FROM TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:
Nur Nasreen Ibrahim — Fiction/Non-Fiction; NY, NY — Nur is a journalist, writer, and producer based in New York City. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she writes speculative and literary fiction, as well as personal essays. Her fiction and nonfiction has been included in anthologies and collections from Harper Perennial, Catapult, Hachette India, Platypus Press, The Aleph Review, Salmagundi magazine, Barrelhouse, and more. She is a two-time finalist for The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, and a senior editor with the South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG) Anthology. she/herRobin Croft, Visual Arts; Manassas, VA – Robin’s painting career began with a 12-year, self-imposed period of abstention from entering exhibitions and seeking gallery representation, as he transitioned from painting toward sculpture. His employment toggled from blue-collar construction jobs to corporate design and marketing positions. He is currently in his 15th year as a building maintenance worker. During all forms of employment, Robin maintains a studio practice in conceptual sculpture and drawing. In addition, he has curated exhibitions in Maryland, Northern Virginia and Richmond.
Robin Croft — Visual Arts; Manassas, VA — Robin’s painting career began with a 12-year, self-imposed period of abstention from entering exhibitions and seeking gallery representation, as he transitioned from painting toward sculpture. His employment toggled from blue-collar construction jobs to corporate design and marketing positions. He is currently in his 15th year as a building maintenance worker. During all forms of employment, Robin maintains a studio practice in conceptual sculpture and drawing. In addition, he has curated exhibitions in Maryland, Northern Virginia and Richmond. Invited to residencies at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Azule Arts in North Carolina, Robin fashioned original outdoor pieces for each. At VCCA, an homage to Van Gogh’s “Sower” paintings took the form of a standing winged maple seed, which was suspended between small saplings and made of gleaned deadfall. At Azule Arts, he collaborated with Marcos Smyth in creating a proscenium stage woven of limbs that formed drawn-back curtains to reveal Smyth’s large-scale, mythic figures in the vale beyond. Recently, Robin installed another “Sower” made of deadfall and grape vines at the Robinson Nature Center in Columbia, MD. This work’s veined wing formed a 14ft high alcove as it arched over from its pod to touch the ground. Visitors could assemble under it for their photographs. Robin’s art seeks a delicate balance between aesthetics, intellect and introspection. As a youth, Impressionism’s soft forms, luscious colors and buttery impasto offered pleasing temptations. With maturity, education and self-reflection, his concept of “beauty” rapidly evolved into an eclectic stew of art and autobiographical influences. As the son of a maternal suicide, Croft grew up racist in a religious family, during a period of racism, integration, political assassinations and the Vietnam War, leaving little patience for impotent art. Absurdity, tragicomedy, loss, racial atonement and homage are frequent thematic touchstones.
Julia Forrest — Visual Arts; Brooklyn, NY — Julia works in film and prints in a travel size darkroom that she builds on location. Her own art has always been her top priority in life and in this digital world, she will continue to work with old processing. Anything can simply be done in photoshop, she prefers to take the camera, a tool traditionally used for documenting, and experiment with what she can do in front of the lens. Julia uses mirrors, reflections, and forced perspective to create her illusionary work. She references the historical fine-art connection of the femme form with the natural landscape. The woman are seen as mythological spirits: building the landscape, destroying it, and transforming it with ease. Because the landscape is ever changing due to societies greed and global warming, Julia hopes to regain the connection to the environment that has been lost. Her work will never see completion because the landscape is in constant change. By relying on residencies to create new photographs, she is constantly seeing new environments to photograph within a creative community. She makes connections with local woman and the landscapes that are person to them. Julia is a grant recipient of NYFA, The Jerome Foundation, and The National Endowment of the Arts. Her grants allow her to travel and show throughout the United States. Internationally she has photographed Morocco, Taiwan, Spain, Norway, Cyprus, amongst others. She is currently working as a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum and Lehman College. As an instructor, she thinks it is important to understand that a person can constantly stretch and push the boundaries of their ideas with whatever medium of art they choose. Her goal is for her audience to not only enjoy learning about photography, but to see the world in an entirely new way and continue to develop a future interest in the arts. Her work encourages people to savor what is around them and become aware that nothing will remain untouched unless hard work is put into place to keep it.
Rita Grendze — Visual Arts; Geneva, IL – Rita is a sculptor making art work from ordinary objects. Both her undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as her year of study on a Fulbright Grant, focused on fiber art. For Grendze this has translated into a lifelong love of process and abundant, accumulative materials. Grendze has taught at Maryland Institute, College of Art in the Fiber and Foundations departments, as well as at Jersey City University. Grendze has received project grants from the Illinois Arts Council, American Latvian Association, Latvian Foundation, and the US Embassy to Latvia. Since moving to the Chicago area in 2001, she has created props for outdoor spectacles, has taught community workshops in Chicago and the suburbs, and currently manages and curates a local non-profit art gallery. Grendze completed several commissions, most notably for Aurora University’s experimental residence for the neuro-diverse student. She is best known for her large-scale, impermanent installations such as those for the Krasl Museum in St. Joseph; MI, for the Latvian National Library, in Riga, Latvia; for the Art Farm Dtour, Reedsburg, WI and most recently for the Schingoethe Center, Aurora, IL. Her work is in both private and public collections that includes the Art in Embassies program.
Sandra Simonds — Poetry; Tallahassee, FL — Sandra is a Visiting Professor in the Literature department at Bennington College in Vermont. She received her PhD in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Florida State University in 2009 and has been a full time Associate Professor of English at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia since 2009. All eight of her collections of poetry explore the intersection of feminism and late capitalism. Atopia, her seventh book, which The New Yorker says, “sings of the absurdities, inanities, and injustices that pervade modern life,” is an epic grappling with the political climate of the United States since November 2016. Poems from her books have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Boston Review, Granta, and The American Poetry Review. Simonds’s scholarly writing centers on the leftist politics of both contemporary poets and modernists. In both “Riot Girl,” and “Why Ruin Everyone’s Life for Dolls?” she examines experimental form and female agency in the work of Chelsey Minnis and Kate Durbin. She has also written about Victoria Chang’s Obit and the way avant-garde and traditional forms intersect with motherhood. She also participated in a roundtable at the Poetry Project in New York City that investigated the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s participation in a reading at the White House and the political ramifications of this event. In addition, she has reviewed books by Roger Reeves, Heather McHugh, Major Jackson, Carolyn Forché, and Danez Smith for The New York Times. Her teaching experiences are intimately entwined with her poetic output. At Bennington, she created a wide variety of classes including a class on Romance Literature of the Middle Ages, a class on Confessional Poetry and a class on the theme of ghosts in the 19th century. Throughout her career, she has championed the belief both inside and outside of the classroom that poetry should challenge the norms, values and beliefs that we hold, not simply conform or confirm them. That is why she consistently writes about women, class struggle, and social change. Her work is accessible yet challenges people to think about the world around them and to think about what wealth inequality does to human relationships. She hopes to continue to transform the lives around her through a combination of her steadfast dedication to poetry.
Gnaomi Siemens — Poetry; NY, NY — Gnaomi has an M.F.A. in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University School of The Arts. Her work can be found at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Believer, Slice Magazine, Portland Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, and Seneca Review, among others. She has read her translations at The British Library in London, was selected by The Poetry Society of New York for a residency at the iconic Mid-Manhattan branch of The New York Public Library, and was a 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow. She collaborated with the UK artist, Morag Eaton, on an artist book with her translations of Old Scots horoscopes, and has given many talks and readings in the states and abroad. Her first manuscript, The Errant, was a finalist for the 2020 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.
Tobi Kassim — Poetry, New Haven, CT — Tobi was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has lived in the United States since 2003. His work has been supported by a Stadler Center Undergraduate fellowship and an Undocupoets fellowship, as well as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a residency at Stove Works. He is the assistant poetry editor for West Branch. He won Yale University’s Sean T. Lannan poetry prize and his poems have been published in The Volta, The Brooklyn Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Zocalo Public Square. He currently lives in New Haven, CT.