essays, life writing, memoir pieces, novellas, poetry and a self-published story collection. She briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg.

Lauren Giambrone is a Community Herbalist and founder of Good Fight Herb Co.,  a Hudson Valley based herbal business growing, gathering and locally  sourcing bioregional plants for making and offering plant medicines and  magic. She is also the co-founder and co-facilitator of Wild Gather : Hudson Valley School of Herbal Studies,  and is committed to teaching and offering Herbalism to her communities  from a source of passion, experience, commitment to social and environmental justice, and ever growing exploration into her ancestral  background.

Melanie Griffin is a Queer Black artist and herbalist from Virginia, who now resides in LA. She is an ardent believer and lover of plant medicine, plant magic, and healing justice. The intersection of social practice, social justice, and healing is where her heart lies. Through her experiences with chronic illness, Melanie was moved to begin studying herbalism after becoming frustrated with the limitations of allopathic/ western medicine. She began studying herbalism on her own and in formal settings over 15 years ago and is excited to keep on learnin. After drawing connections between the medical industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and systemic racism, she became impassioned about how wellness practices and mutual care can be used in the fights for liberation and abolition. As the Deputy Director of Health and Wellness at Dignity and Power Now, Melanie works to support those affected by incarceration with different healing modalities. As an artist, she uses textiles, multimedia works, writing, and performance/ritual/magic to explore ideas around home, self-care, sickness, healing, race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, liberation and our relationship to this planet. They have held workshops and shown work in different spaces including SOMArts, Human Resources, the Women’s Center for Creative Work, and LACE.

Stephanie K. Hopkins is a writer and writing coach. She is the author of the award-winning weekly column “Love Notes,” and has been published in such anthologies and journals as Painted Bride Quarterly, Blithe House Quarterly, Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women, and Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Rauxa Prize for Erotic Fiction, as well as the Bone Bouquet Experimental Writing Prize. She is currently working on a memoir about bartending in the Hamptons.

Zoë Fay-Stindt’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been published in both online and print magazines, including The Indianapolis Review (forthcoming), Gauge, The Ocotillo Review, JASPER Academic Journal, and Winter Tangerine. Most recently, she was selected as one of two writing mentees for the national Gemini Ink poetry mentorship with Barbara Ras. When she's not writing her own poetry, she works for an adult college program in Austin, TX, where she facilitates and supports community writing workshops and helps others develop their voices.

Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of the books "September," "The Endless Unbegun," and "Mary is a River." She and her daughter, Adele, live in Evanston, Illinois, where Rachel teaches Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Constantine Jones is a queer Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & currently housed in Brooklyn. He teaches creative writing at the City College of New York. His work has found a home in The PEN Poetry Series, Blood Tree Literature, Fugue, Ered Condition Zine, & has been performed at various venues across New York City. He wishes to gratefully acknowledge Francesco di Benedetto, curator of the HIV awareness project, and so it happened, for collaborating with him on the photos within.

Inam Kang is a Pakistani-born poet, student, and curator. His work can be found in Winter Tangerine, The Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other journals and anthologies. He splits his time working and living between Cleveland and Southeastern Michigan.

Antonia Estela Pérez  was born in NYC. Her connection to the urban world and culture is strong. This same love inspired her curiosity to learn the city's ecological and human history. It is through understanding of the plant's history of origin and migration that she has also been able to more fully understand herself and guide herself to a life of creative and collaborative service. Through observing the responses and shifts in the earth due to patriarchal and capitalist paradigms, Antonia centers her work in re-imagining new systems that hold foundations in land based wisdom. Antonia comes from a family of farmers and educators where plant medicine has always been used. Antonia is a certified permaculturist, sivananda yoga instructor, environmental and social justice educator, reiki practitioner, visual artist and is currently enrolled at the Arborvitae School for Traditional Herbalism  (she has studied with several herbalists and healers in the North East and in Chile).

Jessica Popeski is an Opera and Creative Writing graduate of Brandon University, where she was awarded the Silver Medal in Creative Arts for her thesis, Big Sky. Sickle Moon. Her poetry has been published internationally in Acta Victoriana, The Cadaverine, carte blanche, The Irish Literary Review, Boston Poetry, Room, Leaf Press, The Nervous Breakdown, Hart House Review, The Windsor Review, and more. She was named one of Toronto’s “exceptional up and coming writers” by Open Book, and awarded the Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre grant to study under the tutelage of the National Poet of Wales, and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in spring 2017. A recipient of multiple grants, including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, she defended her thesis for her terminal degree in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph in December 2017. She published two chapbooks with Anstruther Press: “Oratorio” and “The Wrong Place,” which is featured on the syllabus of a Bachelor of Arts English Literature program in Manitoba. She has taught Academic English, English Literature, and Creative Writing in college and university settings across Canada and the UK. Her research and writing fascinations centre on queer, intersectional ecofeminism, grandmaternal legacy, genetic inheritance, concrete and visual poetry, multimedia and ekphrastic storytelling, geographical rupture, sonic poetics, and histories of violence and voicelessness. Her operatic accolades include performances with the Brandon University Opera Ensemble, the Manitoba Opera, and the Toronto Gilbert and Sullivan Society, as well as having toured internationally with the esteemed Sheffield ladies’ choir, Cantores Novae, across Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Ireland, England, and Wales. She was raised, for the most part, in Moscow, Russia, and Sheffield, England, by her mother and grandmother, and lectured most recently on Newcastle University’s INTO faculty, before rerooting to Toronto where she is a professor on the Faculty of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College.

Jesse Rice-Evans is a Southern poet and weekend witch. Read her work in Monstering, Deaf Poets Society, The Wanderer, OCCULUM, tenderness yea, and others. Her debut full-length, The Uninhabitable, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019.

Karthik Sethuraman is an Indian-American living in San Francisco. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in sPARKLE & bLINK, Quiet Lightning, and Kestrel. Most recently, he was part of Zyzzyva and Winter Tangerine poetry workshops. Along with English language poetry, he spends time reading and translating poems from the Tamil diaspora, feeding his kitten in the early mornings, and tending to the succulents he and his girlfriend share.

Aishah Shahidah Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian incest and rape survivor. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, cultural worker, activist, and international lecturer, she produced/directed NO! The Rape Documentary and created the #LoveWITHAccountability Project. Simmons is a Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she is affiliated with the Ortner Center for Family Violence. You can follow her on twitter @afrolez, and #LoveWITHAccountability @loveaccountably.

Shomriel Sherman received an MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College and a BA in creative writing from Framingham State University. She is fascinated by individual and cultural pathology, beginning with the question of what is pathologized, what is not, and why. Cancer and many hundreds of hours of chemotherapy, as well as the ongoing adventures of neurodivergency, have encouraged her examination of what illness and health truly are, not as separate but as deeply interconnected states; the acknowledgment of our particular responsibilities to ourselves and each other as we navigate this Bodymind; the gifts of endarkenment; and the utilization of those medicines that are truly in service to wellbeing. Shomriel is grateful for all her teachers. She believes that everything is always communicating, and her prayer is for her ears to fit the shape of many tongues and her tongue to fit the shape of many ears.

Xochi Solis (b. 1981) is an Austin, TX-based mixed media artist. Her works include multilayered, collaged paintings constructed from paint, hand-dyed paper, vinyl, plastics, and images from found books and magazines. Solis considers the repeated act of layering a meditation on color, texture, and shape, all leading to a greater awareness of the visual intricacies found in her immediate environment, both natural and cultural. Solis shares her studio time between Texas and Mexico.

Ellie White holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. She writes poetry and nonfiction. She has won an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for both Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Fat, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Arcturus and many other journals. Ellie’s chapbook, Requiem for a Doll, was released by ELJ Publications in June 2015. Her first full-length collection is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2019. She is a nonfiction and poetry editor at Four Ties Literary Review, and a social media editor and reader for Muzzle Magazine. Ellie currently rents a basement in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia.

Kirstin Wu is a Taiwanese-British poet and student currently finishing her undergraduate degree in the UK. Her work has been recognised by the 2017 Adroit Prize and has appeared in Winter Tangerine and sine theta amongst others. More is forthcoming.

Sarah Sophia Yanni is a half Egyptian / half Mexican writer in Los Angeles. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook ternura / tenderness (Bottlecap Press) and is currently pursuing an MFA from the CalArts School of Critical Studies. Find her on instagram @sssaritahh