Artist Bios – November 2012
After graduating from UMBC, Marlayna Demond made the leap to become a freelance photographer, opening her own business focused on event, editorial, and lifestyle portraits. She also accepted a part-time position at Creative Services and is glad (despite the surreality) to be back walking around campus on a regular basis again. During school, Marlayna livened up her senior year playing Ultimate Frisbee. In her free time she likes going to concerts, traveling to different cities and exploring, or just catching up with friends at coffee shops. See more of her work at marlaynaphotography.com.
Karen Donovan’s book Fugitive Red won the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including FIELD, Seneca Review, Conduit, THE GERM: A Journal of Poetic Research, Spiral Orb, and Prime Number, and most recently in Blackbird and Conjunctions. For 20 years, with co-editor Walker Rumble, she published ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of short prose. She works as a writer in Providence.
Erika Ferrin prefers to work in the medium of meat, but occasionally dabbles badly in oil painting and creative writing. Erika has worked in non-profit marketing for almost 10 years and currently is employed at UMBC. Her turns ons are Michael McDonald, graphic designers, velvet paintings, anything from the midwest, the sound a manual car makes backing up and Crispen Glover. Her turns offs are mercury in retrograde, slow drivers and those people that don’t understand the ironic genius of Thomas Kinkaide.
Born in Windsor, Ontario in 1960, Gregory Gunn grew up in small towns throughout Ontario before moving to London in 1970. A graduate of Fanshawe College in late 1982 as an electronics technician, he earnestly began writing during that tenure, has continued doing so for over thirty years and is mainly passionate concerning the composition of poetry. Other interests include music, astronomy, philosophy, photography, foreign languages, the history of the cinema, and gardening. Most recently, Mr. Gunn has had or will have poems published in Inscribed Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Yes, Poetry, 20 X 20 Magazine, 1000 Acts of Kindness, Crack the Spine, Lines & Stars, Ascent Aspirations, Steel Toe Review, Carcinogenic, The Light Ekphrastic, Cyclamens and Swords, Folly Magazine, Shangri-La Shack, Exercise Bowler, Corium, Burning Wood, Blue Lake Review, Vox Poetica, and Covalence. Also published are six collections of his selected poetry.
Michelle Jordan graduated from UMBC with a degree in visual arts, emphasis in photography, in the era before the interwebs. After college, she moved from photography to web design and programming. She likes rescuing cats, dreaming, saving the environment, reading books and seeing daylight.
Dina Karkar is a graphic designer living in Baltimore. She graduated from University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in studio art and later received her masters in publication and design from The University of Baltimore. After working in Austin, Texas for a few years she returned to Maryland, and is now a member of the creative services department. She loves purple and black (go Ravens), cheese, traveling, painting and going to concerts.
Ute Schätzmüller is a visual artist. Her work can be seen on her homepage and www.ute-schaetzmueller.de and her blog at atelierscheune2012.wordpress.com.
Carol Stephen is Canadian poet originally from Toronto, now living in Carleton Place, Ontario, near Ottawa. Her poems have appeared in Ottawa journals, a number of collaborative chapbooks, on the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Month and in The Ontario Poetry Society’s Verse Afire. Carol is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has shared her poems at Ottawa reading series: Tree Reading Series, Dusty Owl Reading Series, and Sasquatch. Carol is the author of Above the Hum of Yellow Jackets, a poetry chapbook released in September, 2011. Honourable Mentions for Poetry : Invisible, published in Arborealis anthology, 2008, Ontario Poetry Society; Tea Leaves, CAA 2008 National Capital Writing Contest; Traffic on Highway 7, CAA 2011 National Capital Writing Contest; The Walking-Off Place in the End-Time, VERSeFest Poetry for the End of the World Contest, January 2012. (Finalist) “Poems begin with words and phrases dancing in my head. Poetry for me is all about that dance!”
