Contributor Bios – February 2023
Heather Harvey works within a traditional studio practice as well as ephemeral approaches that include a walking practice to engage with the environment and collect trash and found materials. Recently, she has been exploring new directions in itinerant practices and concepts of nomadism. Her work and teaching center around experimental, exploratory, and interdisciplinary approaches in art, with a focus on ethics and inquiry. She teaches at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland where she is an Associate Professor of Studio Art. Find her on Instagram here or online at heather-harvey.net.
Ann Iverson is a writer and artist. She is the author of five poetry collections: Come Now to the Window by the Laurel Poetry Collective, Definite Space and Art Lessons by Holy Cow! Press; Mouth of Summer and No Feeling is Final by Kelsay Books. She is a graduate of both the MALS and the MFA programs at Hamline University. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and venues including six features on Writer’s Almanac. Her poem “Plenitude” was set to a choral arrangement by composer Kurt Knecht. She is also the author and illustrator of two children’s books. As a visual artist, she enjoys the integrated relationship between the visual image and the written image. Her art work has been featured in several art exhibits as well as in a permanent installation at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital. She is currently working on her sixth collection of poetry, a book of children’s verse, and a collection of personal essays.
Kristin McWharter draws inspiration from narrative structures that emerge from competitive play. Creating software simulations, immersive media installations and performances, her work critically fuses folk games with virtual and augmented worlds. Contending with narrative structures that emerge from opposition and cooperation, she explores zero-sum, evasion and pursuit, fortune telling, or snowball effect systems through unique aesthetic frames where audiences interpret the poetics of what it means to be a “good sport”. McWharter works with digital media and performance to play with real time systems, emergent imagery, and audience behavior as artistic tools to poetically meditate on the felt consequences of game and spectacle. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center, Ars Electronica, Museo Altillo Beni, and FILE Festival among others. Find her online at kristinmcwharter.com or on Instagram at @kristinmcwharter
Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.
Alexander Perez began writing and publishing poetry in 2022 at age forty-eight. Some of his poems first appeared in journals such as Sixfold, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Blue Unicorn. Alexander is an Albany native and currently lives in Schenectady, New York. He attended the University at Buffalo, University at Albany, and Duke University, and has degrees in English and philosophy. He works in public service for the University at Albany. Read more at perezpoetrystudio.com or on Instagram @perezpoet.
Jes Raschella is a circus. In visual arts, she focuses on caricature and portrait arts, in both digital and traditional styles. Together with her partner Spilly, she has founded Baltimore Hoop Love, the local circus entertainment troupe full of hula hoopers, stilt walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and musicians. Find her on Instagram at @jesraschella and @baltimorehooplove.
James T. Stemmle is an old man, currently living retirement in WV with his wife of 58 years. In warm weather, he writes poetry during morning meditations on a bench in his back yard, where, immersed in nature, it is so quiet that, depending on atmospheric conditions, he can sometimes hear interstate traffic four miles distant. He had a Federal Government career mostly with EPA, earned a doctorate from Catholic U in Chemistry, and was born in Louisville, KY. He is eager to share more of his accumulating poetry, currently enough to fill 7 one-inch binders and part of the 8th. He has published 24 poems so far in several small literary magazines including: The Octillo Review, Evening Street Review, The Raven’s Perch, Deep South Magazine, Hektoen International (a journal of medical humanities), Literary Veganism, Choeofpleirn Press, Seattle Star, Poetry Superhighway, Open Arts Forum.
Carrie Weinberger: I am inclined to write in tribute to the natural world. My education in visual art at RISD, and former work in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, informs the pleasure I take in “painting” with words. My poems have appeared in several literary journals, most recently The Raven’s Perch, East on Central, The Last Stanza, the Irish environmental publication, Channel, and I have been a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. I live and write in Carlsbad, California.
