From top, left to right:

Charles Tisa, Visual Arts; Brooklyn, NY –

Charles (Chuck) is a painter who lives in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia, PA. His awards include the Philadelphia Mayors Award for Artistic Achievement, the Cresson Traveling Scholarship to Europe, the Alexander Award for Painting, and the Hewlett Packard Prize for Painting. His recent group exhibitions include “When You Come Into the World” at Petty Cash Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, “Porous Modes,” curated by Marine Cornuet and Field Projects, ”Self Indulgence,” Hampden Gallery, Amherst MA, “Stone Cold Nasty” at Orgy Park Gallery in Brooklyn NY, and “The Philadelphia Story” at the Asheville Museum at Pack Place, Asheville, NC.

Sreshtha Sen, Poetry; Jackson Heights, NY – Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow –

Sreshtha is a poet from Delhi, India. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University, completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and their PhD at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, Gulf Coast, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Margins,Mcsweeney’s, Rumpus and elsewhere. A 2024-25 AAWW Margins Fellow, she has previously worked at Poets & Writers, The Believer, and UNLV, and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in expository writing at NYU.

Jessica Seigel, Playwriting; Washington, DC –

Jessie’s play, Tinkers Damn, recently received two professional staged readings (November 2021 and October 2023) by Rose Theatre in its First Draft Series. In addition, an excerpt of the play was solicited by and published in The Pen Woman (2023).  Seigel has twice been awarded an individual artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She has been a finalist for a grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation, as well as for the Claymore Award, the Novel Slices Award, and the 47th New Millennium Award.. Her work has also been a semi-finalist for the William Faulkner Creative Writing Award for the Novel and the Eludia Award.
\Seigel’s fiction has appeared in Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Daily Science Fiction, and The Satirist, as well as the anthologies Electric Grace, Furious Gravity, and the London Reader’s Murder or Mystery?, among other publications. Her poetry has appeared in Response, a
Contemporary Jewish Review, and The Boston Jewish Times (where, for two years, her poetry was featured bi-weekly on the editorial page).

Seigel has an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She is an associate editor at the Potomac Review, writes book reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books, and is a political columnist at My Washington Whispers, www.mywashintonwhispers.com. She also practiced law as a government attorney for many years.

Lanie Gannon, Visual Arts; Nashville, TN –

Lanie is a multi-media artist whose most recent projects use paint and paper as tools to create works that explore the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. Her exploratory process is to push paper from its flat surface into structural forms that engage with ideas of space, tension, and support. Inspired by architectural elements such as trusses, arches, and grids, Lanie draws parallels between these structural forms and the skeletal structures of the human body, including the rib cage, joints, and ligaments. Lanie has a particular fondness for flying buttresses, which provide both a decorative element imparting an airy lightness, but also play a crucial role in providing structural support. 

Her interest in patterns of structural support in architecture began in 2019, when she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. This experience sparked her interest in using paper to create three-dimensional installations that explore the intersection of form, materials, and the physical world around us. Lanie is a recipient of fellowships including the 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, the Tennessee Arts Commission/Owens-Corning Visual Arts Fellowship in 1994, and the Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2000. She taught sculpture for eighteen years at Belmont University and co-founded the Nashville Lost Boys of Sudan Foundation, serving on the board from 2004 to 2015. For twenty-five years, Lanie has been designing and fabricating art installations for children’s hospitals and schools. In addition to her work in multi-media art, Lanie has also written and published two books. “Nom de Plume” is a book of drawings, published in 1990, and “Book of Ruby” is an illustrated story about Lanie’s neighbor, Ruby, who grew up in rural Tennessee.

Adam Linn, Visual Arts; Mount Vernon, NY – Working across painting, printmaking and drawing, Adam conjures alternate realities of animate hybrids with an attention to seductive surfaces and forms. His work is informed by his own childhood self-discovery through cartooned and non-human worlds and his interest in understanding sexuality outside the bounds of human existence. Both humorous and sinister, Linn’s work taps into a collective feeling of desire through the exploration of touch. 

Linn received a BFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and a MFA in Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, NY.  He has had solo exhibitions with Marvin Gardens in Ridgewood, NY, Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and JPS Gallery in Tokyo, JP. Linn has participated in two person and group exhibitions at Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY, Hexum Gallery in Montpelier, VT, Steve Turner Gallery in LA, Martha’s Contemporary in Austin, TX, Prior Art Space in Berlin, Germany, Shin Gallery in New York, NY, the Curators Room in Barcelona, Spain and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, PA, among others.

Hiram Perez, Non-Fiction; Poughkeepsie, NY – Vassar College Fellow

Hiram’s first book, A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (NYU Press), won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies in 2016. He has published essays in Social Text, Camera Obscura, The Scholar & Feminist Online, The Journal of Homosexuality, The Margins, and Transformations. His work has also appeared in the edited collections Reading Brokeback Mountain, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, and Asian American Studies Now. He is currently at work on a memoir, Mongrel Love, where he explores the relationship between racial embodiment and shame.

Piyali Bhattacharya, Fiction; Philadelphia, PA –

Piyali is a fiction and nonfiction writer, and Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania’s Creative Writing Program. Her novel-in-progress, An Inventory of Errors, was twice runner up for the Key West Literary Seminar Novel-in-Progress Award. Bhattacharya is the editor of the National Endowment for the Arts grant-winning anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, 2016). The book was awarded gold medals from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Indie Next Book Awards. Good Girls Marry Doctors is currently in development with Netflix as a dramedy series.

She has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 2020, and in 2022 was awarded the endowed Abrams chair in Creative Writing. Immediately following, she was awarded the Beltran Prize for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring. Both honor the work she does in and out of the classroom for students of color and other marginalized groups.

Bhattacharya holds a B.A. in English Literature from Bryn Mawr College (2007), an M.A. in Critical Media and Ethnography from SOAS—University of London (2009), and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin—Madison (2016), where she was awarded the Peter Straub Prize for Fiction