Sandra Lynn Hutchison is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of two poetry collections, The Art of Nesting (GR Books) and The Beautiful Foolishness of Things, which was a finalist for the Poet’s Corner Chapbook Contest. She is also the author of Chinese Brushstrokes (Turnstone Press), a collection of stories drawn from her years living in China, and of a forthcoming memoir, Reading Like a Lover. Her translation, with Shahin Mowzoon, of Mahvash Sabet’s second volume of prison poems, A Tale of Love, with an introduction by Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi, was published by GR Books in 2024. She has published numerous essays and her stories have appeared in publications such as Chinese Pen: Western Ink, the Oxford anthology of stories about China. She serves as editor of elixir (https://www.elixir-journal.org), an online journal of the arts she founded in 2015 to showcase art that celebrates the power of spirit. Hutchison holds a Ph.D. in English literature (Modern Poetry) from the University of Toronto and has been the recipient of various academic and literary awards. She lives in Orono, Maine, where she mentors writers in courses in creative writing and serves as faculty for the BIHE (Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education), an online university that offers higher education to Bahai youth who are banned from attending public universities in Iran.
Kate Kemper is an Intermedia MFA student at the University of Maine. The core theme of her work is connection and disconnection—exploring human relationships to place, other species, and each other. Drawing from an anthropology background, she makes work in response to the contemporary context of the “polycrisis,” crises of meaning, loneliness, disconnection, overconsumption, and human’s material impact on the planet. Kate sees a fractured and violent world, and has made it her life’s work to move against that grain, towards light, connection, community, locality, and stillness.
