Contributor Bios – August 2023
Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections, The Altar of Innocence, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, Once You’re Inside: Poetry Exploring Incarceration, and a memoir entitled Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Recovery. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland, and she’s a frequent contributor to Mad in America’s family section. She volunteers as a correspondent for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, her work has been featured on Best American Poetry, and she’s been a guest on Grace Cavalieri’s “The Poet and The Poem” radio show. Her advocacy work promotes using the arts to foster paradigm change in the areas of emotional wellness, education, and prison abolition.
Teresa Duggan is a Baltimore city photographer and artist at large. Found humor, ephemeral scenes and street surprises are #1 these days, but anything’s possible. See more photos in her Baker Artist Portfolio, or Instagram.
Jo Fields is a fine art photographer based in Nashville, Tennessee. Although her career was in healthcare information systems, Jo’s first love was the expressive interpretation of music as a flutist. Photography has gradually taken over as the primary passion with the colors, shapes and details in the ‘music’ of nature. Photography became a cathartic and therapeutic personal journey that is a fusion of emotional, technical, and creative processes. Her work revolves around themes of finding beauty in the ordinary, and highlighting the conflicts and interdependence of humanity and nature. Regarding Denouement: the final part of a narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved. Jo was fascinated with the story that Silver Slipstream presented and wanted to create a still life with components of the story that showed what the narrator did after her time travel experience with Sylvia. How would this change her life? She wanted to show the impact that Sylvia’s lesson taught her through the memory of the album and show a life of learning, travel, adventure, natural beauty and always having fresh flowers (and violets) on her desk. See more of Jo’s works at jofieldsphotography.com.
Craig R. Kirchner has written poetry all his life, is now retired, and thinks of poetry as hobo art. He loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Decadent Review, Gas, Ink in Thirds, Ginosko, Last Stanza, New World and The Light Ekphrastic.
Jules Miller is a poet who discusses trans life, nature, and metamorphosis in his work. He will graduate in 2024 with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is a dedicated caretaker to many shrimp and snails, and has been published in Atlantis Magazine and by the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Series, among others. His shrimp and snails are very proud of him.
CLS Sandoval, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, as well as flash and poetry pieces in several literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Magical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.
Julie Simon’s work crosses traditional boundaries. Trained in traditional film and video production, she’s gravitated away from representational reality and toward the abstract and non-linear across many media. This work uses photography much as an abstract painter would use a paintbrush. Color, shape, and movement are generated photographically and blended digitally. Where a painter might use a variety of brushes and paints to layer the canvas with texture and color, she intentionally moves and jerks the camera, capturing frames filled with movement and light. That photographed light, in motion, becomes the raw material for the finished work. Simon is much inspired by the ideas of the mid-20th century color field painters but taking their ideas of form and process and updating them with a 21st century digital twist. She blends elements from many layered photographs focusing on the photographic basics of form – light, texture and color – more than the actual content of the original images(s), to bring out the purity of medium. She’s on the faculty at the University of Baltimore and teaches classes in photography, video production, and film studies. See more of her work at juliesimondigital.com.
Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, The Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet who has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.
