We are grateful to L.I. Henley for contributing the artwork for the Fall 2026 issue. L.I.'s work is fully featured in Cross-Ties as a review of Rebecca Hart Olander's full-length poetry collection, Singing from the Deep End. Find it here.  
 Fall 2026
Poet
Writer and visual artist L. I. Henley’s mixed media artwork shares much with her poetic voice—the sense of someone stepping carefully through an interior underworld, gathering imagery to carry back out into the daylight. Many of the pieces utilize clippings of found texts including vintage field guides, etiquette manifestos, illustrated encyclopedias, and old letters to create an eerie nostalgia. Others include only hand drawn elements arranged as collage. Either way, one has the uncanny sense of the images and text being familiar and yet somehow new, vintage and present-day, like something remembered in a dream. Inspired in part by the shards and fragments of growing up in the Mojave desert along with Henley’s personal journey with multiple autoimmune diseases, the work also reflects on the ways in which illness, pain, and isolation can create both real and imagined distances and how our empathy can bridge those divides. Her multi-jointed paper dolls, visual reviews, and other mixed media pieces can be found many places including Adroit, Action Spectacle, Waxwing, Thrush, The Indianapolis Review, Sugar House, The Paris Collage Collective, and Kolaj Magazine. 
Art:  L. I. Henley. “Scorpio Girl: After Rebecca Hart Olander's Singing from the Deep End,” 2026
Colored pencil, acrylic, notebook paper, found The Jesus and Mary Chain album art