Aurora de Armendi is an interdisciplinary artist. She is currently an Assistant Professor of art at SUNY New Paltz. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY(BFA, 2005) and The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (MFA, 2009). She was selected to be part of the program Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of Art during 2012-13 and she was awarded a full year residency from the Center for Book Arts, New York in 2013. In 2016, she completed artist residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Colorado) and Jamaica Flux (Queens), and was a finalist for the Cintas Foundation Fellowship showing her work at the MDCC Museum at the Freedom Tower in Miami. She was born in Havana, Cuba and currently lives in NYC.
National Book Award winner and Pulitzer prize nominated poet Cornelius Eady has set his poetry to song with the Cornelius Eady Trio. Eady’s songs tell the story of passing time, the Black American experience and the blues in the style of Folk & Americana music. Guitarists Charlie Rauh & Lisa Liu join Eady to create layered and graceful arrangements to bolster Eady’s adept craftsmanship as a songwriter, lyricist, & poet. https://corneliuseadytrio.com/home
Jenna Hamed is an art worker, writer and photographer based in Queens. Hamed obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Apparel, Textiles and Merchandising from Eastern Michigan University, and a Master’s Degree in Arts Politics from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently Programs Manager at the Center for Book Arts where she regularly collaborates with artists, poets, curators, and researchers on developing experimental creation and narration of the book as an art object. With a fascination for documentation and archiving methodology, Hamed uses poetics and photographic practices for extracting the mysticisms found in the everyday, and for capturing enigmatic contradictions to preserve the essence of transient occurrences. Her text- and image-based works can be found in several online and print publications, as well as in her e-zine publications, which she sends out to subscribers on a monthly basis.
Faride Mereb is a Venezuelan artist, award-winning book designer, teacher, researcher, and founder of publishing house Ediciones Letra Muerta. She currently lives in NYC with her husband, where she teaches and designs. Mereb is a visiting scholar at Columbia University exploring North and South Americas’ hybridity through its printing and book history. She has exhibited at CBA and is currently co-curating a show at the Washington Project for the Arts.
Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Erika Morillo is a freelance artist and educator based in New York City. She studied clinical psychology and sociology, which influenced her to photograph as a way to understand her family dynamics and the social environment she inhabits. Her work focuses on the issues of family, the finding of identity, and exploring the photobook as art object. Her photographs have been published and exhibited nationally and internationally and her photobooks are in the collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art Library and The International Center of Photography Library. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Image Text Ithaca.
Alicia Ostriker, a poet and critic, has published sixteen volumes of poetry, including Waiting for the Light (2017), which received the National Jewish Book Award, The Book of Seventy, which received that award in 2009, The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014), The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; and No Heaven (2005). Her 1980 feminist classic and anti-war poem sequence, The Mother/Child Papers, was recently reprinted by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The Volcano Sequence, a volume of spiritual quest and questioning, wrestles with Jewish traditions. Twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award for The Imaginary Lover, Ostriker is known for her intelligence and passionate appraisal of women’s place in literature, and for investigating themes of family and sexuality, politics, religion, Jewish identity, and celebration of city life. Ostriker’s poetry is at once moving and new, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and also opens the heart and mind again. Or, as Joan Larkin puts it, “In a voice absolutely her own—wild, earthy, irreverent, full of humor and surprise—Ostriker takes on nothing less than what it feels like to be alive.” https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/alicia-ostriker/
Peter Vanderberg is the founding editor of Ghostbird Press. He served in the US Navy from 1999–2003, received an MFA in Poetry from CUNY Queens College, and is currently pursuing a Ph. D in English at St. John’s University, NY. His work has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Modern Haiku, and CURA, and his chapbook Crossing Pleasant Lake is available from Red Bird Press. He lives on Long Island with his wife and four children.
Matvei Yankelevich’s books include the long poem Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt, the poetry collection Alpha Donut, and the novella in fragments Boris by the Sea. He is the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms and co-translator (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of the National Translation Award-winning An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities. He is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and has curated UDP’s Eastern European Poets Series since 2002. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and is a member of the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. https://uglyducklingpresse.org/contributors/matvei-yankelevich/
