[Image Description: A close up of a smiling white woman with red hair and blue-gray eyes. She's wearing a white shirt and appears to be standing outside, in front of a building.]
Carrie Addington
Carrie Addington’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Collagist, American Literary Review, Waxwing, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Virginia Downs Poetry Award, the American Literary Review Poetry Award, and a Pushcart nomination. She received her MFA from George Mason University and currently lives in Northern Virginia, where she works as a business consultant in the beauty industry and teaches at Northern Virginia Community College. Additionally, she serves on the board of the American Poetry Museum in Washington, D.C.
[Image Description: In this black-framed instant photo, a white man visible in profile from chest to forehead leans his arm against the pane of a large window. He wears glasses with thick rectangular frames and a lightweight gray hoodie with the sleeves torn off. He has a short, light-colored beard. The picture has a pensive, dreamy feel, and by a trick of the light it appears that the windowpane is bowing slightly toward the man where his arm rests against the glass. (The image is a self-portrait).]
Jay Besemer
Trans hybrid artist Jay Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including Chelate, Telephone (both Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press), and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). He is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His performances and video poems have been featured in various live arts festivals and series, including Meekling Press’ TALKS Series; Chicago Calling Arts Festival; Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}; Absinthe & Zygote; @Salon 2014 and Sunday Circus. Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous publications including Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature, Barzakh, The Collagist, PANK, Petra, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The VOLTA, and the CCM organs ENTROPY and ENCLAVE. He is a contributing editor with The Operating System, the co-editor of a special digital Yoko Ono tribute issue of Nerve Lantern, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago, where he lives with his partner and a very helpful cat.
[Image Description: A young white woman with her arms raised. She is smiling and standing in front of a mural of wings painted various shades of pink, purple, blue, and white. She is wearing a green cardigan, jeans, and a T-shirt with triangular prints.]
Marlena Chertock
Marlena Chertock's first collection of poetry, On that one-way trip to Mars, is available from Bottlecap Press. She is the Poetry Editor for District Lit. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Fat, Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction, The Fem, The Little Patuxent Review, Paper Darts, and Wordgathering. Find her atmarlenachertock.com or @mchertock.
[Image Description: A color film photograph by Harrison Swan that focuses on a bearded figure set against a green wall. The figure is white skinned with fading freckles and red spectacles, wearing a pinstripe blazer by Loveless that features a skull-and-crossbones on the breast pocket.]
Junior Dare
Currently based in Shanghai, Junior Dare is a gender-dissident, abolitionist, crip poet dreaming the post-queer, studying the left of the future and the right of the present. In addition to assorted critical work, previous poems can be found in the anthology WebSafe2k16 and the journal Tagvverk. Solicit more, smash out some favs, or just hit the dxde with a follow @prismxp on twitter dot com. Seek joy.
[Image Description: A snapshot showing a paper ghost emerging from a bathtub is held by a white woman obscured by the photo except for part of her hand, a black shirt, and curly brown hair.]
Maia Dolphin-Krute
Maia Dolphin-Krute is an independent scholar based in Boston, MA. Her first full-length book, Ghostbodies: Towards a New Theory of Invalidism (Intellect, 2017), an examination of chronic illness narratives within critical theory, will be out in Spring 2017. She is also the author of a forthcoming chapbook, Aron Ralston: States of Injury (glo worm press, 2016). Her work has recently or will soon be featured in Full-Stop, American Chordata, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere. Currently, Dolphin-Krute is engaged in a long term research project about the forms of freedom that become possible when continually modulated by physical experiences and material proximities--about "how do you live with..." More information about her work can be found at www.ghostbodies.com.
[Image Description: A close-cropped color photograph of the painter Amanda French. She is an adult Scottish woman with short reddish brown hair, blue eyes and an impish grin. Though she is sitting upright, the background of the image is at a sharp angle, as if she were cocking her head at you.]
Amanda French
Amanda French was born in Glasgow, Scotland and is now a U.S. Citizen living in Michigan. She graduated from Florida State University in 2016 with a Masters in Fine Arts.
She says: "I draw and paint, I use a variety of mixed media, from a plain lead pencil to oils and watercolors. My MFA degree show MERRY CHRISTMAS FRANK is mixed media from start to finish. Back in Michigan once more, I have begun my life as a professional studio artist and am now applying myself to making inroads into the vibrant Detroit City Contemporary Art Scene. I look forward to what the future holds."
More of her work can be found online at https://amandaefrench.com/ or on Instagram.
[Image Description: A photo: selfie of the artist Karrie Higgins. She is an adult white woman wearing glitter glasses & blue-gray bobbed hair. She poses with one hand behind her head, casually displaying the large falcon tattoo on her inner bicep. Her mysterious smirk is reminiscent of the Mona Lisa.]
Karrie Higgins
Karrie Higgins is a writer, Intermedia Artist, disability activist, magician, and seamstress living in Colorado. Her work can be found in The Manifest-Station, DIAGRAM, HuffPost, and many others. Her essays have twice been notables in Best American Essays and she won the Schiff Award for Prose in 2013. karriehiggins.com.
[Image Description: Photo of the artist in red light. He is a young man with brown hair wearing a black t-shirt with a graphic of the human skeleton printed on it. There is a green wall with a door behind him displaying signage that reads “Use other door” and “Smoking section.”]
Peter James
Peter James is an autistic adult who uses art as a means of understanding the world. He focuses on using sensory overload and emotional connections in order to tell a story to the viewer. He earned an associate's degree in art at Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, TX. He has been highly influenced by painters like Amselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, Francis Bacon, and photographers like Frank Gohlke. He currently lives in Fresno, California.
[Image Description: A black and white portrait of the author standing in a white knit cardigan and plaid shirt.]
Travis Lau
Travis Chi Wing Lau is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Department of English. His research interests include eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, the history of medicine, and disability studies. His academic writing has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Romantic Circles, and English Language Notes (forthcoming). His creative writing has appeared in Atomic, Feminine Inquiry, Wordgathering, Assaracus, Rogue Agent, and QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology.
[Image Description: A selfie taken by the poet, it shows the femme person, a Chicana/Boricua brown person, who is not smiling, with dark red & black curly shoulder length hair, wearing dark red lipstick and a black t-shirt that reads "decolonize-body love" with an image of a fat femme person. Noemi's arm is tattooed with a heart and tree branches and her arm is outstretched, holding the camera.]
Noemi Martinez
Noemi Martinez is a queer crip Chicana/Boricua lupine mermaid writer, cultural critic & single mami living in South Texas. Some of her recent poems, essays and artwork have appeared in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, TAYO Literary Magazine, Make/Shift Magazine and The Geeky Gimp. She writes poems that are culturally relevant to living in a brown, chronically ill femme queer body at Yellow Chair Review as poet-in-residence. Info on her poem+foto book “South Texas Experience: Love Letters” can be found @ hermanaresist.comor at Twitter @hermanaresist.
[Image Description: A white woman with medium-length red hair in jeans & a blue top leans against a table in a cluttered studio.]
Janet Morrow
Janet Morrow, a Deaf Poets Society art editor, is a conceptual artist and teacher. Much of her work examines themes of deafness, disability and otherness. She holds an MFA in Intermedia Studio Art from The University of Texas at Arlington. Her work has been exhibited at Surface Gallery in Nottingham, England, Access Gallery in Austin, The Smithsonian International Gallery in Washington, D.C., and many other venues. She has taught art and Disability Studies at The University of Texas at Arlington and Tarrant County College Northeast and currently teaches art for the MHMR Pine Street Recovery Center. Janet lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with her husband Jerry. She has two grown children and is a very proud new Grandma.
[Image Description: Close-up showing part of the face of an olive-skinned woman with dark brown eyes. Parts of her gray and brown eyebrows are visible. She is looking down and has a slight smile and a fairly prominent brown mole under her left eye. Photo Credit: Barbara Ruth.]
Barbara Ruth
Barbara Ruth is drawn to the edges, the in-between, the transitional lenses of her glasses, the equinoxes, the mixing of watercolors on the thirsty paper, the going up and coming down, the phases of moon and tide, not this/not that. She is a physically disabled neurodivergent photographer, poet, fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist whose work has been published in Australia, Canada, India, UK and US, and widely anthologized in disability, feminist, literary and queer anthologies, including QDA: Queer Disability Anthology, The Spoon Knife Anthology, and Barking Sycamores: Year One. She lives in San Jose, CA, USA.
[Image Description: Lynx Sainte-Marie, a non-binary Black spoonie with loc'd hair and shaved sides, looks into the camera with a serious expression on their face. They are wearing a Black velvet blazer, a Black dress shirt, a dark statement necklace covered in stones and turquoise earrings with gold trimming. Their Black and gold cane can be seen partially in front of them, tilted to the left.]
Lynx Sainte-Marie
Lynx Sainte-Marie is a disabled/chronically ill, non-binary/genderfluid, Afro+Goth Poet of the Jamaican diaspora with ancestral roots indigenous to Africa and the British Isles, living on stolen Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat land (Greater Toronto Area). They are the founder of QueerofGender, a grassroots organization and transnational visibility project, dedicated to celebrating gender within LGBTTQQ2SIAP+ Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) communities. Lynx is also the creator of #BlackSpoonieSpeak, a creative writing workshop series for Black disabled/chronically ill youth on the margins. A writer, multimedium artist, activist, educator, agitator and community builder, Lynx’s work and art is informed by Black feminism(s), collective community love and social, disability and healing justice movements. http://lynxsaintemarie.com.
Emily Schwartz
Emily Schwartz is a Deaf writer. This is her first publication.
[Image Description: A color photograph of a white man with dark brown hair and stubble on his chin. He's standing in front of a stone building beside a plaque wearing a blue and white checkered button-down shirt.]
Whittier Strong
Whittier Strong is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He is a regular contributor to The Good Men Project and Anthropoid. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Apogee, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology, and elsewhere. His full portfolio is available at http://clippings.me/whittierstrong. Twitter: @WhitNate
[Image Description: A white girl in her mid-twenties smiles brightly at the camera. She’s visible from the chest up. She wears a black and white patterned dress, multi-colored frames, and has a blond pixie-cut. Behind her is the blurry glimpse of a coffee shop.]
Kayla Whaley
Kayla Whaley is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a senior editor at Disability in Kidlit, a site dedicated to discussing the portrayal of disability in middle grade and young adult literature. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Toast, The Establishment, Michigan Quarterly Review, Uncanny Magazine, and the young adult anthology Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World. She can usually be found buying way too many books or being overly sincere on the internet.
[Image Description: Color photograph of the painter Nimue, a young curly-haired Chinese Jamaican Hispanic girl with a mysterious half-smile. She holds out her left hand in a peace/victory sign, and the camera foreshortening makes her hands huge.]
Nimue Fong Yee
Nimue Fong Yee is a 7-year-old artist with Hypermobilty Syndrome (also known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) along with other health issues. She was diagnosed with Hypermobility Syndrome at 3 years old alongside with her mother.
In 2013 Nimue started painting at 4 years old. This was a year after witnessing the traumatic event of her mother dislocating, falling down the stairs, and being knocked unconscious. Her art helped her in the therapeutic sense and has improved emotionally since she started. She mostly paints flowers and landscapes because that is relaxing to her.
Nimue was featured in an article written about her art in the Sun-Sentinel in 2014. She enjoys spreading awareness of her syndrome with her paintings. It is important to her that other Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome families don't have the same difficulties her own family is experiencing.