LAURA BELL

At Douglass College, Rutgers University, Laura studied with Fluxus artist Robert Watts, who gave her a deep appreciation for the spontaneous and serendipitous, and with clay sculptor Ka Kwong Hui, whose sense of the relationships of forms went far beyond the ceramic studio. She received a 2020 "Bronx Recognizes Its Own" (BRIO) painting grant from the Bronx Council for the Arts, has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony, and has participated multiple times in the Governors Island and Aqua Art Miami art fairs. Her paintings and mixed-media work have been shown in New York, Provincetown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere. She lives and has her studio in the Bronx.

IAN GANASSI

Ian Ganassi has worked as a writer, teacher, and percussionist. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Survision, Home Planet News, Meniscus, Offcourse, BlazeVOX, Clockwise Cat, Otoliths, The Yale Review, and New American Writing. His poem “Blunt Trauma” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his translations from Virgil’s Aeneid have appeared in New England Review. Ian's first poetry collection, Mean Numbers, was published by China Grove in 2016; his second poetry collection, True for the Moment, was published by David Robert Books in June 2023. A third collection, By This Time, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024. Ian is a long-time resident of New Haven, Connecticut.