Contributor Bios — November 2024
Julia Franklin is an accomplished artist, leader, professor and founder of multiple community arts programs. She creates immersive installations that memorialize everyday people, places, and moments to explore ideas of memory, loss, and identity. Franklin is a recipient of the prestigious Iowa Artist Fellowship and has exhibited artworks in over 85 shows across the United States. She is currently the Executive Director of Mainframe Studios in Downtown Des Moines. Find more of her work at juliafranklinart.com/landscapes.
Vin Grabill received his B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 1971 and M.S. in Visual Studies from the M.I.T. Center For Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1981. He continued his association with CAVS as a research fellow from 1981-1994, participating in many projects and documenting events and performances of CAVS artists and fellows. After teaching video art at the Massachusetts College of Art from 1984-1988, he joined the faculty of the UMBC Department of Visual Arts in 1988 where he taught video art and film history until retiring in 2020. Grabill served as chairperson of the department from 2008-2015. Grabill has exhibited works in painting, sculpture, video art and digital still formats since 1980. His single channel and installation video works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Most recently, in early 2024, five of his videos were included in the exhibition “Otto Piene – Paths to Paradise” at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, curated by Lauren Hanson and Sandra Reimann. And 18 of his giclee prints on canvas were exhibited in a two-person show, “Synergy Unbound”, at the American Center for Physics Gallery in College Park, MD, curated by Sarah Tanguy in 2020.
Dave Greber (b. 1982, Philadelphia) is an artist, educator, and consultant based in Baltimore. He creates experiences for galleries and the wider public arena, using digital media, sculptural installations, and social/environmental interventions. His practice is enthusiastically intuitive, aided by divination and collaboration with both biological and artificial intelligence. He began exhibiting video and installation works at The Front in New Orleans and holds an MFA in Digital Arts from Tulane University. He has participated in studio residencies in Norway, Slovakia, Russia, and Estonia, as well as unconventional residencies in a commercial mall, an AR project while hiking the coast of Latvia, and fully virtual residencies. Greber’s artwork has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in a large-scale public commission for MTA Arts and Design, in Lower Manhattan. He is currently an instructor at The Maryland College Institute of Art and University of Maryland Baltimore County.
E Kraft is a poetry editor whose poems have been published by The Inlandia Institute, The Hanging Loose Press, The National Poetry Quarterly, and others. She is grateful for everyone who has read her poems or attended her readings including her favorite dog from the local shelter.
Eric Paul Shaffer is author of eight volumes of poetry, including Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems; Even Further West; A Million-Dollar Bill; Lāhaina Noon; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; and Portable Planet. More than 650 individual poems appear in reviews throughout America and eleven other nations. Free Speech, his next poetry volume, will appear in 2025. Shaffer received Hawai‘i’s 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature; Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon (2006) and Even Further West (2019); and the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry. Shaffer received a fellowship to attend the 2006 summer Fishtrap Writing Workshop and Retreat and was a Visiting Poet to the 2015 Jackson Hole Writers Conference. Retired from teaching basic, business, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College, Shaffer lives on Oʻahu with his magnificent other Veronica and a delightful little black dog named Kona.
Christine Stewart-Nuñez is the author of Chrysopoeia: Essays of Language, Love, and Place, (Stephen F. Austin State University Press 2022), The Poet & The Architect (Terrapin Books 2021), Untrussed (University of New Mexico Press 2016) and Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books 2016) —winner of the 2018 Whirling Prize (literature of disability theme). Her work has been the basis for international, cross-artistic collaborations with colleagues in music, dance, visual art, and architecture. Christine served as South Dakota’s poet laureate from 2019-2021 and currently teaches for the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Find more of her work at christinestewartnunez.com.
JC Sulzenko’s poetry, including “Bricolage: A Gathering of Centos,” a finalist for the national 2022 Fred Kerner Book Award from the Canadian Authors Association, and “South Shore Suite…POEMS,” appears in anthologies and journals in print and online, either under her name or as A. Garnett Weiss. Her third poetry collection, “Life, after life—from epitaph to epilogue,” came out in early November. The Ottawa International Writers Festival, County Arts, school boards, municipal libraries, and Alzheimer societies hosted her workshops. A full member of the League of Canadian Poets, she selects for bywords.ca and serves on the Board of the Ontario Poetry Society. Find more of her work at jcsulzenko.com.
Ernest Williamson III is an artist living in Tennessee. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, Fourteen Hills, Columbia Journal, and Penn Review. His poetry has appeared in over 200 journals including Roanoke Review, Pinyon Review, and Poetry Life and Times.
