Woman Made Gallery Presents: It’s About Time
By Woman Made Gallery
Woman Made Gallery Presents: It’s About Time
By Woman Made GalleryEarly or late, young or old, past and present. Time engulfs and carries us by seconds, centuries, and increments between. If we can’t keep up, we fall behind. We are influenced by history, from what came before, for better or worse. We are told that if we don’t learn from it, we’ll repeat it. Our aspirations, goals, even our fears for the future color our futures. We think of time as crawling, racing, or breathing down our necks. We take time, waste time, give our time. People say “act your age,” and speak of that which is timeless or slipping away. Time is the matrix through which we move: that for everything there is a season, and the times, they are a-changing.
Featured readers include JoAnn Balingit, Ariana Nadia Nash, Erika Mikkalo, Lynn Pattison, Keli Stewart, and Angela Torres.
JoAnn Balingit is the author of Your Heart and How It Works, and Forage, winner of the Whitebird Chapbook Prize. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, PoetsArtists, Salt Hill Journal, and Verse Daily. JoAnn served as guest editor forDelaware Poetry Review’s Summer 2012 issue. Appointed Delaware’s poet laureate in 2008, JoAnn teaches poetry for schools, detention centers and non-profits. She coordinates Delaware’s Scholastic Writing Awards for students, grades 7–12.
Stefania Gomez is an incoming Senior at University of Chicago high school. She is a spoken word poet and placed seventh in individual finals at this year’s Louder Than A Bomb teen poetry festival. This spring, she worked with Regina Taylor and several other talented young women poets in the Yolanda Project to workshop her play Crowns, playing this summer at the Goodman Theater. Stefania wishes to incite a poetic, feminist revolution. Her featured poem focuses on the coming-of-age aspect of time and uses four pillars of coming-of-age towards that end: a first haircut, a first period, a first love, first real writing/expressive experience.
Erika Mikkalo lives and works in Chicago. Her writing has received the Tobias Wolff Award for short fiction from The Bellingham Review, and has appeared in various publications, including Nimrod, The 2nd Hand, Exquisite Corpse, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, POM, The Columbia Poetry Review, fence, Moonlit, Another Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Review.
Ariana Nadia Nash is the author of the collection Instructions for Preparing Your Skin, which won the 2011 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. She is also the author of the chapbook, Our Blood Is Singing, which is forthcoming from Chicago’s Damask Press. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and a MacDowell Colony residency. Her work most recently appeared in The Mom Egg and Rock & Sling, and is forthcoming from The Journal for Compressed Creative Arts. Ariana is a very recent transplant to Chicago, and Illinois will be the fifth state she’ll call home, after California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Hawaii.
Lynn Pattison’s poems have appeared in The Notre Dame Review, Heliotrope, Rhino, Controlled Burn, Rattle, and Atlanta Review, among others, and been anthologized in several collections. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she is the author of two chapbooks: Tesla’s daughter (March St. Press, 2005) and Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press, 2006), and the book Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press, 2006).
Keli Stewart’s work has appeared in Quiddity, Meridians, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Hip Mama, On Becoming, and Calyx among other journals. She received artist fellowships from Hedgebrook, where she was awarded the 2010 Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Award, and the Augusta Savage Gallery’s Arts International Residency Program. She is also the recipient of the 2010 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award from the Illinois Center of the Book, Emerging Writers Competition. Her first manuscript is forthcoming from Benu Press.
Angela Narciso Torres completed her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson and received a Ragdale fellowship in 2010. Her recent work is available in Cimarron, Colorado, Crab Orchard, Cream City, and North American Reviews, and in the anthology, A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Her first book manuscript was named finalist in the Crab Orchard, Philip Levine and Brittingham/Pollak Poetry Prize contests. She serves as an editor for RHINO.
