Contributor Bios – February 2024
J. A. Berlin is a writer living in the Midwestern United States. Her poetry is part of the 20 Poems Project and has most recently appeared in Bramble. She draws inspiration for her creative work from history, myth, fairy tales, and the natural world. Currently, she is working on her first novel.
Ruth Farfel is a creative from Baltimore City. She gets excited and energized by music, nature, dancing, and being around people she loves. She tries to express herself in many ways and encourages others to do the same. Her curiosity and wonder about the world, and her place in it, is often at the heart of her creative expression. She strives to allow imperfection and messiness into her work.
Anne Griffiths’ inspiration comes from collections; from the priceless cultural or natural history museum collections, to those of the eccentric ‘collectaholic’ accumulating vast assemblages of memorabilia. In examining the museological processes of collection, organisation, restoration and display, she assumes the role of the curator ‘unbinding’ and ‘rebinding’ objects or text to construct new narratives and connections. Anne’s practice is cross disciplinary, mixing the analogue with the digital, collage, illustration, taxidermy and sound, she builds ‘installations’ which reimagine, reorder and juxtapose the past with the present, cultures, classes, genders and race. Anne is interested in the hybrid; ‘creatures’ which playfully cross boundaries and cannot be categorised. Much of Anne’s work focuses on the eighteenth-century, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, a period a time when reason and scientific proof displaced the authority of the church and state: where early scientists attempted to organise the world; collating animals, vegetables and minerals into hierarchies and family groups while the public wondered at magnificent ‘curiosities’ and ‘exotics’ collected from ‘new worlds’. For more information visit Anne’s website at www.annegriffiths.com.
Thomas Riesner was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1971. Has been self-taught and intensively involved in painting since 1990. In addition to acrylic and ink paintings, drypoint etching is one of his means of artistic expression. Quite spontaneously and suddenly, it literally bubbles out of him. His expressive, intuitive painting style is reflected in his archaic-seeming figures and image elements. His pictures exude an atmosphere of originality and spontaneity, although most of the motifs are dark.
Hoyt Rogers is a poet, translator, novelist, scholar, and internationalist. He has published many books; he has contributed poetry, fiction, essays, and translations to a wide variety of periodicals. His edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s Rome, 1630 received the French-American Foundation’s 2021 Translation Prize. His latest collection of poems is Thresholds (MadHat 2023), his latest translation is Yves Bonnefoy’s The Wandering Life (Seagull 2023), and his latest novel is Sailing to Noon (Spuyten Duyvil 2023, volume one of The Carribbean Trilogy). Born in North America to an ethnically diverse family, he has spent most of his life in Latin America and Western Europe. He was educated at Columbia, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, where he received his doctoral degree. Please visit his website, hoytrogers.com.
Jan Wiezorek writes and paints in Michigan and takes daily walks through the woods. The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Abstract Magazine, Minetta Review, Talon Review, Modern Poetry Review, The Passionfruit Review, Sparks of Calliope, The Wise Owl, Poetry Center San José, and The Orchards Poetry Journal, among others, have published his poems. Also, he is a feature writer whose articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and forthcoming in PAN-O-PLY arts magazine. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and wrote the ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). He holds a master’s degree in composition/writing from Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. Jan posts at janwiezorek.substack.com.
