the blueshift journal

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

 

 

Brianna Albers is a poet, writer, and storyteller, located in the Minneapolis suburbs. A student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is currently studying psychology and the philosophy of literature. She was named one of the 30 up-and-coming writers under 30 by Phosphene Literary Journal. While her work can be found in Guernica, Word Riot, and Winter Tangerine Review, among others, she is currently compiling a collection of her poetry; her début chapbook, Why I’m Not Where You Are, was a finalist in Where Are You Press' “Where Are You Poet” contest, and is forthcoming in 2016. She can be found at briannahopealbers.com, and can be contacted at briannahopealbers@gmail.com.

 

Sammi Bryan is originally from South Carolina though she considers many places home. She currently lives in Tuscaloosa where she is an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Alabama and an assistant editor for Black Warrior Review. Her work also appears in Potluck Magazine. How to sail, pick a lock, and keep a cactus alive are some of the many things she's learned and since forgotten.

 

Queens, NYC native Audrey T. Carroll is an MFA candidate with the Arkansas Writer's Program and graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University. Her obsessions include kittens, coffee, Supernatural, Buffy, and the Rooster Teeth community. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Hermeneutic Chaos, So to Speak, Feminine Inquiry, the A3 Review, and others. She can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.

 

Acronym is a sophomore and English major. They grew up in Morristown, NJ.

 

Lenny DellaRocca has poems in Poet Lore, Fairy Tale Review, 2River View, Albatross, Seattle Review and Nimrod. He has work forthcoming in Chiron Review, The Potomac: A Journal of Politics and Poetry, Blue Fifth Review and Quail Bell Magazine. His chapbook, The Sleep Talker, is published by NightBallet Press.

 

Anthony Frame is an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, where he lives with his wife. He is the author of one book, A Generation of Insomniacs (Main Street Rag Press, 2014) and three chapbooks, most recently: To Gain the Day (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015). He reviews books and chapbooks of poetry for Weave Magazine and he is the poetry editor at The Indianola Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Rattle, Third Coast, Harpur Palate, The North American Review, Milk Journal and Verse Daily, among others. In 2014, he was awarded an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council. His website is www.anthony-frame.com.

 

Farah Ghafoor is a fifteen year old poet and a co-founder/editor at Sugar Rascals. She lives in Canada where she enjoys smelling perfume samples and thinks she deserves a cat. Her work is published or forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, alien mouth, Really System, Moonsick and elsewhere.

 

Judy Hall is a writer and itinerant teacher of writing who has lived in such far flung places as Iceland, Sudan, Germany and New Jersey. Her MFA is from William Paterson University. She has been published in Brevity, Split Lip Magazine, The Huffington Post and many other places. Judy is also a fiction reader for Literary Orphans. Her as yet unpublished novel, Max Runs, was long-listed in the Mslexia Competition. You can read most of her recently published work at www.voluptuousmermaid.com.

 

I.S. Jones is an American-Nigerian poet located in New York City by way of California. She left all the California Sun behind in pursuit of poetry and the performance arts as a profession and life source. She is currently a TWH (The Watering Hole) fellow, holds an honorable mention from the Academy of American Poets, winner of the "Power Poetry" scholarship, and is a graduate student at Hofstra University. As a performance poet, I.S. uses the stage as a temple, a place of healing, to illuminate critical issues of race, gender, class, and overall societal disadvantages. When ask "What propels you to write and perform", she states, "I write because it is far too painful to sit in my silence"  I.S. is a poet who is Black and loud about it while providing her audience poems that entertain and humble. She is currently co-editor at Chaparral, a online literary magazine. She is editor-in chief-of Upcoming Hip-Hop, a blog which spotlights and works with emerging hip-hop artists as co-host of a podcast The Encore Radio Show.

 

Noah Jung is a writer stationed in Hawaii. His most recent works are/will be published in Hobart, Winter Tangerine Review, and textploit, and have been recognized by Sierra Nevada College, Hollins University, the Boston Globe, and The Massachusetts Poetry Festival. He also firmly believes in the magic of Princess Tutu, and wants to ask if you will dance with him. 

 

Cynthia Lee is a student currently studying at NYU, majoring in photography. She grew up in California, Bellevue, Beijing and Taiwan. Previously, she had her photos published in Blueshift Journal as well as some school or local magazines. In December of 2014, she had her very first solo exhibition at a clinic in Taipei. She had begun taking photos since a very young age but started taking photography seriously in her freshman year of high school. 

 

Mia Leonin is the author of two poetry collections, Braid and Unraveling the Bed, (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). In 2016, a new poetry collection, Chance Born will be published by Anhinga Press. A fourth collection of poetry, Fable of the Paddle Sack Child will be published by BkMk Press in 2017. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

 

Sandra Meek is the author of five books of poems. An Ecology of Elsewhere, forthcoming from Persea May 2, 2016, has been named a "Top Poetry Pick" for spring 2016 by Library Journal; her other books include Road Scatter (Persea Books, 2012), the Dorset Prize-winning Biogeography (Tupelo 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002). She also edited an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), which was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Recipient of an NEA fellowship, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry (Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991), and two Georgia Author of the Year awards, Meek is director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, poetry editor for Phi Kappa Phi Forum, co-founding editor of Ninebark Press, and Dana Professor of English at Berry College.

 

Momina Mela is a Pakistani poet based in Lahore. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Lighthouse Journal and Cake, amongst others. She currently serves as the poetry editor for Papercuts Magazine. 

 

Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013).  Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, The Believer, Georgia Review, and Blackbird, and her creative nonfiction won the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose and has appeared on the Michigan Quarterly Review blog. She is editor-in-chief of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought and an Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. 

 

Jenny Molberg's debut collection, Marvels of the Invisible, won the 2014 Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, North American Review, Copper Nickel, The New Guard, Mississippi Review, Third Coast, Best New Poets and other publications. Molberg holds an MFA from American University and a PhD from the University of North Texas. She currently teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is poetry editor for Pleiades. Find her online at jennymolberg.com. 

 

Gabrielle (Gabe) Montesanti is a recent graduate of Kalamazoo College, where she studied studio art and mathematics. As an undergraduate, she spent a term in New York City working for visual artists and completed her senior thesis in Rome. Currently she lives with her girlfriend in Bowling Green, Ohio, and she will begin an MFA program in creative nonfiction in the fall. 

 

Kelly Nelson is the author of the chapbooks Rivers I Don’t Live By (Concrete Wolf, 2014) and Who Was I to Say I Was Alive (Minerva Rising, 2015). Recent work has appeared in RHINO, Quarter After Eight, Prime Number and Another Chicago Magazine. She hasn’t owned a car since 1999 and teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University. Find more at www.kelly-nelson.com.

 

Emily O’Neill was born on the bedroom floor in her mother’s childhood home and has been making loud messes ever since. Her first collection, Pelican, won YesYes Books' inaugural Pamet River Prize and her recent work has been featured in Cutbank, The Journal, Minnesota Review, Redivider, and Washington Square, among many others. She has a degree in the synaesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College and, when not selling sushi and sake bombs at a rock 'n' roll izakaya in the Fenway, teaches writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education.

 

Frani O'Toole is a freshman at Yale University. She has work featured in Polyphony H.S. and The Adroit Journal, and she has been recognized by the National YoungArts and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
 

Ania Payne lives in the Northwoods of Michigan where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Nonfiction. She has or will be published in The Rumpus, Whiskey Island, Foliate Oak, Third Point Press, Perspectives, The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Milk Journal, and more.

 

Julian Randall is a Living Black poet from Chicago. A 2016 Callaloo fellow and two time national college slam competitor, he traveled to the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) earning the title of Best Poet. He currently works as a teaching artist with the Philly Youth Poetry Movement. His work has appeared in Winter Tangerine Review, The Killens Review, and Pluck! A Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. 

 

Nicole Rollender’s work has (or will shortly) appeared in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Memorious, Muzzle Magazine, The Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Louder Than Everything You Love is her first full-length poetry collection (ELJ Publications). She’s the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications, 2007), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio, 2015), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She has received poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal. Visit her online at www.nicolerollender.com.

 

Torrey Smith is a freelance writer, an editor at Cogitate Studios, and an assistant at Spark Wheel Press. She received her B.A. in History and Writing, from Gonzaga University.  A poet, writer, and editor, she was the 2014 winner of the Michael and Gail Gurian Writing Award in the category of poetry. Her poetry has been published in Heavy Edit, Toothtaker, and Reflection Journal. Her paper “The Rabbit Inside: Psychoanalysis in Donnie Darko,” was chosen for presentation at the 2014 Spokane Intercollegiate Research Conference. She completed her M.A. in the Critical Theory and Creative Research Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon in 2015.  Her thesis, "Quote Culture and the Community of Mind: Towards a Critique of the Quippie," focuses on specific modes of idealism and elitism in digital language use, in particular, the appropriation of quotations within social media as identity markers, belief signatures, and formulaic acts, and was chosen for presentation at the 2016 OCADU Conference in Toronto.  Torrey currently lives in Omaha, NE.

 

Jordan Thompkins is a nineteen-year-old photographer attending Georgia State University for a degree in Marketing. He received first place in the color category for Shutter Sense’s Photography competition and recognition by a local police department for a "No Texting and Driving" ad campaign. You can find more of his work on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/87594069@N08/) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jordant.photography/ ).

 

David Uzochukwu is an Austro-Nigerian visual artist based in Brussels, Belgium. 

 

Greta Wilensky a seventeen year old writer from Lowell, MA. She was the 2015 runner-up in prose for the first annual Winter Tangerine Review Prizes and a 2015 YoungArts winner in short story. Her work has been published in the Best Teen Writing Anthology of 2015 and Souvenir Lit Journal, and is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, the James Franco Review, and Bartleby Snopes. Her work has been displayed at MoMA PS1 in NYC and in the Department of Education building in Washington, D.C.