Mallika Singh

Artist Statement

My art practice/s are rooted in my environment/s and my relationships. In everything I do, I am deeply committed to process and play. Even when cooking and farming, I am a poet. I believe in poetry that is active, an action. Poem as something we do. River as something we do. I am interested in food, poetry, and ritual as tools to access our singular and collective imaginations. Food has always been a sensory and embodied experience for me. I am inspired by the ingenuity and skill of my mama/s, the histories and archives of culinary practice, and the innovation, exchange, and care that occurs through/with food – amidst apocalypse and amidst celebration. I dream of a food system that enacts a life beyond capitalism through collectivity, knowledge sharing, and the redistribution of resources, land, and power.

PHOTO CREDIT - mk blurry gloves hand reaches for a lamb chop resting on a bed of mashed turnips and stewed greens. other dishes on the table include a citrus salad and radicchio salad.

Bio

mallika singh is a poet, farmer, and cook who makes work about ecosystems and intimacies. in collaboration with Rebeca Alderete Baca, mallika ran OOZE— an event series that celebrates poetry, ritual, and gathering. mallika also facilitates a study and writing group called Rivering Towards: Desert-Water Poetics and Politics. their debut chapbook, Retrieval, was published in 2020 from Wendy's Subway. mallika was born in Delhi, India and raised in the Bay Area, CA and Santa Fe, NM. they are currently living under the open skies of New Mexico and growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers with their coworkers at Ashokra Farm.

Martha Silano

Artist Statement

My poems often center on the natural world and rely heavily on lived experience, often focusing on our Earth’s flora, fauna, bioregions, and geologic features. I also write about astrophysics and the cosmos. Increasingly, my work has centered around environmental peril, climate grief/optimism/hope, and the Anthropocene, and calling attention to changing weather patterns, forest fires, warming seas, endangered species, and the need to act quickly to reduce carbon outputs. I am urgently drawn to catalogue the species that are managing to survive, along with those that are not, and exposing the ways human beings are leading us toward catastrophe. Influential writers include Craig Santos Perez, Claire Wahmanholm, Barbara Ungar, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Geffrey Davis. I am motivated by an unceasing passion for poetry; it’s my excuse to learn all I can during this brief period I am alive.

Martha Silano_front cover_Gravity Assist_2019

Bio

Martha Silano is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and in many print anthologies, including the Best American Poetry series, and Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poem on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press 2023). Awards include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize. She’s received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College. Her website is available at marthasilano.net.

marthasilano.net