Events
Coming Soon
This piece, "The work of war" is forthcoming in DIAGRAM literary journal.
The text reads:
The work of war
is a river
emptying into the sea
the battle-slaughtered
at evening
caught
along the rapids
Recent Events
"Cut Pieces"
at the Emerge Gallery
I am excited to be included in the Emerge Gallery's current show "Cut Pieces." The exhibit is running from now until October 1, 2023 and is also online.
Each visual poem is an erasure created from one page of text from The Iliad. The page is erased using a variety of techniques to reveal a new poem which is juxtaposed with collage.
Artist's Statement
I am a poet, educator, and visual artist interested in the intersection of image and language. How is meaning made, communicated across people or even across time? How does meaning move from text or image into the mind of the observer? What is the collaboration between artist and audience and how can we actively invite collaboration of meaning? This current project is meant to question, discover, and create new meanings from given texts (in the form of erasure) and image (in the form of collage). Putting these two forms together--the act of subtraction to create new meaning and surprising juxtapositions--inherently invites the participation of the observer. Given the current divisive and strained political climate, the abuse of rhetoric in political speech, and the specter of war in Europe, this project takes on heightened importance. These pieces come from The Iliad--one of the great ancient war epics--to ask new questions and to invoke new dialogues and new ways of listening. What new stories can we tell? What possibilities are present within the already written text? The project is meant to be an act of community, sharing, and rekindling of the possibility of new meanings.
Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival
October 19 - 21, 2023
I will be participating i two panels at the upcoming festival.
Saturday Session 2 10:45am-noon, October 21, 2023
Flexing Form – Finding a Shape for the Story You Need to Tell
Sandra Beasley, Ellen Kombiyil, Sheila Squillante
Moderator Juan Rojas
Authors accomplished in poetry and creative nonfiction discuss how the narratives they wanted to share—personal, cultural, historical—required adapting conventions of “storytelling” they were first taught. Brief illustrating readings from their own work will anchor discussion. Takeaways for the audience will include practical tips, with time for Q&A.
Saturday Session 4 2:15pm-3:30pm
Moderator Ellen Kombiyil
Poetry of Witness
Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Jennifer Martelli
Jessica Cuello
Stacy Gnall
Subhaga Crystal Bacon and Jennifer Martelli read from and discuss their work on “project collections,” books that had their genesis in chronicling and reckoning with attacks on the feminine in the current socio-political climate. They’ll read from their own work and discuss how they used non-literary sources to craft a poetry of witness.
***
Jessuca Cuello reads from Yours Creature, composed of epistolary poems in the voice of Mary Shelley. Often written as missives to her famous literary mother, Wollstonecraft, the poems address months, years, and her own monstrous creation as they contend with exile, transience, and desire.
***
Stacy Gnall reads new poems from her third book project, The Danger Constellation, which combines poetry with moments of lyric essay to interrogate the cultural and philosophical history of women’s costume. These poems think through clothing’s gendered relationships to notions of vanity and shame, conformity and rebellion, decoration and escape.
