Interviews by Brainard Carey

Jennifer Natalya Fink won the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction in 2017 for Bhopal Dance (which is now a finalist for the Lambda Award),  and the Dana Award for the Novel for The Mikvah Queen. 

She is a professor at Georgetown University, where she helped found the Program in Disability Studies, and is the author of five other books.

She founded The Gorilla Press, a nonprofit aimed at promoting literacy through bookmaking. Fink is at work on All Our Families: Finding Our Disability Lineage, a disability memoir, and A Mischief, a novel about rats, love, and catastrophe.

Rob Neilson is the Frederick R. Layton Professor of Art and Associate Professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Born and raised in Detroit, he received a BFA in Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Rob has exhibited his sculpture and drawings at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces nationally and internationally.

Neilson has created public art commissions throughout the United States, including projects in California, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington.

In 2006 Rob was Artist in Residence at the Kohler Arts/Industry program and has been a visiting artist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Virginia Tech University, Longwood University (Virginia), Dickinson College (Pennsylvania), Millikin University (Illinois), and California State University.

Rob Neilson is represented by the Frank Juarez Gallery in Milwaukee.

Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin MDF and milk paint 17” x 15 x 10” 2016

Unboundedness, Steel, paint, 120” x 60” x 20”, Long Beach, CA, 2014

Fruits of Labor, Carbon reinforced plastic, steel, 168” x 108” x 96”, Los Angeles, CA, 2003

Steven Sanchez’s debut book, Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), was selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award.

A CantoMundo Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, and winner of the inaugural García Lorca Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared or will appear in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Nimrod, and elsewhere.

Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to America in 1990. She is the author of the lyric memoir, Mother Winter (S&S, 2019), and is a feminist writer and painter living in Portland, OR with her two children.

She has been published in Electric Lit, Guernica, Entropy, Vela, The Rumpus, Lit Hub and many others.

A collaborative, epistolary piece about mothering while writing with the author of Red Clocks, Leni Zumas, is forthcoming in Guernica this May.

Links to the next two tour dates, which are Cleveland, April 23 and Nashville April 27 and 28th.

Sometimes I Wish I Was Your Lover, 24x42, Oil and Acrylic

Inez Tan is the author of This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone: Stories (Epigram Books, 2018), which was a national bestseller in Singapore. Her writing has won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been featured in Rattle, Hyphen, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Fairy Tale Review.

In 2017 she was a Fellow of Kundiman, a national organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing.

She holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at the University of California, Irvine.

This Is Where I Won't Be Alone sold out at the book launch at Kinokuniya Bookstore, Singapore.

This Is Where I Won't Be Alone features stories on home and belonging, set in Singapore and abroad.

Eileen Murphy has spent her life along the Hudson River and has lived in Brooklyn, NY for the last fifteen years. Her current paintings are based on the landscape of Columbia County, NY, where she spends part of her time. 

Eileen has shown widely in New York City and the metropolitan area, and was awarded residencies to the Vermont Studio Center in 2004 and to Yaddo in 2013 and 2017. She received the Individual Artist Award from the Santo Foundation in 2017; in that same year, she was  invited by the US Department of State to participate in the Art in the Embassies program. Her work is currently on view at the American Embassy in Algiers, Algeria, and in 2018 Eileen was invited to that city to give a workshop and a series of lectures. Her work can currently be seen at Garvey|Simon in New York City and at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York.

Elegy V (The Lost Carpet Of The Great Beyond), oil on panel, 16” X 16,” 2019

Elegy III (A Slower Sap Rises In Our Arms), oil on panel, 16” X 16,” 2018

Julia Paull is an artist living in Los Angeles CA.  She is a grant recipient of a USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative, Documenting the Breeding of Endangered Species (Galapagos Islands, Costa Rica, Panama, and California)as well as a Durfee Foundation grant recipient for Project 21, a Pictorial History of Kagel Canyon, CA. She was the 2018 Artist in Residence at the Theodore Payne Foundation, as well as a resident at the Hambidge Center, Georgia.  Paull is a former resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute International Water Rights Residency, New Mexico. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Perfect MasonTheodore Payne Foundation, Sun Valley, CA, Increasing the Magnitude of a Property, Custom Cabinets, Los Angeles, CA Double Life, Corridor 2122, Fresno, CA, The Sum of the Sun, Calame Studios Presents, Los Angeles, CA, Drawn in Nature, Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico, and In Harm’s Way, Central Booking, NYC. As a gardener Paull grew Site #28 for the seed initiative Wildflowering LA. Julia received a BA from the University of California Santa Barbara and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is an Associate Professor of teaching at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Learn more on her Instagram Account.

Perfect Mason (California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica; and Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa), 2018, 9.25 x 14 inches, pigment print

Untitled, I am Me, You are You, 2014 - 2018 10 x 8 inches, Unique Chromogenic Print

Stephanie Strickland’s 10 books of poetry include How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected (2019 Ahsahta) and Ringing the Changes, a code-generated project for print based on the ancient art of tower bell-ringing (Fall 2019 Counterpath). Her other books include Dragon Logic and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil. Her print work garnered two Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prizes and the Sandeen, Brittingham, NEH, NEA, Boston Review, Pushcart, and Best American Poetry awards. Her co-authored eleven works of electronic literature include slippingglimpse, which maps text to Atlantic wave patterns; House of Trust, an homage to free public libraries; and Hours of the Night, an MP4 PowerPoint poem probing age and sleep.

Strickland has written, as well, a number of essays about digital literature. An interview treating her practice extensively appears in CounterText and is freely accessible. A member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, Strickland edited Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1. Her work across print and multiple media is being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University. For more information, visit her website.

In this interview she read a poem that can be seen here.

Portrait of Pam Glick by Julian Montague, in background; "Pink Dowers" 72"x 72" flashe and aqua cote on canvas 2018

I am Pam Glick. I was born in Albany Georgia in 1956. I grew up in Buffalo New York, graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1980 and moved to New York in 1980.  I lived there until 1995 when I moved to Brookline Vermont near Brattelboro. I had two boys and stayed there until 2014. I moved back to Buffalo and got an MFA from the University of Buffalo last year. Now I live and work in Buffalo.

The book mentioned in the interview is "Ninth Street Women" by Mary Gabriel

"For My Brother" 60"x60" flashe and aquacote on unprimed canvas 2019

"Niagara USA Canada" 2019 60"x60" Aqua cote on unprimed canvas 2019

" Niagara USA Canada" aqua cote and Flashe on unprimed canvas 72"x 72" 2019

Ginger Balizer-Hendler is a Long Island Based artist, whose vibrant primitive work is based on her love for storytelling. In 2013, Ginger received an artist residency at The Vermont Studio center, where she completed  a 17 1/2’ canvas,The Adventures of Gingerella, based on a recent journey to India.

In 2014, The Adventures of Gingerella and the Peaceful Planet Project , an art installation, was featured as part of The East End Arts Council’s JumpstART program to revitalize downtown Riverhead, New York. The multi-media installation featured her love for Indian miniatures and the Buddhist concept of ahimsa( sanskrit for non-injury), inviting viewers to participate through poetry and performance.

Her recent book, The Adventures of Gingerella was published in November, 2015 and she is currently working on an opera based on this work.

Her recent series of paintings is evocative of ancient symbols and mythology inspired by her travels to India and Morocco. Mother Earth’s Party Dress, a mixed media piece, received an Award of Merit from the Long Island Biennial in 2012. She was featured in the 2014 July/ August issue of Long Island Pulse Magazine and is a former contributing writer for Art Times.

Most recently, Ginger was interviewed for My Long Island TV by Waldo Cabrera, featuring her innovative mixed media art dresses. She is continuing work on her Dreamscape paintings as well as exploring the dress as art form, through the use of fabric and hand stitching.

Ganesh and the Lotus Flowers, 36x 36, Acrylic, 2013

Mother Earth's Party Dress, Mixed Media,  35"x35", 2012