Artist Bios – August 2015
Elena Berriolo is a New York-based artist who has created many sculptures and installations. Since 2009 she made a commitment of working exclusively in the book format and performing while producing books. See her work at http://elenaberriolo.com.
Apala Bhowmick is a student of English literature. Her work has appeared in 3Elements Review, and she has coedited two poetry collections brought out by her college. She likes having long, meandering conversations of a deeply philosophical nature with potted plants and cats. She lives in Delhi, India.
Ann Bracken is a writer, educator, and expressive arts consultant whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Pif Magazine, Scribble, New Verse News, and Praxilla. Ann Bracken was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and leads workshops at creativity conferences, including The Creative Problem Solving Institute, Florida Creativity, and Mindcamp of Toronto. Educated at Towson University (’74 BA in Speech Pathology and Audiology) and Johns Hopkins University (M.S.Ed. in Communication and Learning Disorders ’79), Bracken’s work during the past forty years has focused on giving women and children a voice. Her post-graduate work in drama in education from Dublin’s Trinity College, journal instruction training from The Center for Journal Therapy and poetry therapy training from The National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy all make their way into her classrooms and workshops, making them creative and memorable learning environments. Learn more about Ann’s work at http://www.annbrackenauthor.com.
Cindy Brown is a waitress, freelance writer, and graduate student based out of Baltimore, MD, who focuses her craft on the ordinary and its relationship to the extraordinary. She lives a simple, peaceful, and active life, and enjoys hiking, kayaking on mountain lakes, traveling, golfing, playing the mandolin, and praying.
Melissa Penley Cormier is a Maryland-based painter and photographer, originally from Appalachia. In 2005, she received a BFA from Radford University (Radford, Virginia) and currently is pursuing an MFA at UMBC. While experimenting with various media, her work reflects on ideas and aesthetics of deterioration and preservation.
S.J. Crane is from Coronado Island, where she spends summers hiding from tourists. She is a contributing writer for the A Room of Her Own writer’s retreat, and is grateful it occurs in August. She’s published in multiple medical journals, literary journals such as Three Line Poetry and The Beechwood Review, and has forthcoming publications in Pideonholes and Unbroken.
Morgan Downie is a visual artist who also writes short stories and poetry. He is a keen collaborationist and cross disciplinary practitioner and this underpins many of the themes of translocation in his practice. His published work includes stone and sea and distances, a Romanian- English photopoetry collection. See more of his work at http://morgandownie.com.
David Eberhardt has published three books of poetry: The Tree Calendar, Blue Running Lights, and Poems from the Website, Poetry in Baltimore. He is at work on a memoir: For All the Saints. As a peace protester, Dave was incarcerated at Lewisburg Federal Prison in 1970 for 21 months for pouring blood on draft files with Father Philip Berrigan and two others to protest the Vietnam War. He is retired after 33 years of work as a Director of Offender Aid and Restoration at the Baltimore City Jail.
Beatriz F. Fernandez is the author of Shining from a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press, 2015). She has read her poetry on WLRN, South Florida’s NPR news station and was the grand prize winner of the 2nd Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry award. Her poems have appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Falling Star Magazine (2014 Pushcart Nomination), Label Me Latina/o, Verse Wisconsin, and Writer’s Digest, among others. She will be presenting her chapbook at the Miami Book Fair International later this year. Contact her at www.beasbooks.blogspot.com or @nebula61.
Musician, producer, songwriter, photographer and poet, George Hagegeorge has credits on dozens of music releases as producer, remixer, musician and composer. His photojournalism has been published in newspapers throughout Maryland including the Baltimore Sun, The Baltimore Examiner, and the Washington Post. George’s poetry is an extension of his lyric writing.
Mary Huddleston lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for more than 30 years and recently moved to northern Baltimore County to be closer to her family. Although she usually paints from nature, she is experimenting with new materials and concepts.
Janet Little Jeffers is a Maryland-based artist and photographer working from a studio in the historic Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore. Much of her work explores intimate and often abstracted details in two seemingly disparate subjects: nature, and abandoned manmade subjects such as vehicles or buildings left to decay. Among her most recent projects are works from her travels to Cuba and the polar regions, and her installation “Thaw,” a 27-foot wide window mural, is on display at the studios of WTMD radio in Towson, MD.
Mary Jesionowski‘s work can be found at https://mcjart.wordpress.com/.
Leslie F. Miller is the author of Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour, Sugar, Butter, Eggs, Vanilla, Baking Powder, and a Pinch of Salt (nonfiction, Simon & Schuster, 2009) and BOYGIRLBOYGIRL (poetry, Finishing Line Press, July 2012). She likes to break things and put them back together in a random, yet tasteful, order. She is a writer, photographer, and mosaic artist.
Catherine Moore’s writing has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review and in various anthologies. She won the 2014 Gearhart Poetry Prize and has work selected for “The Best Small Fictions of 2015.” Her collection Story is available with Finishing Line Press. Catherine lives in the Nashville area where she enjoys a thriving arts and writing community. She has a Masters of Fine Arts degree. She is tweetable @CatPoetic.
Born in Selma, Alabama and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Andrea Noel is now a resident of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area. Andrea is a self‐taught artist who has been perfecting her craft over the last 15 years. Andrea wants her art to be a vehicle for others to connect with God, self, and creation. Her life’s goal is to listen for inspiration, envision beauty, and make affordable art. Andrea’s artwork illustrates anywhere from one to three main images and relates a specific theme. Once the main images are in place, she weaves intricate patterns around them. The final step to her artwork involves strategically applying vibrant colors in ways that slightly hides the main images, while still allowing the main images to come to life. Andrea is always surprised by what people see in her work and the meaning they attribute them. In 2013, Andrea started Listen Vision Gallery, a virtual art gallery that offers Giclée reprints of her artwork, www.listenvisiongallery.com. Andrea hopes to grow Listen Vision Gallery into a brand that connects people with affordable art, captures life in all its energetic colors, and inspires others to create what gives them joy.
Barbara Ruth is a 69-year-old published memoirist, poet, essayist, and fiction writer, as well as photographer. She has co-conspired with DYKETACTICS!, made theater with Wry Crips Disabled Women’s Theater Project and has been searching for other opportunities to collaborate with others on political and/or artistic projects. And then she found The Light Ekphrastic! Her memoirs, and poems can be found in the following 2015 anthologies: Stories Of Our Lives: Women and Health; QDA: Queer Disability Anthology, and Slim Volume: This Body I Live Inside. She lives in San Jose, CA.
Laura Smith: I began painting in 2011 as part of an on-going dialogue with my dreams and with the support of a dreamwork practitioner who was helping me move through some intense trauma work. Prior to this, I had no experience with this type of creativity. The dream has become my muse, carrying the full breadth of my felt experience: pain, love, grief, joy, anger, and fear. I work mainly with oil paints, often completing each piece in one sitting. The images are specific and mainly figurative, representational of a moment from a dream. Through this active and colorful exploration of the dream, I seek to express my deepest self, engage the felt experience of the viewer, and bring them into the dream with me. Laura is an Archetypal Dreamwork Practitioner, working with clients nationally and internationally. She lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with her partner of 17 years raising heritage breed livestock on their 78 acre farm. When she’s not wrangling sheep, you can find her painting or writing in her studio, connecting to the healing energy of the earth, or engaged in laughter and general mayhem with her friends and family on various parts of the globe. She regularly blogs about her journey through dreams on the dream blog In Search of Puella and her art work has been has been featured at venues in the Burlington, Vermont area and published in deLuge (2011, 2012), in Collective Magazine (2014), in Still Point Arts Quarterly (2014), and in ARAS, The Poetry Portal (2014). Find out more about Archetypal Dreamwork with Laura Smith on her website www.archetypaldreamworks.com.
Adel Souto‘s work can be found at http://www.adelsouto.com.
Prasanna Surakanti is an engineer interested in literature. Her previous work has appeared in Terracotta Typewriter, Ignite, The motion in Motive chapbook, Di Mezzo Il Mare, Caterpillar Chronicles, Playground literary journal, Orion Headless, Urban Confustions, Magic Cat Press, The Applicant, Wordland, The Stone Hobo, The BluePrint Review, Spillway, Skive, Cahoodaloodaling, Something’s Brewing Anthology, Imitation & Allusion.
