Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist currently living in Los Angeles. She is the Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project and author of Continuum (2023) and Confirmation Bias (2019), both available from Metatron Press. Her work has appeared in Blush Lit, Cixous72, DIAGRAM, Newest York, Peace On Earth Review, and elsewhere.
William Archila was awarded the 2023 Jack Hauser fellowship. He is the author of The Art of Exile, which was awarded theInternational Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Theatre Under My Skin: Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land. He has work forthcoming in Copper Nickle, Southern Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Salamander and Guesthouse.
Maia Asshaq (Shikwana)
Mandy Kahn is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Holy Doors (Hat & Beard Editions, 2023). Kahn’s poems have been included in the Best American Poetry anthology series and in former poet laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry. Kahn has given readings at Cambridge University, the London Review Bookshop and Shoreditch House in the UK, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and at the New School in New York, and she serves as the writer-in-residence at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.
Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and advisor in new media art and emerging technologies. He is the author of I Create Like the Word: Poetry in the Age of Machine Intelligence (Black Ocean, 2024) and for many years edited the Best American Experimental Writing anthology (Wesleyan University Press). He is Senior Curator and Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum, Arts & Culture Advisor for Protocol Labs, and an Affiliate of the metaLAB at Harvard and Institute for the Future. His writing appears in Architectural Design, Flash Art, NBC News, The Verge, and WIRED, and recent curated exhibitions include Conjured Terrain at Vellum LA, Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems at Nxt Museum, PROOF OF ART at Francisco Carolinum Linz, and Synthetic Wilderness at Honor Fraser Gallery. Damiani lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he runs the Reality Studies newsletter and podcast.
September 9, 5:00PM at MSC Gallery in Omaha: Sophie Clark, Moisés Delgado, Maison Horton, Luke Koestens, Dylan Leslie, Lee Riggs, Christine Stromberg
September 2, 4:00PM at MSC Gallery in Omaha:
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Their books include The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), and a forthcoming collection of autofictions, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (2024). A co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles, Carmody has recently moved to Omaha, to join the Writers’ Workshop at University of Nebraska Omaha as an Assistant Professor in Fiction.
Maritza Estrada earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University, where she served as the Inaugural Artistic Development and Research Assistant for the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, created by Natalie Diaz. Born in Toppenish, Washington to Mexican parents, she calls Phoenix, Mexico City, and Paris, home.
Noni Williams is a poet, storyteller, mathematician, and a senior data professional with a background in nonprofit data analysis in Omaha, Nebraska. Noni has spent the last decade as a performance poet and a teaching artist. Noni finds purpose in using mathematical concepts to explore the perceived world around her and fostering the joy of that exploration in others. She believes that everyone can be a math person, even you!
Todd Robinson has read his Star Trek love poems to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, to the California rock band Cake, and to Del Weber, former chancellor of UNO, where Dr. Robinson has miseducated the world’s youth since 2006. He has officiated a dozen weddings and shared awkward elevator or escalator rides with Robin Williams, Helen Mirren, and Bob Kerrey, among other luminaries. Perhaps this is why he writes so little.
My name is Mark Sabaliauskas. The places I am from are vibrant, colorful, and old. The color of my childhood greatly influences my work and my life. It has leaked into everything. I started writing as a way to supplement my painting. It has become a way to be honest with myself and those around me, and a way to give myself goosebumps.
Chelsea Kavich
August 26, 5:00PM at the Little Italy MSC residency house in Omaha:
Trey Moody is the author of Autoblivion (Conduit Books, forthcoming 2023), winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, and Thought That Nature (Sarabande Books, 2014), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, and New England Review and received the Poetry Society of America’s 2023 Robert H. Winner Award. He teaches at Creighton University and lives with his daughter in Omaha, Nebraska.
Lara Schoorl is a writer and art historian.
Ken White is a poet and screenwriter who received his MFA from the University of Montana. He co-wrote and co-produced the feature film Winter in the Blood, directed and co-wrote the short films Universal VIP, andThe Conservationist, as well as wrote and directed the supernatural horror feature Wed the Dark, which is currently in post-production. White is the author of three books of poetry: Eidolon, The Getty Fiend, and Middlemost Constantine. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Versal, Spork, Horsethief, EuropeNow, Poets.org, and BOMB Magazine, among others.
CLOSE DISTANCE 