the blueshift journal

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

 

Stephanie Bryant Anderson is author of Monozygotic | Codependent (The Blue Hour Press 2015). Recent of forthcoming publications include Vinyl, burntdistrict, Iodine and Rogue Agent. Besides poetry she enjoys kickboxing and math. Stephanie is founder of Red Paint Hill Publishing.

 

Emma Bolden is the author Maleficae (GenPop Books), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and five chapbooks. She won the 2014 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast Magazine and the Spoon River Poetry Review’s 2014 Editor’s Prize Contest. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Conduit, theIndiana Review, Harpur Palate, the Greensboro Review, Redivider, Verse, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Guernica, and Copper Nickel, and was chosen for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2015 and Best American Poetry 2015. You can find out more at EmmaBolden.com.

 

Brendon Burton is a 21 year old visual artist currently located in New York City. His work portrays mysterious subjects in unique locations throughout the West Coast. 

 

Emari DiGiorgio is a recipient of two Vermont Studio Center Residencies, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and the Ellen LaForge Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including DIAGRAM, Mead, Poetry International, Smartish Pace, and Verse. She teaches writing at Stockton University and is a visiting Poet-in-the-Schools through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Dodge Foundation. 

 

Katy Ilonka Gero is an engineer living and working in Boston, MA. She likes to build things that sit at the intersection between art and science. Her favorite building blocks are words, though more physical mediums are fun too.

 

Jennifer Givhan is an NEA fellow in poetry. A Mexican-American poet who grew up in the Imperial Valley, a small, border community in the Southern California desert, she was a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow, The Pinch Poetry Prize winner, the DASH Literary Journal poetry first-prize winner, the 2015 Blue Mesa Review poetry second-prize winner, an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, her Master’s from Cal State Fullerton, and her work has appeared in over eighty journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, The Collagist, and The Columbia Review. She teaches online at Western New Mexico University and The Rooster Moans Poetry Coop. You can visit Givhan at jennifergivhan.com.

 

Camilla Guo is an incoming junior at Phillips Academy Andover.

 

Matthew Graham is a professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana and is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, A Word Without End from River City Publishing.

 

Jacob Guajardo is currently located in Gainesville, Florida. His fiction has appeared in print and online at Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Midwestern Gothic, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. He is an aspiring harpist and a Tori Amos enthusiast. 

 

Eirik Gumeny is the author of the flash chapbooks Boy Meets Girl (Kattywompus Press) and Storybook Romance (Red Bird Chapbooks). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, their dog, and his new lungs. His website is egumeny.com.

 

Sonja Johanson graduated from College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, ME., and currently serves as the Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator for the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association.   She has recent work appearing in The Albatross, Redheaded Stepchild, and Off the Coast, is a contributing editor at the Found Poetry Review, and is the 2015 recipient of the Zero Bone and Kudzu Poetry Prizes.  Sonja has three chapbooks forthcoming in 2015:  “Trees in Our Dooryards” from Red Bird Press, “Impossible Dovetail” from Silver Birch Press, and “all those ragged scars” from Choose the Sword Press.  Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.

 

Shana Joseph is a sophomore in college and a freelance photographer. She is currently a sophomore in college and has been taking photos throughout my life since she’s been a ki, but she started pursuing it as a hobby in 9th grade.  She mainly takes portrait photos and dance photos. When she’s not in classes you can most likely find her capturing shots throughout. She enjoys traveling and capturing numerous shots of the world and the people around us. She aspires for every photo to be different from the last and experiments with many styles.

 

Elisa Karbin’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, RHINO, West Branch and Blackbird, amongst others. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and fiction editor for cream city review.

 

Dee Lalley is a recent graduate of the MFA program at NC State. She was a finalist in the 2014 NC Poetry competition and won an Academy of American Poets Prize in 1992. She currently works in a corporate job, but continues to write and teach poetry in her spare time.  This would be her first publication.

 

Kathryn Merwin is a native of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barely South Review, burntdistrict, Wayne Literary Review, and Jabberwock Review, among others. She is the winner of Jabberwock Review's 2015 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize for Poetry.

 

Courtney Kenny Porto has been featured in numerous publications, anthologies, blogs and television interviews. Most recently, she was featured as Maxim Feminine Hygiene’s “Fierce Woman”. She has been an art instructor with WhyArts and “Artists in Our Community” through Omaha Creative Institute.  She is also an Artist INC fellow. She was recently selected to be included in the FBAlous Project Banner display in Omaha and will be featured in the upcoming addition of Omaha Magazine.

 

Lauralee Sikorski is a Connecticut born award winning artist currently living in the Midwest. After Art showings in Chicago, Northwest Indiana, and Michigan she traveled to London where she was Juried into a Raw Arts Exhibition at the Candid Arts Center. Here her artwork was purchased into a private collection. She continued to show abroad in another Juried exhibition in Berlin and continued showing through out the U.S. Along with being published in National Arts and Literary Journals, earlier this year her art work was featured for the second time as a Cover for Branches Magazine now celebrating 25 years in Print! Influences: In 2004 she received her teaching certification for Hatha Yoga and has continued her training with multiple certifications including Meditation and integrates these Eastern Disciplines with the creation of art work.

 

Julia Stumbaugh is a freshman at the College of William & Mary, where she plans to specialize in International Relations, mainly because it involves no calculus. She writes about her existential crises in-between rereading Tim O'Brien's books and writing her own.

 

Claire Wahmanholm’s work most recently appears in or is forthcoming from Memorious, Unsplendid, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Waxwing, Sugared Water, and The Cincinnati Review, and has been featured on Verse Daily. She is a PhD student at the University of Utah, where she is the co-editor of Quarterly West.

 

Lucy Wainger's poems have appeared/will appear in The James Franco Review, Textploit, Black & BLUE, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She has attended summer writing workshops at UVa and the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, and in the fall, she will be a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City.

 

Bill Wolak is a poet, photographer, and collage artist. His collages have been published in The Annual, Peculiar Mormyrid, Danse Macabre, Dirty Chai, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Lost Coast Review, Yellow Chair Review, Otis Nebula, and Horror Sleaze Trash. He has just published his twelfth book of poetry entitled Love Opens the Hands with Nirala Press. Recently, he was a featured poet at The Hyderabad Literary Festival. Mr. Wolak teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

 

Alan Wor’s work (real name Ryan Row) has been previously published, or is forthcoming, in 94 Creations, Writings on the Wall, The Kokanee, Danse Macabre, and elsewhere. He lives in Berkeley CA and is currently studying Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Alan Wor is the broken down superhero who lives inside him.