Looky Here Magazine Spring 2024: Issue#2 – contributor biographies:
Joel Seppa is a Western Mass based artist making drawings, paintings, and occasional zines and comics. He uses graphite, colored pencils, micron pens, watercolors, gouache, and acrylic. You can find his work at joltedjoel5000 on instagram.
Hilary Irons is a Maine-based painter and curator. She is gallery and exhibitions director at the University of New England and is represented by Dowling Walsh Gallery. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in ’08 and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in ’02, and she has attended residencies at the Albers Foundation, Skowhegan, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, the Pace House, Hewnoaks, the Canterbury Shaker Village, and the Surf Point Foundation. She has written for The Chart, Art New England, Boston Art Review, and other publications.
Kylie Gellatly is the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Kylie has received support from the Academy of American Poets, Vermont Studio Center, Juniper Writing Institute, and Disquiet International Literary Program. She currently serves as Managing Editor of Plant-Human Quarterly and Reviews Editor for Pleiades. For more, visit www.kyliegellatly.com
Sophie Foulkes is an artist, designer, and illustrator from Western Massachusetts who graduated from RISD with a BFA in Illustration. She enjoys creating fantastical imagery by experimenting with eccentric colors and textures. Her work is narrative and playful and is often inspired by personal experiences combined with natural phenomena. Sophie’s work strives to capture the emotions and excitement of a moment in order to share with others.
Beverly Ketch has been in the bands Bunwinkies, Viewer, Jow Jow and Stella Kola, as a songwriter singer and improviser. She also reads poetry with Weeping Bong Band. She is the co-creator of The Lovelights bringing Tableau Vivant and prettiest pucnic contests to Peskeumskut park, as well as a full length show for MCTV!
Elendë Connor is an interdisciplinary artist living in Franklin County. She has been making art depicting beds since 2018. Elendë often has to spend long periods of time in bed due to her chronic illness that she has had for her entire life. She views the bed as both a safe haven as well as an enclosure that keeps her from life outside its confines. This dichotomy fuels her interest in making images that include the bed as the main subject. At this time Elendë views bed imagery as symbolizing herself, therefore each art piece that includes a bed is also a self portrait. The majority of Elendë’s work is about living life as someone who is chronically ill and disabled. She hopes to share her personal experiences to better understand her own reality as well as create connections amongst individuals who struggle physically within their bodies. Find Elendë on Instagram @elendefinn.
Ana Two (@anatwocomics on Instagram) is a cartoonist and painter living in Vermont. They make noir, thriller, and romance comics that explore themes of Americana, religion, and queer desire.
Jayson Keery is based in Western Massachusetts, where they completed their MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They are the author of The Choice is Real (Metatron Press, 2023) and the chapbooks Astroturf (o•blēk editions, 2022) and Sleepover Nervous (Midnight Mass Press, 2024). Their work is forthcoming or has appeared in Cero, Shabby Doll House, Hot Pink, Boulevard, Black Warrior Review, b l u s h lit, Peach Mag, and others. They have been anthologized in Mundus Press’s Nocturnal Properties, Nightboat Books’ We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and Pilot Press London’s A Queer Anthology of Rage. They received the 2022 Metatron Prize for Rising Authors, selected by Fariha Róisín, and the 2021 Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship, selected by Wendy Xu. A complete list of publications, awards, and interviews live online at JaysonKeery.com. Instagram: @jayson_keery. Twitter: @JaysonKeery.
Rachel Guardiola is an interdisciplinary artist and naturalist with a studio practice that explores the intersection of science fiction, ecofeminism, and alternative ecologies through lens-based technology. She has been a recipient of the Hamiltonian Gallery Artist Fellowship and Studio Residency at School 33 Art Center. Guardiola has exhibited internationally with List í Ljósi, Wassaic Project, Ent Center for the Arts, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Vermont Center of Photography, The Halide Project, Rhizome DC, Center for the Holographic Arts, Analog Cookbook, Light City Baltimore, Artscape, Sydney College of the Arts, Dakar Biennale de l’Art Contemporain, Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (MoCA), and Washington Project for the Arts amongst others. She has been an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, A.I.R. Gallery Governors Island, Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition, HEIMA, Vermont Studio Center, and Atelier de Visu. Guardiola is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Art Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. She received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Sadie Dupuis is the guitarist, songwriter & singer of rock band Speedy Ortiz, as well as the producer & multi-instrumentalist behind pop project Sad13. Sadie heads the record label Wax Nine, edits its poetry journal, and is a regular contributor to Spin, Tape Op, Talkhouse, and more. She holds an MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, where she also taught writing. Mouthguard, her first book, was published in 2018 (Gramma); Cry Perfume, a second poetry collection, was released in 2022 (Black Ocean). She is an organizer with the Union of Musicians & Allied Workers and its local UMAW Philly.
Eva Lin Fahey (she/her) was born in Jingmen, China during the One Child Policy (1979 and 2015) and immigrated to the US. She became a US citizen at age 3. As one of over a quarter of a million children adopted internationally from China, her work exists within the context of this shared experience of cultural loss, personal migration, and separation. Eva’s artistic practice is centered in painting and explores themes of motherhood, intergenerational ties, and the East Asian diaspora. She was a 2023 ValleyCreates Capacity-Building Grantee through MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program and her work was recently featured in AGNI’s Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. Her work has been exhibited across Massachusetts and in El Dorado, AR.
Melanie Mac Caskie has a degree in education, which she uses to help students navigate the path to college, and a degree in literature, which she uses to appreciate life and its art. She lives and writes in an old house in Sunderland, MA, which she shares with her husband, baby, and a mischievous golden retriever named Tilly. This is her first publication.
Kacie Howard is a trans woman who has got it all figured out.
Jenny Terpsichore Abeles is a writer and educator living in Greenfield. Her stories have been published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Lackington’s Quarterly, New Dead Families, The Queen’s Head, and others. She’s currently looking for an agent or publisher for her novel, The Art of Death, about werewolves, matriarchy, and death cults in 16th-century Italy. It’s amazing! Hopefully you can read it someday.
Esther Solomon lives in Greenfield and enjoys making art with their community.
Stash White is an artist currently living and working in western Massachusetts.
Sean Collins is a poet and non-owning cat person, living in the shadow of Mt. Tom in Easthampton. He has a couple of out-of-print chapbooks, Planchette and Aerie, and with his partner, Maude Haak-Frendscho, co-organizes Press On: an annual, all-ages indie publishing festival.
Noelle McManus is a writer from Long Island, New York. Their work has been featured in Redivider, Eclectica, Vagabond City, and elsewhere.
Gordon Spencer-Blaetz is a musician and carpenter living in Western Massachusetts.
Lee Misenheimer lives somewhere between Western Mass + Brooklyn NY. He mostly likes to draw.
Maria Danielson is a dilettante scribbler, collage artist and DJ. Formerly a Dutch legal translator for 30ish years, she now runs Greenfield Records full-time with her partner, assisted sometimes by their two grown offspring. She was raised in Montana and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Yankle Candee has been studying astrology for twenty years. She incorporates tarot readings and the works of Robert Hand and Liz Greene into her predictive horoscope practice.
DJR David 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.