George Abraham is a Palestinian-American poet attending Swarthmore College. He competed in poetry slams including CUPSI (placing 2nd out of 68 international teams in 2016), NPS, and IWPS. He is a Pushcart nominee and a 2-time recipient of the Favianna Rodriguez Artistic Activism Award. His chapbook, al youm: for yesterday & her inherited traumas—a winner of the Atlas Review’s 2016 chapbook contest—is forthcoming in 2017. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, Thrush,  the Margins, Assaracus, Sukoon, and the Ghassan Kanafani Palestinian Literature Anthology. He hopes to continue bringing awareness to Palestinian human rights/socio-economic struggles through art.

Bani Amor is a queer travel writer,  photographer and activist from Brooklyn by way of Ecuador who explores diasporic identities, the decolonization of travel culture, and the intersections of race, place and power in their work. They have been published in Bitch Magazine and Paste Magazine, among other outlets, and is a three-time VONA/Voices Fellow.

Ekin Balcıoğlu received dual degrees from California College of the Arts, MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Visual & Critical Studies. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates ideas of immigration, traditions, and roots. She produces a mixture of media including, film, photography, painting and installation that are often developed in response to specific locations and events. She explores the way identities are shaped and transformed across national, cultural, and intimate borders. She focuses on the intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her work highlights the tension that generate from tradition/modernity, society/government and nation/identity by borrowing a wide range of references including real-life stories, dance and belief systems, in order to reveal what is suppressed. Her work creates a space where a private moment and intimacy are broken, and exposed to the audience’s gaze. Ekin has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout London, Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, Sofia and San Francisco. Ekin is a recipient of IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Award with the project “To Lemon Hill”. “To Lemon Hill” offers a Saturday tutoring program at Gelisim Collegiate in Izmir for Syrian refugee children where they will learn Turkish and English, among other subjects, with volunteer teachers and high school students. She is a recipient of Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award.

Braudie Blais-Billie (b. 1993) is a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and a freelance writer and photographer from Fort Lauderdale, FL currently residing in New York. Her interests are primarily music, pop culture, and indigenous issues, and her work has appeared in places like Billboard Magazine,i-D Magazine,The Fader,  and Paper Magazine.

Payton Bordley is a member of the Skokomish Tribe, and a recent graduate of the Creative Writing program at the University of Washington. Payton currently lives in Seattle, and works as the Racial Equity Liaison at the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Pelenakeke (Keke) Brown is an artist, writer and performer living in Brooklyn, NY. She is originally from New Zealand, and is half Samoan/ half Caucasian. She has a BA from the University of Auckland and recently completed a 3-year Studio Art Intensive program at The National Academy School of Fine Art. All her work deals with the Samoan concept of the ‘Va’ or the space in-between irrelevant of form.

Pelenakeke began her career in the arts as a founding member of New Zealand’s first mixed ability dance company Touch Compass Dance Trust. She has exhibited in several galleries in the US and is in the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program: Social Practice for 2016. Her writing has appeared in the James Franco Review and she recently attended an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

Jessica Christy is a native North Dakotan, born to two artists on the Sanger Art Farm, located at the northern edge of the Sheyenne River Valley. She received her MFA from the University of North Dakota in 2011 and has since created works that challenge the status quo of human activity and the resulting impacts. Heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Dakota culture, Christy weaves the Native experience into her perspective as an American woman. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is currently working on a new series, Hands of Protectors, which collects the stories of the #NoDAPL water protectors to shine a light on the beauty of this historic gathering. Christy lives and works in the Chicago area.

Artist’s Statement: The rhythm of instinct is a melodious constant.  A force we can count on, expected, part of the natural world.  Humans, once a part of this rhythm, are creating a dissonance, one that reverberates through the quiet instinct around us.  The song we sing is loud. The Rhythm of Instinct narrates the dissonance between human actions and the natural world.  Offering visual curios, the work speaks to the heavy relationship forced upon our instinctual neighbors. We are loud, we are inventors, we are path-makers, and we are hard-wearing. If we do not change our actions, we will also be alone.

Sarah Clark is a two-spirit Native editor and writer. She is currently an editor with The VIDA Review, a co-editor of Bettering American Poetry, and is the former managing editor of Drunken Boat. She has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including Sundress Press, Best of the Net, contemptorary.org, Open City, The Paris Review, and Blackbird. She curated Drunken Boat’s folios on sound art, and on global indigenous art and literature “First Peoples, Plural.”

Shari Crane is a physician and poet of Cherokee, Sioux, Blackfoot, and Irish descent. She is a member of the Not Dead Yet Poets in San Diego, and an alum of A Room of Her Own Writing Retreat (AROHO). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction can be found in such journals as Crab Fat Magazine, The Beachwood Review, Unbroken, and Gastroenterology. She is working on her first chapbook, among other things. She lives in Coronado.

Demian DinéYazhi’ is an interdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water) of the Diné. His work is best understood through the lens of curatorial mediation, zine production, street interventions, education, workshops, and art production. Demian’s artwork and writing is a continual inquiry into Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist ideology, creating critical and challenging content that has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. He received his BFA in Intermedia Arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he received the Intermedia Department Award for his thesis exhibition BURY MY ART AT WOUNDED KNEE: Blood & Guts in the Art School Industrial Complex. He is the founder and director of the artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment, which is dedicated to the education, perseverance, & evolution of Indigenous art & culture.

Creating collaboratively in addition to individual practices artists Ginger Dunnill, Nicholas Galanin, Merritt Johnson, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Dylan McLaughlin are cultivating awareness, respect, honor and protection for land and water, for all the living things that have lived here, and for all the living things to come. Due to the imminent threat to water and land in Standing Rock, North Dakota, the collective’s work is currently focused around this place. In October 2016, the artists gathered audio and video at the Oceti Sakowin camp, Missouri and Cannonball Rivers, Lake Oahe, the DAPL route, the Bakken oil fields, Lake Sakakawea, and the land holding all these things. The collective is currently in production on film, video and sound installation works, performance, sculpture, drawing, storytelling and song composition. This work is ongoing, for everyone, and will be accessible to the public through online platforms, museum and gallery exhibitions, screenings, and public performances.

Artists’ Statement: Today we see natural cycles of life disrupted by the extraction and transportation of what we have come to call resources from the land. The Nations of all living things are being destroyed in this pursuit. We acknowledge that the need to protect water and land is increasing in every part of the world. As human beings we are responsible to the ancestors and descendants of all living things for how we live. So we bring together our minds as artists to cultivate gratitude and respect for water, land, and the interdependence of all things living in this world. Through our work we bind together our diverse ancestry and cultures, to honor and protect water and land. As artists we tell stories, stories learned from each other, from land, water and all our relatives. We are listening, we are watching, we are holding up reflectors, waving flags, singing the horizon and telling the story of how we are now. As artists we are making visions and asking how we can be, what we can make for our children, and our grandchildren’s children.

Ginger Dunnill: http://www.brokenboxespodcast.com/; Nicholas Galanin: http://galan.in/; Merritt Johnson: https://flashbanggiveaway.com/; Cannupa Hanska Luger: http://www.cannupahanska.com/; Dylan McLaughlin: http://www.invisiblelaboratory.com/

Kayla DeVault (Shawnee/Anishinaabe) is a resident of Window Rock, Navajo Nation. She is a SustainUS COP22 delegate who works as a research assistant for the Diné Policy Institute while pursuing a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and tribal energy policy. Her passions include sustainability, learning other cultures and languages, and interfacing social and environmental justice. This year, Kayla was appointed to the NEJAC/EPA Youth Perspectives on Climate Working Group where she provides recommendations to national policy. In her spare time, Kayla is a Premiere Scottish Highland dancer who also holds many National hockey titles, including a Team USA inline hockey gold medal.

Tafisha A. Edwards can sing with the voices that ascend from the deep. She is the author of THE BLOODLET, winner of Phantom Books’ 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The Offing, PHANTOM, The Atlas Review, Bodega Magazine, Fjords Review, The Little Patuxent Review, and other print and online publications. She is currently an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor at Gigantic Sequins, and a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Jiminéz-Porter Writers’ House. She is the recipient of a Zoland Poetry Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center and has received scholarships to other writing workshops and conferences. She is currently writing her first collection of poetry, Confusing the Wind.

Artist’s Statement:

I am not safe until every woman in the world is safe.

Not just cis-het women, or white women, or women with access to higher education. It’s not enough if only U.S. citizens, or married women, or women who’ve internalized their societies’ hatred of women, or Christian women, or thin women, or chaste women, or are worth protecting.

If the mass disappearance of thousands of indigenous women is not a cause of national mobilization (much less international) what is my one body worth? If a Black woman could go missing for three years, only to be found in her own apartment, almost entirely decomposed, with her still TV on, why would I expect for a search party to be deployed if I were to disappear?

What arrogance would lead me to believe that I am viewed as more precious, more protected, more valuable when any woman can be the victim of the cultural—and often legally—sanctioned hatred of women? And that hatred is not singular. It is present in the developed and “under-developed” world. It is supported by many theologies and their leaders. It is supported in education systems and in workplaces and in homes and in churches and and and…

What then?

No denial. No turning away. No more stretching the bounds of logic to excuse the torture, the murder, the abuse, the stalking, the neglect, the shaming, the killing of women. No more justifying or rationalizing the actions of brothers, uncles, father’s, boyfriends, fiancées, world renowned professors, musicians, or presidents.

No more laboring under the illusion that just because you, personally, have not been murdered and disposed of, threatened, raped, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, or coerced to act against your will that these acts do not occur. And they do occur, in every hour of every day in every corner of history. Just because you won’t believe it, or can’t, does not mean this isn’t happening.  

Hazem Fahmy is a poet and critic from Cairo. He is currently pursuing a degree in Humanities and Film Studies from Wesleyan University. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in Mizna, COG, FreezeRay and HEArt. In his spare time, he writes about the Middle East and tries to come up with creative ways to mock Classicism. He makes videos occasionally.

David Finkle has been called a ‘Renaissance man’ of sorts. Proudly hailing from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in southern Ontario, he is an award-winning multi-instrumental recording artist. He’s a traditional aboriginal instrument maker (making by hand many of the instruments used in his music) as well as a storyteller, activist, producer and historian specialising in aboriginal history. He has also completed many scores for various theatrical productions and is a highly sought after project facilitator for his popular traditional drum-making workshops. David can be seen performing in his live world-beat ensemble ‘Caveman Techno’ along the southern Canadian powwow and festival circuit working with many musicians from differing cultural backgrounds. Contact: DavidFinkleDrums[at]hotmail.com

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she taught Native American literature and creative writing. Her recent books: Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (Nonfiction. University of Nebraska Press, 2014), Report to the Department of the Interior (Poetry. University of New Mexico Press, 2015), and (The Collector of Bodies: Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poetry. Wipf & Stock, 2016). Glancy received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers. Other books and awards are on her websites: www.dianeglancy.com, www.dianeglancy.org

Dr. Samantha Chisholm Hatfield is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, from the Tututni Band, and is also Cherokee. Dr. Chisholm Hatfield earned Doctorate from Oregon State University in Environmental Sciences focusing on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Siletz Tribal Members, from Oregon State University. Dr. Chisholm Hatfield’s specializations include: Indigenous TEK, tribal adaptations due to climate change, and Native culture issues. She’s worked with Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, and successfully completed a Postdoctoral Research position with Northwest Climate Science Center. She’s spoken on the national level such as the First Stewards Symposium, National Congress of American Indians, Northwest Climate Conference, and webinars. She’s helped coordinate tribal participation for the Northwest Climate Science Center and Oregon State’s Climate Boot Camp workshops. Her dissertation has been heralded nationally by scholars as a template for TEK research, and remains a staple conversation item for academics and at workshops. She is a Native American Longhouse Advisory Board member at Oregon State, was selected as an H.J. Andrews Forest Visiting Scholar, is actively learning Tolowa, Korean, and continues her traditional cultural practices.

Ernestine Hayes belongs to the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit nation. Her first book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, winner of the American Book Award, was published in 2006 and was the selection for Alaska Reads 2016. Her most recent book, The Tao of Raven, was published in October 2016 by University of Washington Press. Her essays, articles, short stories, and poetry have been published in Studies in American Indian Literature, Huffington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tipton Review, and other forums, including selection of her poem “The Spoken Forest” for permanent installation at Totem Bight State Park. Grandmother and great-grandmother, she lives in Juneau, Alaska, where she was born.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s books include: Sing Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Effigies II, Effigies, Streaming, Blood Run, Off-Season City Pipe, Dog Road Woman, The Year of the Rat, Burn, and Rock, Ghost, Willow Deer. She teaches for the University of California Riverside as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.

B.B.P. Hosmillo is the author of two poetry collections, The Essential Ruin (forthcoming) and Breed Me: a sentence without a subject/ Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên & Hải Yến. A Pushcart Prize and four-time Best of the Net nominee, his writing is anthologized in Bettering American Poetry (BlazeVOX, 2016) and has recently appeared or forthcoming in Connotation Press, Palaver Journal, The Collapsar, Transnational Literature (Australia), BOAAT Journal, Assaracus, and The Nottingham Review (UK), among many others. He has received research fellowships from The Japan Foundation, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Republic of Indonesia. He is the founding co-editor of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art (www.queersoutheastasia.com) and a guest poetry editor at Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (www.asiancha.com). Contact: bryphosmillo@yahoo.com.

Nicolas Lampert is a Milwaukee-based interdisciplinary artist and author who works with three groups: the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a worker-owned printmaking cooperative of thirty artists in North America that formed in 2007, ReciproCity, a group that focuses on urban agricultural projects and community activism in Milwaukee, and Climate Prints, a website/activist infrastructure project that shares downloadable graphics on Climate Justice works directly with movements.

Tanya Lukin Linklater‘s performance collaborations, videos, photographs and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is compelled by relationships between bodies, histories, poetry, pedagogy, Indigenous conceptual spaces (languages), and institutions. Her work has been exhibited and performed at EFA Project Space + Performa, NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago, Chilé, SBC Gallery, Montreal, Western Front, Vancouver, Images Festival + Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, and elsewhere. In 2016 she will present work at La Biennale de Montréal – Le Grand Balcon curated by Philippe Pirotte. Her poetry and essays have been published in C Magazine, BlackFlash Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, Drunken Boat, Ice Floe, and in publications by Access Gallery, Western Front, and MacLaren Art Centre. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours) where she received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the Louis Sudler Prize for Creative and Performing Arts. She is currently a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. She was awarded the Chalmers Professional Development Grant in 2010 and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature in 2013. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in southern Alaska and is based in northern Ontario, Canada. http://tanyalukinlinklater.com

Israel Francisco Haros Lopez is a visual and performance artist. He was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Laney and Vista Community College with an A.A. in English Literature. He received a Bachelor’s in English and Xikan@ Studies from UC Berkeley and his M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. His work is an attempt to search for personal truths and personal histories inside of american cosmology. The american cosmology and symbolism that he is drawing from is one that involves both northern and southern america that was here before columbus. The work both written and that which is painted is attempting to mark and remark historical points in the americas and the world.The mark making attempts to speak to the undeniable presence of a native america that will continue to flourish for generations to come. The understanding which he is drawing from is not conceptual but fact and points to the importance of honoring and remembering ancestral ways of living as a means of maintaining healthy relations with all humans,the winged, all those that crawl on this Earth, all Life, the Water, the Sacred Fire, Tonantzin, Tonatiuh,the Sacred Cardinal Points,everything in between, above and below and at the center of self and all things in the universe.

LynleyShimat Lys (MFA, Queens College- CUNY, Poetry and Translation, 2016) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and poetry editor of the Hawai’i Review. Lynley co-chaired the panel “Now What? Everyday Resistance in the Middle East,” at Split This Rock! Poetry Festival 2016 with Nomi Stone, Phil Metres, and M. Lynx Qualey. Recent work appears in Drunken Boat online. Other activities include reviewing Judaica for “Religious Studies Review,” and serving as a multi-genre reader for the Atlas Review.

Nicole Markoff’s art and design practices cultivate works that navigate the analogous links between landscape and thought production. Through small shifts in a horizon line, folding water onto itself, or transforming the body into land form through performance, she aims to bond with her viewer, engaging them in a practice that unearths neural pathways to deepen attention and slow compulsion. She works with textiles as medium and subject, photography as process, and most recently, collaborative performance. Much of her work is currently made on the road in places far from her home in northern California.  She can be found always at nicolemarkoff.com.

Artist’s Statement: Memory | Resource | Volume | The Slow Haul of Geology | Landscape

At once flat and holographic, Cry River witnesses dreams of healthy waterways. This series draws from landscapes of sensitive areas near the Bakken shale formation, at this moment when life-saving resources are being threatened by industry. I offer Cry River as a gesture towards suspension— expanding time to question and discern this absolute and relative moment.

Sarah Maria Medina is a poet and a fiction/creative non-fiction writer from the American Northwest. Her writing has been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Midnight Breakfast, PANK, Split This Rock, Raspa Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in Indiana Review‘s 2015 Poetry Prize. She is also the poetry editor at Winter Tangerine. Medina is Boricua (The United Confederation of Taíno People). She is at work on several projects. Find her at www.sarahmariamedina.com & @crushedmagnolia

Dylan Miner is a Wiisaakodewinini (Métis) artist, activist, and scholar. He is currently Director of American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. Miner is also adjunct curator of Indigenous art at the MSU Museum and a founding member of the Justseeds artists collective. He holds a PhD from The University of New Mexico and has published approximately sixty journal articles, book chapters, critical essays, and encyclopedia entries. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship through the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). Miner has been featured in more than twenty solo exhibitions – with many more planned in the near future – and has been artist-in-residence or visiting artist at institutions such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, École supérieure des beaux-arts in Nantes, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Rabbit Island, Santa Fe Art Institute, and numerous universities, art schools, and low-residency MFA programs. His book Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island was published in 2014 by the University of Arizona Press. Miner is currently completing a book on Indigenous Aesthetics: Art, Activism, Autonomy and writing his first book of poetry, Ikidowinan Ninandagikendaanan (words I must learn). In 2016, Miner has had solo exhibitions in Ontario and Vancouver, conducted a workshop in Chile, done a residency at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, and exhibited work in Sweden and at the Banff Centre.

Ruby Hansen Murray is writer and photographer living on Puget Island in the lower Columbia River estuary. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, her work has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry, Oregon Humanities Magazine and National Public Radio. She is a fellow of Jack Straw Cultural Center and Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). She has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek, Island Institute in Sitka, AK, Jentel, Playa and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She has studied at Warren Wilson College and the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Nshannacappo is a Nakawe (Saulteaux) graphic novelist, artist, writer and poet who specializes in black and white western style dragons, super heroes all with Aboriginal protagonists. As a writer he loves to write fantasy and sci-fi, with his poetry specializing in long form poetry that tells stories the vein of The Iliad. Nshannacappo is a spiritual believer, in the traditional beliefs of his people: Creator, the Seven Grandfathers and the Medicine Wheel. By education he is a Social Service Worker, by passion he is an artist/poet and you can find more of his creativity here: https://www.facebook.com/nshannacappo

Jonathan Nelson (Diné), or Johnny, as he prefers, was born and raised in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, and began his art experience with coloring books like many children. His drawing has evolved into a career as a creative professional. In his youth, he began collecting comic books and started tracing famous comic book characters, like Spiderman and the X-Men. Elementary tracing evolved into freehand drawings with No. 2 school pencils. Nowadays, he works in ballpoint pen to showcase vast high desert landscapes filled with sheep. Jonesy, an untraditional sheep, stands out in the rez just like the overhead power lines and oil pump jacks do among a sea of sand, sage, and piñon trees. Johnny’s recent work entails a humorous narrative called The Wool of Jonesy. It brings to light the sustaining life of indigenous culture and its on-going struggle in a Eurocentric driven society. Johnny’s other works are also inspired from identity and life on the Navajo reservation. Visit badwinds.com to view other works on politics, racism, tribal identity, stereotypes, and environment.

Artist’s Statement: The body of work I have created challenges the notion of Indian art by bridging the gap between the comic book form and easel painting. It engages the general public into the story of Jonesy, a sheep living on the edge of the Navajo reservation trying to sell his wool. The humorous narrative brings to light the sustaining life of indigenous culture and its on-going struggle in a Eurocentric driven society.

Today, systemic racism runs deep in North America with Indian mascots, “Navajo” panties and flasks by Urban Outfitters, Johnny Depp as Tonto, and, the never-ending war over Indian Lands and resources. My work is an introduction to the complexity of my status as an indigenous person in America.

Utilizing sheep allows me to illustrate profound issues in Native America, often unconnected to society that communicates adaptation, deconstruction, and knowledge. Using symbolic gestures, I am asking the audience to reflect on our personal status and the judgments we make that either empower or oppress.

Etan Nechin is an Israeli born writer. His fiction and essays were published at ZYZZYVA, Potluck Magazine, MonkeyBicycle, Gravel, Entropy, MutualArt and more. His co written text for a performance, UTTER: The Violent Necessary for the Embodied Presence of Hope was shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Currently, he is pursuing his MFA at Columbia University.

Christine No is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in the Sundance Film Festival, sPARKLE+bLINK, Tayo, Columbia Journal and Story Magazine; and is forthcoming in The Oakland Review and Nomadic Journal. She is a VONA Alum, a Pushcart Prize Nominee and the First Place Poetry Winner the 2016 Litquake Writing Contest. She lives in Oakland with her dog, Brandy.

Kayla Paul studied Fiber Arts at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. Upon moving to New Mexico she acquired a small tabletop loom and started weaving small samples and scarves. Since that first loom she has built a Rio Grande loom and acquired a 16 harness production loom. On these she has continued to weave rugs, blankets, shawls and scarves. Currently she works restoring Navajo rugs with Textival Rug and Textile Workshop, which she has been doing since 2001. She has exhibited at 516 Arts and Izzy Martin in Albuquerque, and Marigold Arts in Santa Fe.

Elizabeth LaPensée is an Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish artist, designer, and writer who expresses herself through games, comics, and animation. She received a Ph.D. in Interactive Arts & Technology from Simon Fraser University. Her work has been widely shown across Turtle Island, including imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, LA Skins, SAW Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

Artist’s Statement: The Thunderbird Strike Series depicts stories of about impending pipelines. The series opens with “The Snake That Swallows Us Whole” that portrays a geographically accurate map of the proposed pipelines that stretch from the tar sands in Alberta to across the Great Lakes, forming the shape of a snake with fangs that jut into the ground, constantly consuming. It uplifts with “They Are Answering” that shows a thunderbird channeling through the sky with lightning wiring from its eyes as it answers the prayers of communities. “Rip Off Its Head” portrays a thunderbird serenely soaring as it explodes the source of pipelines, recognizing that the best way to kill a snake is to tear off the head.

Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently fromunincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn, 2014), which received the American Book Award. He is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa.

Raquel Salas-Rivera ha publicado poemas y ensayos en numerosas revistas y antologías. En el 2011, publicó su primer libro, Caneca de anhelos turbios, con Editora Educación Emergente. En el 2016, publicó su segundo libro, oropel/tinsel, con Lark Books & Writing Studio. Actualmente es editorx contribuyente para The Wanderer. Si para Roque Dalton no existe revolución sin poesía, para Raquel no existe poesía sin Puerto Rico. Puedes aprender más sobre su trabajo si visitas raquelsalasrivera.com.

Raquel Salas-Rivera has published poetry and essays in numerous anthologies and journals. In 2011, their first book, Caneca de anhelos turbios, was published by Editora Educación Emergente. In 2016, their chapbook, oropel/tinsel, was published by Lark Books & Writing Studio. Currently, they are a Contributing Editor at The Wanderer. If for Roque Dalton there is no revolution without poetry, for Raquel there is no poetry without Puerto Rico. You can find out more about their work at raquelsalasrivera.com.

Alon Sicherman is an artist from New York. He is a graduate of Columbia University. Alon is the founder of L-Vision, a boutique creative agency specializing in aerial cinematography and film production.

Swarm is a street artist and multidisciplinary artist mainly known for wheat pastes and murals in the streets of Montreal, QC. Her art takes on many forms including immersive installations, mixed media pieces, paintings, drawings and various printmaking mediums.

Swarm’s artwork, while grounded in politics, centers around the themes of the universe, the multiverse, naturally occurring patterns within the universe, alienation, and the search for unity, purpose and a sense of home.

Among all these themes, a prevalent motif in Swarm’s work is portals, which represent liminality, the desire to escape, a changing world, a method of traversing the multiverse, and a form of time and space travel that does not require resource extractive colonialism.

Another prevalent motif in Swarm’s work is ‘star beings’ which express the artist’s feelings of being a person with a multiracial identity and expresses the artist’s feelings about gender. The star beings are explicitly non-­‐binary and ambiguous in form. Swarm uses portals and star beings with the intent of invoking the feelings in the viewer that she is trying to express; the feelings of transcendence, boundlessness and hope for the future.

Chip Thomas aka jetsonorama  is a photographer, public artist, activist and physician who has been working between Monument Valley and The Grand Canyon on the Navajo nation since 1987. There, he coordinates the Painted Desert Project – a community building project which manifests as a constellation of murals across the Navajo Nation painted by artists from all over the reservation + the world.

Artist’s Statement: These murals aim to reflect love and appreciation of the rich history shared by the Navajo people back to Navajo people. As a member of the Justseeds Artists Cooperative he appreciates the opportunity to be part of a community of like-minded, socially engaged artists. You can find his large-scale photographs pasted on the roadside, on the sides of houses in the northern Arizona desert, on the graphics of the Peoples Climate March, climateprints.org, Justseeds, and 350.org carbon emissions campaign material.

Michael Wasson is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017), winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize. His poems appear in American Poets, Narrative, Drunken Boat, Passages North, and Bettering American Poetry. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho and lives abroad.

Erika T. Wurth‘s published works include a novel, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend and a collection of poetry, Indian Trains. Her collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine and her collection of poetry, A Thousand Horses Out to Sea are both forthcoming. A writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and was a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Boulevard, Drunken Boat, The Writer’s Chronicle, and South Dakota Review. She is represented by Peter Steinberg. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.