Elliot Gordon Mercer, Visual Arts; Chicago, IL –
Elliot is a queer interdisciplinary artist, performance scholar, and expressive arts therapist. His creative practice investigates the intersections of performance and visual art, with an emphasis in postmodernism and queer theory. While his work is always rooted in the body, Mercer’s multimodal art practice shifts between photography, film, dance, and drag. His projects interweave his creative interest in queer storytelling, artistic practice with multimedia performance scoring, and academic research on questions of legacy and historical knowing.
Mercer holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. He is a graduate of the Tamalpa Institute’s professional training program in expressive arts therapy. As a performer and director, Mercer is an authorized transmitter of choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s dance repertoire and he has staged Anna Halprin’s intermedia theatre works internationally. Mercer is currently an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Mercer’s creative research has been supported by a Mellon Foundation Digital Storytelling Grant, MacDowell Fellowship, and the California State Parks. In 2021 his short film “Sensorium” premiered at Frameline San Francisco LGBTQ Film Festival. His co-edited book “Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance” is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press. www.elliotgordonmercer.com/ he/him
Frances Choe (F.E. Choe), Fiction; Greenville, SC –
F.E. Choe is a Canadian and Korean-American writer whose fiction explores family, power, and identity often through a speculative lens. Her characters navigate haunted spaces as intimate as their own bodies, as routine and suburban as the halls of a sprawling North American public high school, as vast and unmapped as the reaches of space while they doggedly search for wonder, purpose, meaning, and belonging. Her work has been published in Clarkesworld, The Moth Magazine , Fractured Lit and adda. She is a 2023 graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise workshops, and an Editor at 100 Word Story at 100 Word Story and is South Arts’ 2024 South Carolina Fellow for Literary Arts.
Izzy Ampil, Non-Fiction; Brooklyn, NY – Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow –
Izzy was born in the Bronx and now lives in Brooklyn. She is, among other things, a Margins Fellow in Fiction at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, a fact-checker at The Paris Review and The American Scholar, and a writer whose work appears in Reboot, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed News, and The Wall Street Journal.
Johanna Keller Flores, PW; Saint Paul, MN –
Johanna is a Peruana American theatre artist who’s out here trying to tell stories close to her heart for her queer and trans Black and brown familia. She was born on the Dakota Land of St. Paul, Minnesota with roots in Chimbote, Peru. She is a 2022-23 Many Voices Mentee with the Playwright’s Center. Johanna has had the sincerest pleasure of creating in her Twin Cities home in recent years; assistant stage managing, writing, directing, and performing with Pangea World Theatre, Twin Cities Media Alliance, Teatro del Pueblo, Full Circle Theatre, Lightning Rod, 20% Theatre, Gadfly Theatre, BareBones Productions, Exposed Brick Theatre, and Threshold Theater.
Caprice Gray, Fiction; NY, NY –
Caprice holds a BA from Yale University, an SM from Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an MFA from New York University where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is a current Fellow with the Center for Fiction, and upcoming Resident with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her novel-in-progress was Longlisted for the 2023 First Pages Prize. She hails from traditionally Wecksquaesgeek territory, Harlem New York.
Candace Clement, Composing; Belchertown, MA (2nd ½ session) – Candace is a musician, organizer and artist from western Massachusetts. Candace has been playing in indie rock bands for twenty years and as such has worked nearly every angle associated with the process along the way. In the early 2010s she co-founded a small independent record label with her bandmates and released multiple artists on vinyl during an era where pressing plants were few and far between.
She has collaborated on several video productions (camera operation, storyboarding, production, editing) and co-produced, shot, edited and directed live video performances from artists like Emperor X, Mirah, Myriam Gendron, Nat Baldwin and Pile (solo). Candace has had the opportunity to share the stage with many incredible artists, including Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Cotton Candy (Mark Robinson), Thalia Zedek (Come) and
countless others. In 2022 she completed a brief tour with Bonnie Prince Billy (Will Oldham) as part of his backing band and as opening act with the band Footings. Her primary instruments are guitar, vocals and keys/synthesizers. When she isn’t making music with friends or creative project mischief with collaborators, she serves as the Managing Director for the national nonprofit advocacy organization Free Press that fights for a more just and equitable media and technology system in the United States through public policy change.
From top, right to left:
David Todd, Visual Arts; Austin, TX –
“I am a conservationist concerned about sustainability and equity. I have worked as the founder and executive director for the Conservation History
Association of Texas, as an environmental attorney for the Texas Air Control Board and various conservation non-profits, as co-owner and managing director for Wray-Todd Ranch, L.L.C. and SWT Cattle, L.L.C., and as a donor, co-founder and trustee for conservation non-profits.
Through the Conservation History Association of Texas, I am the co-author of two books about the history of conservation efforts in Texas. The first is The Texas Legacy Project – Stories of Courage and Conservation (Texas A&M Press; texaslegacy.org), based on over 250 video interviews with environmental activists in the state. The second book is The Texas Landscape Project – Nature and People (Texas A&M Press; texaslandscape.org) and is a data-based atlas with over 300 maps and figures about natural resource and public health protection in Texas. Since 2019, I have been working on a third in the series, also for Texas A&M Press, The Texas Fauna Project.” www.texasfauna.org
In addition, with Wray-Todd Ranch and SWT Cattle, I co-manage a beef cattle operation dedicated to habitat protection and native prairie restoration in Colorado and Fayette County, in central Texas. These firms have twice won the Lone Star Land Steward award from Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Outside of work, I help volunteer groups protect and restore natural resources in the state, and towards that, have worked as a grant maker through the Wray Charitable Trust, Magnolia Charitable Trust, and Chiltepin Charitable Fund, as a trustee for the Texas Conservation Alliance, Audubon Texas, Galveston Bay Foundation, Houston Arboretum and Botanical Society, and the Environmental Integrity Project, and as a co-founder of the Cullinan Park Conservancy (cullinanparkconservancy.org) and Blunn Creek Partnership d(blunncreekpartnership.org). Some of my pieces can be seen at www.texasnotebook.org.
Caprice Gray, Fiction; NY, NY (Full session) – Caprice holds a BA from Yale University, an SM from Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an MFA from New York University where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is a current Fellow with the Center for Fiction, and upcoming Resident with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her novel-in-progress was Longlisted for the 2023 First Pages Prize. She hails from traditionally Wecksquaesgeek territory, Harlem New York.
Elliot Menard, Composing; Santa Monica, CA –
Elliot is an opera-maker—a composer, vocal performer, producer, and grant writer. She is dedicated to bringing new opera-theater to life and exploring opera’s many forms. As a composer, she is interested in how text allows music to emerge and the expressive range of the voice. Her compositions have been programmed at the California Institute of the Arts, the N.E.O. Voice Festival, Open Gate Theater, and Renegade Opera. She is currently developing ORPHEUS/OVID, an opera that explores our dreams with lost loved ones through Ovid’s poetry on the Orpheus myth. Her academic background in vocal performance and ancient literature brings a deep knowledge of the voice and unique perspective on Latin poetry to her compositions. As a classically-trained mezzo-soprano, she performs vocal repertoire across all eras (from pre-baroque to contemporary), including operatic repertoire, art songs, Jewish cantorial music, jazz, improvisation, and extended techniques. She has recently performed in CalArts’ production of HERE BE SIRENS (Kate Soper) as Polyxo, New Opera Days Ostrava’s premiere of Partial Memories (Judith Berkson), and Renegade Opera’s live premiere of Adam’s Run (Ruby Fulton).
Her productorial practice centers on supporting emerging artists and living composers, particularly women and people of color. She is a Co-Founder of Renegade Opera, a Portland-based company dedicated to creating immersive and accessible opera and promoting institutional reform in the opera industry. As a grant writer, she redistributes wealth to increase access in the arts for audiences and artists. She is the Grants Coordinator for Urban Voices Project and also writes grants for the Resonance Collective, Renegade Opera, and independent artist projects. She holds an M.F.A. in Voice Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and a B.A. in Classics from Reed College. Originally from Brooklyn, NY and currently based in Los Angeles, CA (with 5 years in Portland, OR in between), she works in all three cities.
Sara Stites, Visual Arts; Thomaston, ME –
Sara’s work explores the dichotomy between tradition and anomaly, nature and artifice, male and female, life and death; shown in her work by intertwining organic, natural and fantastical elements that open a window to her world view. Her work has been in both one person and group shows in Miami, Hollywood, FL, Maine, Buenos Aires, Nice and Paris and is in the PAMM, MOAD, Good/Horvitz and Mosquera Collections in Miami in addition to other private collections. In recent years, her work has been featured in Voyage Magazine, Hyperallergic, Maine Arts Journal, Seymour magazine, and ‘100 degrees in the shade: A Survey of South Florida Art.’ BFA, Syracuse University. MFA Pratt Institute.
Alyson Mosquera Dutemple, Fiction; Metuchen, NJ –
“I am a fiction writer from New Jersey with an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. My work has appeared in more than three dozen literary magazines. My short story manuscript was a runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize and Texas Review Press’s George Garrett Award. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies (Best Microfiction and The Middle of the Sentence) and on podcasts (The Art of the Short and Short Story Today). I have been an invited guest panelist at conferences at Rutgers University and St. Peter’s University and a mentor in Adroit’s Summer Mentorship program for high school students.
In addition to prose writing, I am an optioned screenwriter whose scripts have received recognitions in the US and the UK. When not writing, I work as a creative writing instructor and freelance editor. I am an Associate Fiction editor for Pithead Chapel and a former Feedback Editor at CRAFT Literary.”