Tofu Ink Arts Press Volume 6 Contributors

 

Vicki Austin’s work has been featured on the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop blog, included in the online journals Projected Letters and Wraparound South and printed in The Walls Between Us: Essays in Search of Truth, a Juncture publication.

 

Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Netherlands) is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. His unfinished studies in mathematics and musicology mainly created a penchant for activities in a Dada vein, as did several unsuccessful jobs in offices and other well-organized systems. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions.From around the year 1995 on Blonk started work with electronics, at first using samples of his own voice, then extending the field to include pure sound synthesis as well. He took a year off of performing in 2006. His renewed interest in mathematics made him start a research of the possibilities of algorithmic composition for the creation of music, visual animation and poetry. As a vocalist, Jaap Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and keen grasp of structure, even in free improvisation. He has performed around the world, on all continents. With the use of live electronics, and sometimes projection of visuals, the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension. Blonk’s recorded / published output comprises some 60 titles: CDs, vinyl, books and cassettes. From his sound poetry scores he developed an independent body of visual work, which has been exhibited and collected in books. See tofuink.com to experience Jaap’s brilliant recordings.

 

Rhys Daly is a queer Asian-American Seattle writer and actor who wishes he lived even closer to the ocean. His work explores discomfort, uncertainty, identity, acceptance, and the wonder in the mundane. When he’s not hunched over a coffee table furiously memorizing lines or scribbling up poems, he can be found walking moodily down a city street looking for his next bit of inspiration. Other works can be found in Rigorous Magazine and Short Vine Journal as Cyan, and Cathexis Northwest Press as himself. His debut poetry collection Shedding is available through Unsolicited Press. 

 

Jasper Glen is from Vancouver, Canada. He holds a BA in Philosophy and a JD. His poems appear or are forthcoming tn Posit, Streetlight Magazine, fauxmoir, NiftyLit, Pinky Thinker Press, The Ekphrastic Review, The Antonym, and Island Writer Magazine. 

 

Genoveva Galarza Heredero's visual art is heavily inspired by ecology, speculative fiction, and human anxieties and dreams. 

 

Harvey Humphrey (they/them) is trying to be some kind of activist-academic (they want to try to change the world through language). They are a queer, trans, non-binary disabled person living in Glasgow. They have a PhD in sociology on trans and intersex activism. Their academic work and their poems explore the everyday, relationships and bodies (specifically relating to queer, trans and disability experiences). Their favourite food is ice cream. Previously published: Powders Press, Snowflake Magazine, Gamut Mag. Twitter: @rharveyhumphrey

Jones Irwin teaches Philosophy and Education in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. His vision is of a postmodern existentialist, with a dash of noir mixed in with a progressivist ethic.  He has been featured before in Tofu Ink.

 

Karin Falcone Krieger is a writer, visual artist, gardener, advocate and chef.  Her writing in many genres has recently been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Tofu Ink, Able News, Contingent Magazine, BlazeVOX, LITPUB, The Laurel Review, The Literary Review, Newsday and other publications. She published the pop-up zine artICHOKE. She holds an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She taught freshman composition as an adjunct instructor at several New York area colleges from 1999-2019 and was involved in the organized labor movement supporting contingent faculty. She is an adult adoptee of the baby-scoop era who has been reunited with her family of origin. These and other projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com

 

Brian L. Jacobs is a poet and editor of Tofu Ink Arts Press. Brian grew up in Southern California and has been teaching GATE English and Humanities for thirty one years in both K-12 and college settings. He lives in Pasadena and has been married for 17 years to Thye, a Professor of Nursing and a Nurse Practitioner. Both Thye and Brian are currently PhD candidates and will finish this year. Brian was the assistant to the Poet's Allen Ginsberg and Julie Patton while studying at Naropa. During this time he also on a peace pilgrimage with Buddhist monks commemorating WWII walking through Europe, the Middle East and India. Brian is also a three time Fulbright Scholar, which has allowed him to study in Brazil, where he studied its water issues; China, where he studied its vast 10,000 year history; and Japan, spending time to participate in a case study in one of its small towns near the Japanese Alps. He had also earned a National Endowment of Humanities grant to China, studying its philosophies and histories, a Fund For Teachers grant visiting South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho, plus earning other various grants that have taken him to places all over in the United States. He also taught teachers at a university in Fuzhou, China for five summers under grants from SABEH. Subsequently he has earned an Earthwatch grant to the rainforest of Ecuador, to study climate change and caterpillars and he recently earned another Earthwatch Senior Fellow Grant to teach teachers in Acadia, Maine studying climate change and crabs. Brian has been to 120 countries and had visited all 50 states, practices Yoga and is a proud vegan. Brian's poetry has been published in several publications including, Wet Grain, Shiela-Na-Gig, the Crank, The South Florida Florida Poetry Journal, Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, GRIFFEL, Foxtail, Rip Rap, The Bangalore Review, Sunspot Lit, Anthropod, Pa'Lante, Dark Moon Lilith Press, Black Tape Press, Genre, Inky Blue/Celery, Red Dancefloor Press, Entelechy, 1844 Pine Street, Pasta Poetics, Trouble and Praxis. 

 

Kimberly Jae is an award-winning Slam poet and educator, who is disabled  Kimberly is the winner of this years 2022 Tofu Ink Arts Press Reza Abdoh Poetry Prize. In 2018, she became the 2018 Grand Slam Champion of Steel City Slam, BOSS Slam Queen of Steel Slam Champion, Steel City Slam IWPS Rep, and Womxn Slam Champion, going on to rank among the top 30 slam poets in the world by Poetry Slam International.  In 2019, she won slams in the US and Canada, making finals for in the US and Canada as well as winning Hot Damn, It's a Queer Slam.  Before she could compete, she survived a stroke.  The condition that led to the stroke caused disability as well as a language-based disability called Aphasia, which affects her ability to read, write, speak and comprehend language.  Since the stroke, she received the 2020 Zooglossia Fellowship, 2021 Langston Huges Fellowship, as well as winning a number of slams making it to finals and nationals in multiple countries.  Kimberly Jae’s poems and performances have been published domestically, internationally, and online including the Poetry Coalition’s One Poem: A Protest Reading in Support of Black Lives (online), Alt Minds Literary Magazine (Canada), Hawai’i Review (US) and anthologies including, In the Shadow of the Mic: Three Decades of Slam Poetry in Pittsburgh.  Her full-length manuscript, Baptism, was shortlisted for the 2021 Sexton Prize. 

 

Alexander Laurence was born in Los Angeles. He attended CSULB and San Francisco Art Institute. He has contributed to the books The Hipster Handbook (2004), Reefer Movie Madness (2010), Degenerative Prose (1995), and books about the history of Grove Press. He is also the author of a book of short stories: Five Fingers Make A Fist (2007). He has recently written a book of poems The New Spain. He presently works as a tour manager and has traveled the world with indie bands. He is the founder of the website The Portable Infinite, and has a weekly internet radio show New Noise of Radio KAJW. 

 

Jon Lawrence currently teaches high school English and Creative Writing in his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. His poetry reviews and poetry have been published or are forthcoming from Newfound and American Writers Review. Chat with him on Twitter @JonLawrence1116

Mario Loprete I live in a world that I shape at my liking. I do this through virtual, pictorial, and sculptural movements, transferring my experiences and photographing reality through my mind’s filters. I have refined this process through years of research and experimentation. Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to transmit my message this is the foundation of painting for me. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting that voluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike prohibited chords. This new series of concrete sculptures has been giving me more personal and professional satisfaction recently. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation of my own work. I was looking for that special something I felt was missing.Looking back at my work over the past ten years, I understood that there was a certain semantic and semiotic logic “spoken” by my images, but the right support to valorize their message was not there. The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It tells a millennia-old story, one full of amphitheaters, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now, concrete is a synonym of modernity. Everywhere you go, you find a concrete wall: there’s the modern man in there. From Sydney to Vancouver, Oslo to Pretoria, this reinforced cement is present, and it is this presence which supports writers and enables them to express themselves. The artistic question was an obvious one for me: if man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban to galleries and museums? With respect to my painting process, when a painting has completely dried off, I brush it with a particular substance that not only manages to unite every color and shade, but also gives my artwork the shininess and lucidity of a poster (like the ones we’ve all had hanging on our walls). For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the concrete, so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my work as urban artefacts. I like to think that those who look at my sculptures created in 2020 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of a planetary problem that was covid 19... under a layer of cement there are my clothes with which I lived this nefarious period. Clothes that survived covid 19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000- year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, capable of recounting man's inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.

Cory Massaro writes speculative poetry, fiction, and nonfiction about Luddism and the biopolitics of software.

 

Ann Pedone  is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring, 2023 Etruscan Press), and The Italian Professor’s Wife (2022, Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, and New York Quarterly. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared as Best American Poetry’s “Pick of the Week.”

 

Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City high school English teacher.Her work has appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Common-weal, among other print and online publications.She has published two poetry collections, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring and two chapbooks, The Family Calling and New Lebanon.Her work can also be found in This Full Green Hour, an anthology published by the One O’Clock Poets.

 

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX.  His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, and Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Midway Journal, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and elsewhere. Octavio’s visual work has been exhibited in numerous art spaces, including, The Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and Equinox Gallery. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, consisting of a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review.  Octavio teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.   Website: octavioquintanilla.com   IG: @writeroctavioquintanilla   Twitter: @OctQuintanilla   

 

Dana Rivera received her film degree from Ithaca College and began her career making documentaries at nonprofit organizations such as the Innocence Project and Legal Services of New Jersey. In her late 20’s, she began experimenting with various art forms from water marbling and bookbinding to poetry and digital art, which became her greatest tool for self-exploration and self-expression. Her art is an effort to remember (re-member) her self, through a spectrum of topics from reclaiming the spiritual practices of her latino ancestors to nurturing mental, physical, and emotional health. Dana is currently working on a collection of poetry and abstract art in Washington DC where she resides with her husband and dog.

 

Joey Salomone was born and raised in the Midwest. Being home schooled, Joey grew up spending much of his time reading and writing. He started writing poetry during his teenage years and continued throughout college and into adulthood. He currently lives and works in Kansas City, MO as a nurse. He continues to read and write poetry daily.

 

George L. Stein is a photographer with Midwest roots working in the NYC area focused on art and surrealist photographic genres. He has been published recently by Tofu Ink Arts Press, Wrongdoing Magazine and Fatal Flaw. georgelstein.com and on Insta, @steincapitalmgmt. 

 

Myles Weber is a professor of English at Winona State University in Minnesota.  His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, and many other journals.  He is the author of Consuming Silences:  How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (U of Georgia Press).

 

Susannah Winters Simpson is a hospice nurse, and she facilitates Therapeutic Writing groups for treatment centers.  Her work was accepted by Cream Literary Alliance: Her Voice Series and was read last November at the Norton Museum. Simpson has been published in: North American Review, Potomac, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, and Nimrod International among others. Her book Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2016. Winters Simpson is a volunteer ESL tutor for DePorres Literacy Center, is the Co-Director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Reading Series. www.writeRECOVERY.com, write_recovery@IG

 

Vivien/vonvivsview is a in Vienna based Austrian poetry writer and analog photographer, currently living in New York. As an artist she calls herself “vonvivsview”. A couple of months ago she decided to start a blog were she officially releases her poetry together with her analog photography to connect those two together and create a vivid story toeach poetry - even though it’s just a captured moment. Currently she releases her poetry only in English. Vivien fell in love with analog photography, because it’s the result of the exact moment of reality only on film. No photoshop, no editing. Her own rule is to not take more than 2 pictures form each occasion to make it more special. It is even more exciting to wait if it really turned out the way she saw it through the camera lens after developing the film.

Lily Lavender Wolf is a poet hailing from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She enjoys long walks exploring nature, the companionship of her gecko, and writing with multi-colored ink while drinking wine. Lily draws inspiration from the world around her: the forest, acoustic music, dive bars, the wonderful world of amative affairs, perfectly ripe fruit. Poetry is her passion, her pastime, her therapy. She will continue to write down her strange thoughts in lyric until her dying breath. Her creative work can be found published in myriad litmags: Wingless Dreamer, MacQueen’s Quarterly, From Whispers to Roars, Metonym Journal, and the Write Launch, to name a few. Feel free to check out her poetry-only Instagram account, @poet.faerie.magic, for more than 800 different pieces from over the years.