Sara Michas-Martin

Artist Statement

I am interested in an ecologically-minded poetics that formally explores the possibility of language to embody energy and meaning through collage, rhythmic pattern and arrangement. My poems utilize eliding syntax and fracture to illustrate the pace of environmental change, the fluid boundaries between self and other, human and non-human, and the push and pull between responsibility and vulnerability while parenting in the Anthropocene.

Book Cover, Cover art: Albín Brunovský Lady with a Hat II.

Bio

Sara Michas-Martin is a poet and nonfiction writer who draws inspiration from science and the natural world. Her book Gray Matter (Fordham University Press), was chosen by Susan Wheeler for the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Works-in-progress include a nonfiction manuscript (Black Boxes) that draws on medical, cultural and natural history to consider how the logic of the maternal body corresponds, or is in tension with, current ecological and social systems. Hold it All, a poetry manuscript in progress, takes on deep ecology and the ethics of care in a moment of environmental precarity. Sara’s work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner fellowship in poetry from Stanford University, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf and Community of Writers’ conferences. Recent poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, CrazyHorse, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and environmental humanities at Stanford University.

saramichasmartin.com

Margo Steines

Artist Statement

I write nonfiction about bodies and the brutalities humans inflict upon them. I am obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering, how spectacle alters the experience of pain, how humans engage with animality, and how community coheres around tests of mettle. I work in a hybrid genre of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism, exploring themes of pain, brutality, and violence through various lenses, including martial arts, labor, sex work, athletics, BDSM, agriculture, pregnancy, chronic illness, and addiction. My curiosity about how these sites of brutality inform each other is the thread that connects these disparate worlds. To write about the body is political, and I seek to embed inquiries about gender, power, and privilege in my work. My hope for my writing is that it bridges gaps of confusion and isolation between my readers and parts of themselves, offering vocabulary for what is left unspoken.

Bio

Margo Steines is a native New Yorker, a journeyman ironworker, and serves as mom to a wildly spirited small person. Margo holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story, forthcoming in October 2023 from W.W. Norton. Margo is faculty at the University of Arizona Writing Program, and she is represented by Matt McGowan at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

margosteines.com

Azure Arther

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a WOC, the experiences of BIPOC people and women is important to me. No matter what I am writing, they are my focus. With my plays, I found freedom of expression in writing about the reoccurring theme, the motif, of war against women. I write about the never-ending war crimes serve as a campaign against female identities and their bodies. My work endeavors to encompass this in a series of plays that will eventually be a collection simply titled: War.

This is a display of journals and anthologies my work has appeared in. It is not all of them but these are the printed copies I own.

Bio

A native of Flint, MI, Azure Arther resides in Dallas, TX, with her family. She is obsessed with literature. Her passions are evenly distributed between writing, teaching, and parenting. Azure's work has appeared or is forthcoming in over a dozen publications, including a winning story in Writers of the Future, Volume 38. You can keep up with her via her website: azurearther.com.

Azurearther.com