Looky Here Magazine Fall 2023: Issue#1 – contributor biographies:
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of 9 books, including AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. UK Penguin published two books in 2023, and a new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024 titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. Visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88
Casper Lucia
Catherine Bresner is the author of the chapbook The Merriam Webster Series; the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue 2017); and the empty season, which won the Diode Edition Book Prize in 2017. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the VOLTA, b l u s h, Denver Quarterly, Sixth Finch, Fonograf, Iterant, The Offing, Paperbag and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Juniper Summer Institute fellowship and the 2019 Cadence Residency through the Northwest Film Forum. Currently, she is the publicity director for Wave Books and lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts.
Chelsea Granger is a multidisciplinary artist. Painting, drawing, illustration, and murals are the foundation of her practice. She recently self-published a zine about death and grief titled So Many Ways to Draw a Ghost. After the death of her mom as well as a dear friend, she started seeing her art as a way to sing up life, with the hope that her art can act as a doorway to create conversations about death and grief. Chelsea’s art is of the everyday, inspired by the overlap of earth/spirit dimensions, and woods as church. She is interested in painting as medicine, painting as a portal, painting as prayer. Her work has been exhibited across the Northeast, and her murals exist across New England. For more than twelve years, Chelsea has collaborated with Thyme Herbal, making medicine posters and zines as well as creating the oracle deck Dirt Gems with long time collaborator Anne Louise Burdett. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from UMass-Amherst and a certificate in therapeutic recreation from Gateway Community College. Her work celebrates life while honoring death and walking gently into the unknown.
Chris Weisman is a musician living in Brattleboro, Vermont. He is working on a book of poetry for Looky Here, available in 2024.
Clover Ajamie is an artist and cartoonist working in Vermont. They make comics about queers, nature, and queers in nature. More of their work can be found on their website, cloverajamie.com, or on Instagram @rajamie.
Clark Jackson
Colleen Harriss is an artist currently living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her tandem drawing and performance practices use line, sequence, and gesture to illuminate human emotions, inter-object relations, and other earthly mysteries. She is co-founder of DOG EYE PRESS, publisher of artist books, zines, and other ephemera, and BAGBAG, a performance duo that uses props and unadorned movement to tell short stories about how we live.
David Russell
DJRDavid Jonathan Ross draws letters of all shapes and sizes for custom and retail typeface designs. A native of Los Angeles, he currently lives in the woods of Western Massachusetts. He began drawing typefaces at Hampshire College and joined The Font Bureau in 2007 where he honed his bézier-wrangling skills. Now he publishes his typeface designs at his own foundry, DJR, as well as working on projects with Type Network and developing unusual display faces for his Font of the Month Club.
Duncan Bullen
Hannah Brookman
Hannah Exum (she,they) and Jillian Marchetti (she,her) are life long best friends, western mass early educators, and queer soft hearted artists. They have come together in a collaboration of their original writing and illustration under the project name twobigsofties (@twobigsofties on Instagram). The heart of this project is an exploration of softness, vulnerability, self, and connection through visual art.
Kat Freeman is a good friend. Over time they have collected leaves, stones, seeds and stories. They believe in the power of community organizing, magic, and relationships to heal and change us. You can find them @smallbrightlightslikestars
Kel Warren is a writer from New England. Her short stories have appeared in Tilted House Review, Roi Fainéant, Seaside Gothic, The Mount Holyoke Review and elsewhere. Warren is currently a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College, where she received the 2023 Sydney Robertson McLean Short Story Prize. She was the recipient of a fellowship at the International Literary Seminars in Nairobi and Lamu, Kenya. Previously, she attended the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the founder of SARDINES Press and co-founder of the ROUGE Reading Series.
LMcNamara has been writing and self publishing since she was a kid. Drawing always came harder for her but after 50-some years of practice she offers a pic of her favorite subject, her beagle Ada, on a walk in Greenfield,MA
Maisie Sibbison-Alves is a white bad pescatarian bisexual elemental. She was born in franklin medical hospital in 1986 with a silver micron pen in her mouth. Maisie lives alone in a monastery at the edge of town and loves to draw.
Rivkah Gevison
Ruth Garbus (she/they) has been writing, performing, and recording music for two decades. Her most recent album, “Alive People,” was released on Orindal Records in August 2023 to much acclaim. Ruth is a singular vocalist who incorporates wild improvisatory freedom into her complex, soothing compositions that are rooted in multiple traditions, from folk to jazz and r&b. Currently she most often performs her solo material with elie mcafee-hahn and Nick Biscglia. She is also a member of the experimental quintet Gloyd as well as the trio Earth Flower with Sam Gendel and Phil Melanson. She also loves crossword puzzles.
Sarah Wisby is the author of two poetry books, Viva Loss and the heart’s progress. She lives with her dog, Otter, in Western Massachusetts.
Shea Mowat is a writer, illustrator, and experimental musician who was born in Maine to a lobsterman-artist and a social worker-seeker. He has worked as a roofer, bookstore clerk, housepainter, landscaper, and support person at a group home for those with severe mental illness. Shea lives just outside Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
Solomon Kahn
Stella Corso is the author of Green Knife (Rescue Press, 2023) and TANTRUM (Rescue Press, 2017) along with the chapbooks TabooVivant (b l u s h, 2022) and Wind & the Augur (Sixth Finch, 2021). She is a graduate of the MFA program at UMass-Amherst and a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets’ Theater (CRVPT). Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver where she acts as the Managing Editor for Denver Quarterly. She also works as a farmhand on Lost Greens Farm in Colorado and is busy writing her first novel.
Tayler Jones
Vanessa Brewster is a writer, musician, and educator living in Greenfield, MA.
