STAFF

Amanda Johnston
Editor

Amanda Johnston is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet. Honors include 2003 and 2004 Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the 2005 Austin International Poetry Festival's Christina Sergeyevna Award.  Johnston has served on the board of directors for the National Women's Alliance, is currently an ensemble member of The Austin Project Performance Company (TAPPCo). She is the founder of Torch Literary Arts and editor of TORCH: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women.  

Shia Shabazz
Blog Editor

"Spark" in the premier, Fall 2006 edition of Torch, Shia Shabazz Smith is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of The Austin Project: Experiments in the Jazz Aesthetic, and a teaching poet in UC Berkeley's Poetry for the People Program. An accomplished poet, performance artist, activist, and screenwriter, Shia's current projects include a second poetry collection and a feature-length screenplay. Shia lives in Oakland, California, where she enjoys walking Lake Merritt and eating tiramisu.

L. Lamar Wilson
Copy Editor

L. Lamar Wilson has copy-edited and reported for The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel & a host of other newspapers in the past decade. The Cave Canem & Callaloo fellow and emerging poet has work in or forthcoming in Rattle, Reverie and Crab Orchard Review.

Ana-Maurine Lara
Staff Writer

Ana-Maurine Lara is an award-winning novelist and playwright. She is a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and member of The Austin Project: Experiments in the Jazz Aesthetic. Currently she is working on a PhD at Yale University in African American Studies & Anthropology. For more information about Ana-Maurine, visit her website: www.zorashorse.com
 

Matthew Zühlsdorf
Social Networking Coordinator

Matthew is pursuing a master's degree in International Education at the SIT Graduate Institute. He previously worked for the Corporation for National and Community Service and served two terms in AmeriCorps VISTA. He is from El Paso, Texas.

Senalka McDonald
Art Curator  

Senalka McDonald is a visual and performance artist who focuses on the monstrous side of domesticity. Using textiles, paper, photography and video, she creates performance-based works that explore complex personal states while giving testimony to those spaces being sites of sex, stigma and shame. She has participated in ROOTED and the Austin Project residencies. Recent selected exhibitions include Station - a 2412 Performance Project (Austin, Texas) and Hello (San Francisco, California). McDonald is currently an MFA candidate at California College of the Arts, where she received full Graduate Merit and Diversity scholarships. She received Bachelor’s degrees in Fine Art and Cultural Geography from the University of Texas at Austin (2006). She currently resides in San Francisco, California.

 

     Editorial board

Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey, an Afro-Latina poet who was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Central Florida, is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, Hedgebrook and Squaw Valley alumna, as well as the 2011 Agha Shahid Ali Scholar in Poetry at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. Selected by D.A. Powell for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011 and a finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, Nicole's poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Third Coast, and Callaloo, among others.

Niki Herd

Niki Herd has been published in forums such as Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, The Drunken Boat, Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta!, From the Web: A Global Anthology of Women’s Political Poetry, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, and Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies on compact disc. Nominated twice for Pushcart Awards in poetry, she lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Bianca Spriggs

Bianca Spriggs resides in Lexington, Kentucky where she works as an instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She is the creator and programmer of the Gypsy Poetry Slam featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.  An Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily, and her work may be found in the anthologies, New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, America! What's My Name? and the journals, Alehouse, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and the Langston Hughes Colloquy.

Remica L. Bingham

Remica L. Bingham, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, earned an MFA from Bennington College and is a Cave Canem fellow. Among other journals, her work has been published in New Letters, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and Essence. Her first book, Conversion, won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, was published by Lotus Press and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A book of her selected poems, The Seams of Memory, will be translated into Arabic and published in 2010 in conjunction with the Kalima Project. Currently, she serves as the Writing Competency Coordinator at Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia. For more information on her work and upcoming events visit www.remicalbingham.com.