In February 2020, I had the good fortune to spend two weeks at the Vermont Studio Center. It turned out to be their last residency session before the Covid lockdown forced them to close their doors, but we didn't know that then, and I was ignorantly happy to write all morning and hang out at meals and evenings with my new friend and housemate Vaune Trachtman. When I visited her studio, we laughed as we sipped gin from tiny paper cups meant for mixing chemicals. All around us, hanging from the walls on great sheets of heavy paper, was her work: gravure prints, layered black and white images that combined Vaune's photographs with snapshots her father had taken in the 1930s. The resulting images are haunting, surreal, and intimate, blurred with time and memory. Yet their details--a man's stare, a woman's profile, a boy's threadbare shirt--are so sharp they could cut you open. 

I'm lukcy to have had that time--one last pre-pandemic moment--to have worked among a community of writers and artists, and I'm so lucky to have met Vaune Trachtman and to have experienced her work. She takes my breath away.

                                       ~Juliana Gray 

​I heard Dilruba Ahmed’s work before I ever encountered it on the page, which seems fitting, given the masterful way she attends to sound and music in her work. She was reading poems that would become part of her debut collection, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf 2011), at a summer multi-genre reading at the low-residency program I was attending at the time as a (poet-disguised-as) fiction candidate. She leaned towards the microphone and, a stanza in, I felt the room lean forward.
 
A few months later, I would take leave from the program and I wouldn’t write anything for almost a decade, but I kept my memory of that reading as a bright spot and continued to seek out Ahmed’s work. In 2020, when the state of the world revealed/re-revealed poetry as an essential coping strategy, I picked up her second collection, Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020). 
 
Whether she’s writing about the personal, the environmental, or the political (and their various intersections), Ahmed’s work embodies a deeply sensory presence that echoes timelessly. Her attention towards the world is clear-eyed and piercing and (still, somehow) open-hearted. The range of her subjects and formal approaches diffuses texture, imagination, and surprise throughout her collections. 
 
I’ve also been lucky enough to experienced Ruba as a teacher (at Hugo House’s and Murphy Writing of Stockton University’s online classes) and I can confirm both her sharp insight and generosity. My work has been enriched by the time I’ve spent with hers. 

                                                                             ~Violeta Garcia Mendoza

I walked its length more than once, stopping to study the honeycomb and the delicate seed pod, to make out what one book that one card spoke of. There’s a blurry picture I took of the egg—what I think might have been a quail’s—and another from the end, showing the gentle curve of the cards that called up for me, then, memories of water and a pier stretching out into the distance. Now, when I think back, the cards, lined as they were, resemble the underside of a Browning Parasol mushroom.
 
Whiting’s work, overall, focuses on the environment, something that matters to me. Her framed pieces that use human anatomy textbook illustrations and geologic survey maps illustrate the connection we have with nature. As she writes on her website, “Our impact on the land affects human health since air pollution and disposed waste will ultimately lead back to us.” Her installation piece Deforestation is a room full of tree stumps made from vintage law books. Like Catalog, the tight packing of paper—its semblance to another form—readjusts our view and, more importantly, provokes us to think carefully about what we are doing to save this place we inhabit.
​
                                                                                             ~Kelly R. Samuels

Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed

Camille T. Dungy, "Trophic Cascade" ​
Kenyon Review 

I encountered Madge Evers and her spore print art at a neighborhood festival a few years back. Looking at her ghostly, exuberant work stole my breath, and I knew I couldn't take it in the way I wanted to while standing under a makeshift tent at a folding table in the last minutes of a one-day event while my kids begged for popsicles. I pocketed her card and not long after she invited me to visit her home studio. 

Thi Bui's dynamite graphic memoir The Best We Could Do skyrocketed onto my all-time favorites list instantly: it's an intimate family story strung out on the pitiless frame of history, the way the membranous part of a dreamcatcher is stretched across its hard outer frame, such that every reader is drawn in -- implicated -- caught. Bui's visual art, not only in The Best We Could Do but also in her award-winning illustrations for the children's book A Different Pond (by poet and author Bao Phi), has a heartstrings-tugging watercolor-like tenderness: it's amazing to find an author so equally gifted with words and pictures. Many of us children of refugees have heard our parents tell stories bearing similarities to the tales Bui tells, but it takes talent to make the scenes spring to life the way she does, often with just a single thoughtfully chosen visual detail or scrap of dialogue. 

                                                       ~ Jenna Lê

I met Ebukun Gbemisola Ogunyemi when I got into SprinNG as a poetry mentee; she was my mentor and she taught me a lot about poetry (structuring, form and style) and writing in general. The most profound of it all is her ability to make me understand that I don't need to have any reservations or shame because my advocacy plays out in my writing, and at the same time I should explore diverse forms and not box myself. She taught me to find my voice and own it and above all because of her, I know that my art cannot be home for all; I have an audience and I can't possibly please everybody or cater to everything in my work and that's okay. I am completely smitten by her. She's great!

Ebukun is a creative writer, researcher, editor and content writer with more than four years experience in creating and writing stellar, original and engaging contents for digital and non-digital brands such as African freelancers, glance magazine, The odyssey etc. Ebukun is also the manager of the SprinNG Women's Authors prize (the_swapng) a literary award committed to promoting and empowering female Nigerian Authors by investing yearly in the buying and distribution of a select author's book.

                                                  ~Roseline Mgbodichinma