About the Contributors

Angela Adee Andriesse is an educator, writer, and Ph.D. student in Comparative Studies (Culture, Languages, and Literatures) at Florida Atlantic University. Her work explores neurodivergent life writing, feminist disability studies, and the embodied costs of masking, with a focus on cultural rhetorics, multimodality, and radical visibility. She creates hybrid scholarship and visual narratives that center autistic women's selfhood, survival, and world-making.

Scott Ennis is a writer and poet, widely published for formally disciplined verse, including the sonnet. Scott’s work blends lyric and critical modes to explore injury, ritual, and care. Drawing on lived experience with traumatic brain injury, Scott examines how healing and world-making unfold within systems not designed for cognitive vulnerability.

María Andreína Escalona Abreu is a Venezuelan visual artist, writer, curator, and arts worker based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She obtained a BFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University in 2022 and has since been developing her curatorial practice with various organizations. She works at the FOFA Gallery as the Exhibition Coordinator and serves on the board of Céline Bureau Residency. Escalona's practice brings together curation, collaborative initiatives, creative writing, textile installations, and handmade paper as ways of dreaming, confabulating, and applying notions of sustainability, community development, and advocacy for equity in the arts. Escalona’s work is a “tough-love” letter to her Venezuelan roots and Canadian present.

Tracy Fahey is an award-winning Irish writer. Her recent prizes include the 2025 Rubery International Book Award and the 2024 Paul Cave Prize for Literature. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards (2017, 2022, 2014). Fahey's short fiction is published in over fifty American, British, Australian, and Irish anthologies. Her writing is supported by residencies in Ireland, Scotland, Greece, and Finland. In 2023, she was awarded a Saari Fellowship by the Kone Foundation for her fiction writing. Fahey holds a Ph.D. on the Gothic in visual art and lectures in creative writing, folklore, and horror studies at Limerick School of Art and Design.

Swan Ferraro is a multidisciplinary artist researching creative improvisation as a form of divination within the trans body. This manifests through the performance and documentation of somatic rituals within art installations. Their work seeks to queer spaces into creative sanctuaries to collectively dream of desirable futures. Through physically and spiritually envisioning new realities, imagination and improvisation are used as political tools for empowerment. Their work questions what healing is and how it is felt. Ferraro will graduate in 2026 with an MFA in 4D Art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To view more of Swan Ferraro’s work, visit swanferraro.com.

Sarah Giragosian is the author of Queer Fish, winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and The Death Spiral. In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. She also wrote Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Tin House, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

Charlene Langfur is a LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow in Poetry, living in the southern California desert. My most recent publications include poems in Poetry East, The HiramPoetry Review, Acumen, A Certain Age, Pensive, The Healing Muse as well as others.

Florencia Marchetti is an Argentinian-born, Montreal-based nomadic thinker-maker. She is a community weaver, a social documentarian, a sensory ethnographer, and a participatory researcher. Her early documentary works are part of a permanent exhibit in Campo de la Ribera, a former clandestine detention and torture center that now houses a site museum and the Provincial Memory Archive repository, both in Córdoba, Argentina. Endlessly curious about the power of culture to imagine and create new pathways for living, she has done research on the different forms social memories can take, exploring the affective power of past experiences in present-day lives. She’s been selected to act as researcher-in-residence at the Dare-Dare Artist Run Centre for the 2026-2027 program: “To Embody: Joyful Militancy and Irresistible Activism.”

Tzvi Mayer is a weaver of webs and writer of quiet intensity.  Born and now based in the land of many mounds on the shores of Lake Michigan, aka Milwaukee, she grew up also in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Mayer studied continental philosophy with the spirits of many great thinkers in exile at the New School and somatics at the base of a grandmother Ponderosa pine in the Wet Mountains, Colorado. For over 20 years, Mayer has been a co-regulator for many struggling youth as they navigate complex trauma and instability in a brutal world. Her life coaching practice can be found at www.mindfulmyths.com. Their work has appeared in the classic street art book, Stencil Pirates (2004), Keep This Bag Away From Children (2012), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013), Hitting A Wall: Jewish Narratives Confronting the Occupation (2017) and in her 2019 hybrid cultural anthropology Master’s thesis on youth involved in the sex trade, which integrates poetry with ethnography. Mayer facilitates self-defense classes and experimental writing workshops. They have traveled widely, often using only a thumb for a vehicle.

Laura McCullough is the author of several poetry collections, including The Resurrection Jar (forthcoming, Cornerstone Press), Women & Other Hostages (Black Lawrence Press), The Wild Night Dress (University of Arkansas Press), a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Series, and Panic (Alice James Books), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and numerous journals. She has received three New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowships and has been featured at the Dodge Poetry Festival and AWP.

Amy S. Morgenstern is a multimedia artist, writer, and philosopher with a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an MFA in New Genres. Her work spans performance, video, writing, lectures, and the creation of feminist objects, including zines and stickers designed for circulation. Drawing on feminist philosophy, semiotics, and social practice, she examines grief, rage, endurance, and how feminist meaning moves through hostile cultural environments. She lives and works in California.

Tuan Raja Naga Ultramar Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang is the 13th and current Kabesa or Indigenous Chief of the Kristang people of Singapore and Southeast Asia, the Merlionsman and Dreamtiger of the Republic of Singapore, and the Makaravedra Hierosa or Dragon Reborn of the Holocene in the Roda Mundansa or Kristang Deep Time/cosmological cycle. He is a National University of Singapore Research Scholar completing his doctoral dissertation on a decolonial grammar of Kristang, and is also a creole/Indigenous science fiction and fantasy novelist, poet, playwright, and performance artist in Kristang and English. His first novel, Altered Straits, was longlisted for the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and his short story “Nus Nubu Sta Prendeh Sunyeskah / We Are Learning to Dreamfish Again” was one of four top prize winners in the inaugural Unearthodox Regenerative Futures international writing competition. He is hierosa (gay), kadmang (non-binary), kalkali (autistic), jintiu (atheist) and kakualzu (polyamorous).

LaShawnda Crowe Storm is an artist, activist, community builder and occasionally an urban farmer. Whether she is making artwork or sowing seeds, Crowe Storm uses her creative power as a vehicle for dialogue, social change and community healing. At the core of Crowe Storm's creative practice is a desire to create community – any community in which the process of making art creates a space and place for difficult conversations around a variety of topics, with an eye to community healing. In her words, "If life were a photo, then my artwork would be the film negative, seeking to explore those aspects in our society that have been ignored or forgotten. By printing these negatives, I give voice to the marginalized and disregarded aspects of our society."

Michelle Valois lives in Florence, Massachusetts with her family and teaches writing and humanities at Mount Wachusett Community College. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Florida Review, Brevity, Tri-Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Her chapbook My Found Vocabulary was published in 2017 (Aldrich).

Dr. Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College, specializing in the Arts and Visual Culture of Africa and the Global Diaspora. Born in Chile, she has conducted extensive research in Nigeria and the US for her first book manuscript, De-figuring the Feminine: Art, Spirituality, and the Black Atlantic. She was a Visiting Scholar for the IRW interdisciplinary seminar Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters, and Presidential Visiting Faculty Fellow at Rutgers in 2024-2025.

Kristen T. Woodward received her BFA in Printmaking from Syracuse University and her MFA in Studio Art from Clemson University. Her zoomorphic works combine encaustic painting and printmaking processes and often utilize found collage materials. Woodward is currently a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Art, Gaming & Simulation, and Computer Science at Albright College, teaching drawing, painting, printmaking, and gender & the visual arts. She has also collaborated with an environmental biologist to teach and explore tropical ecosystems in Costa Rica.