Montage | Issue #18

montage

2023 - 2024

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Editor in Chief

Assistant Editor

Associate Editor

Creative Director

Secretary

Treasurer

Membership Director

Social Chair

Tessza Vitalis-Grant

Gianna Conidi

Safia Khan

Sarah Zhao

Maiah Cabral

Lily Dokhanchi

Izzy Perpich

Aaron Mukhopadhyay

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Molly Cooper Willis

Joy Dudley

Victoria Gama

Tirza Garcia Olivares

Zoey Godkik

Theo Gary

Lauryn Henry

Sara Starecheski

Olivia Streitmatter

Emily Stutzman

Cover Art: “The Landscape” by A. Oishii Basu

Proudlypublishedbythestudentsofthe UniversityofIllinoisatUrbana-Champaign © 2024 Montage Arts Journal

Letter From the Editor

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure to present the 18th issue of MontageArtsJournal. This year, we received an astonishing number of submissions from the University of Illinois community. It was a pleasure to review writing and art from so many students from different backgrounds and disciplines. This issue contains incredible pieces that explore themes of love, identity, and home. I am so excited to share them with you.

I would like to thank everyone who submitted to Montage this year. You make Montage possible! I also thank the Department of English, whose help in spreading the word about Montage has been invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank our wonderful executive board and editorial staff. Working with you all has been an absolute joy, and I appreciate the hard work you put into this issue.

Montage has been a core part of my experience at the University of Illinois. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of this journal and serve as its editor-in-chief this year. While I am sad to be leaving my position and U of I, I cannot wait to see what the future holds for Montage. I hope you will keep following along to see it.

Sincerely yours,

Tessza Vitalis-Grant Editor-in-Chief

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ElegyfortheCaveCricket

Homestead

Brother and Sister

Demetra

CampaignOffice1

Neo Dimension

toogoodforthisworld

The God Trick Untitled Remembrances Black Girlhood

Maya Miriyala

Ava Delariman

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

Emily Hackett

Nathan Holder

Nyx Melancon

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

Sanjana Babu

Sofia Staudenmaier

Archer Sun

Nyx Melancon

Ava Delariman

Liara Aber

Nathan Holder

A. Oishii Basu

Sanjana Babu

Nyx Melancon

Liara Aber A. Oishii Basu

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Eastern Bloc

TheLandscape

Phone Booth 1

Ghazal Embodied

Out of the Dark

A Son Named Slick

Untitled

I hate America for what it did to you&me

whydoesn’tanyonetakeme seriously

Homecoming

Train Ride 1

Olivia Jakubas

A. Oishii Basu

Nathan Holder

Sajana Babu

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

Nyx Melancon

Sofia Stuadenmaier

Meredith Riggs

A. Oishii Basu

Mariana Quezada

Nathan Holder

Elegy for the Cave Cricket

Maya Miriyala

that we vacuumed off the kitchen floor and dumped unceremoniously in the grass on the side of the road.

sorry brother, but you leaped too high. your body too bulbous, unnatural hunchback unfurling your limbs askew, antenna reaching too far in our direction.

crickets are cute, you were not.

thank you brother, she and i, we haven’t talked in weeks. i mean really talked. laughed the way we used to, our giggles syncing to the same tempo.

for just a moment we were back. hopping in mutual disgust.

and then you were gone, exiled from the vacuum bin by the maintenance man who watched

in amusement as we argued over how to open your plastic cage. minutes later, in the elevator back to the apartment vacuum held between us, i feared that we left with you.

Homestead

Ava Delariman

Dirt under broke fingernails, still stained cherry from old polish. A bright red toy fire truck sticking out from underneath the row of hydrangeas. A linen dress

torn and mended, ripped, and patched with spare fabric from the hall closet. I stitch myself into the earth with every seed planted and

live off the soil-sullied rocket leaves that my mother once fed me while I hung from a scarf wrapped around her chest. In the garden, I make lovers out of seeds. Companionplanting:

Thecloseplantingofdifferentplantsthatenhanceeachother’sgrowthor. protecteachother. On this land, there is no solitude, no existence of one without another.

And when the bedsheets, baking in the Tennessee sun, wave proudly with our wrinkles and our stains, I will salute them from this garden. Our American flag, our identity

that refuses to fade or wither when the winds threaten to steal us from the earth, a land-divined Rapture. Even then, I will kneel. A sort of prayer for body and soil,

the Body and Blood of Christ, rebuilt in veins that pulse with root systems and coil themselves around a neighbor, becoming one. Companion plants grow stronger together.

On this land we do not yet know, we are entwined in the ground beneath us. Growing as one. And I want, caked in dirt and cleansed of sin, my fingers to reach for him. Bathing him in the earth

beneath us. Growing as one. And I want, caked in dirt and cleansed of sin, my fingers to reach for him. Bathing him in the earth

that has replaced my swollen, no-good brain. Burying myself in the summer sun-soaked soil and pulling him down with me. Feeding him homegrown desserts and tomatoes plucked by my once-soft hands, he has little to say. His mouth full, tasting me with every bite, I suckle on the juice that leaks down his chin. Homestead: toliveself-sufficiently. He will live off the earth I grow just for him and I will learn to thrive off those rivulets of myself that escape him.

In this garden, I make lovers out of seeds.

Brother and Sister

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

Demetra Emily Hackett

after“drift/(:(”byAlekOlsen

We are sitting in the kitchen’s afternoon sunlight. You’re making me your yiayia’s French toast, putting each one on the same plate and covering it with tin foil to keep them warm. My plate is full, my heart overflows with pure maple syrup. My mind wanders towards a little house with you, ponders if this is the way most mornings will be from now on. It is four in the afternoon and of course we have just gotten out of bed, cuddles keeping us in the blankets; my cheek on your chest, your face nestling into my hand. Time (mischievous as ever) slips through our fingers like sunlight most days, and today is no exception. We kiss until my lips smell of cinnamon sugar, of you and your maroon perfume. You tell me the Greek word that describes the after-aroma of cooking. I smell it all the time.

Neo Dimension

Nyx Melancon

xe and I breathe deeply, our young hearts stitched together with needle and thread looking at the world from button eyes. we were all delicately crafted by our loving Goddess, Sarya.

address Her in our prayers as, “Dear Mother,”

Her name must not be uttered. instead, it shall be carved into pages with shed blood.

crimson ink symbolizing the wounds that Dear Mother endured to create us.

desperation clings to my limbs as my arm stretches like an

elastic band, reaching out to my love who resides among the darkness.

Nyx is xyr name.

I turn to xem, as xe paints xyr lips a glossy black.

we kiss, and now my lips are the same.

xe smirks at me, naughtily unleashing moans of satisfaction hidden inside me.

daring to fill up spaces with xyr fingers and xyr love.

and if anyone ever questions the sounds we create,

I’d simply say,

“We were making the kind of love Dear Mother intended for us to make.”

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

The God Trick

Sanjana Babu

the mothership is allowed no windows which pleases the bricklayer past two vacuum sealed cubicles in a sterile corner lit with artificial sunset. a whale song plays ocean noise, blank noise, sound heavy like a mother’s voice curdling with a sour paleness. legislation guides an alien’s hand into your body and shows you interior things. the image is cloudy like the distance of the universe. many circles appear telling you what the cones in your eyes should be transmitting to your brain as reality. the interior is not you—it is your interior in the image shown, you do not see your breasts, or the indents in your hips. you do not see the sand flea scars across your back or your crooked smile that has long deserted its retainer. in the interior all you see is gray and the grayness is given an age—six weeks + 24 hours more of gray growth. you bear witness because you have been asked if you would like to, in a manner that implies protocol. the turning of your head reckoning with the dark inside. all matters seem part of procedure—

the moment snaps as tidal movements crackle over the intercom.

Remembrances

Archer Sun

i walked through our graveyard today and laid a lavender down on the dirt. i stood with the headstones picking petals, bated baby’s breath of the living. you have always been too good for ghosts. sweetheart, i’m starting to think i can still be gentle with you. patroclus’s favorite son has run out of thyme, so i lay among the green and the jaded. it would not be so terrible to sleep among the bodies we made trying to save ourselves. tale-torn and orpheus-affectionate, when tomorrow comes, may i be covered in flowers.

Black Girlhood 101

Nyx Melancon

Don’t be like them lil fast tail girls.

Spreading their legs wide, smiling

An open invitation to men old enough to retire

Who’d been preying on them since birth

Their overtly sexual nature is to blame

For the eyes that stalk them down alleys at midnight

Becoming familiar with the colors black and blue

Created by the heavy hand that holds

A tattered belt, weary from years of ass whoopings

Told afterwards, “You should’ve known better.”

Don’t be like them lil’ fast tail girls.

With bodies that lie in the hands of adolescence

Clothes glued onto their skin, movin’ against the —

Rhythm of their fast behinds, switchin’

Only to catch the attention of grown men

Who have already prepared an excuse for their attraction

Urging them to get dressed in their own homes

Unless they askin’ for it

Cannot sit in the laps of no man, even if that man was yo daddy

Cause, you are made responsible for the mistakes a man makes.

Don’t be like them lil’ fast tail girls.

Smacking gum without caution

Interrogated by momma who wants to know three things:

One. Who exactly do you think you are?

Two. Where the hell do you think you’re going?

And three. Why do you act so damn grown?

Steady sayin’, “Someday you gon end up pregnant,”

Met with fists from the mention of birth control

Constantly reminded that fast tail girls don’t deserve protection.

Don’t be like them lil’ fast tail girls.

The ones that countdown until their 18th birthday

Thinking maybe then their existence will be acceptable

The ones that feel a mass of guilt clump together like a blood clot

Whenever their breasts and behind jiggle every which way

The ones mourning the loss of a childhood that never began

So they paint their nails red in secrecy because the color is forbidden

The ones that are praying to be absolved from the burden of adultification

Momma in the back of your mind sayin’, “Nobody likes a fast tail girl.”

TheOvergrownChild

Ava Delariman

Somewhere between Randolph and Neil, there is a child made of glass and watered-down wine and the Body of Christ. She stumbles down side streets at half-past three and the man in the red pickup truck swears that the town has been haunted by her wails and wants since the Sun first set over the complex and cast it into dark.

The man and his friends, eyes cruelly dark, tell stories of the matted hair and cigarette-stench child. Of her cherry-red lips and how they want to teach her what it means to have your body belong to the night. Budweiser paints the paper-thin lips and day-job wife-beaters and they feel her on their tongues. Sweet and sticky and rotting from the inside out, dark ashtray dust clinging to her teeth. The men will look for the overgrown child in every linoleum checkerboard aisle, prodding the body of the woman in their sheets, declaring their want.

The men do not see the child’s hunger—her want to be the consumer, the predatory eye, and curse the tongues that taint her name and stain her body.

No one remembers where she came from before her body became the legend of small-town Illinois, the figure in the shadows of the highway welcome sign. Dark

jeans and dirtied cowboy boots listen for her, with the want of her story or her filth-ridden skin. And maybe she will give it to them. For this child

whose body reeks of cigarettes and sugar, wants only for the memory of herself to linger in the prairie air and threaten the men who lie in the dark waiting for the overgrown child.

At the Vet Med Fair

Liara Aber

While waiting to stick my hand in a cow, consumed by my 21-year-old body not looking like my 16-year-old body. I step on the livestock scale and an old white man tells me he bets he could guess within 3 pounds.

Men are encouraged to be dogs. Two barked at me last night, sitting on a beat-up plaid couch in the middle of their yard, listening to country music, sipping on two tall glasses of audacity flavored with hops and grains and grass.

There’s so much grass in this cow, and it’s making me nauseous acting like I have the right to violate this animal. But my hand is inside her and allI can think is how I just said “No thank you.”

What I really wanted to tell him was fuck you. Fuck the number on the scale. Fuck the boy who slipped a little pill

into my glass.

I throw up and move on with my day.

Brush

Nathan Holder

Out(acontinuation)

A. Oishii Basu

For Maia

I worry about my dusty bones, poking out of this freshly baked body, reaching for the others. My Michelin star carcass dressed to the nines, laid on my very own spitfire. My olive skin, jaundiced by that fiery light. Licorice tattoos, garnish for the feast. These chocolate chip moles, upon a segmented torso, practically begging to be fileted. Without a doubt, fistfulls of me, gone. Nibbles, meals, flesh

For anyone hungry

Poking Out from beyond that fire.

Sanjana Babu

I stared and hacked, my mouth and moon an O The sweat under my kneecaps, beautiful

No knight or serf could see what I once was Only the King reached out and bellowed The Dog! It kneels! Like tales of the werewolf He saw in me what could not be held in

My claws, my blood, my loyalty, now His In regal heat, I forgot past evil, Abandoned my body in the forest, And saw the stars were now bright electric

I pray my wretched wife will rot to green For what she stole from my open heart, and Naked body—under the fur, mad red Oh let my Lord love away my cursed tears!

THE STORY OF LIL’ MICHAEL EVANS

Nyx Melancon

momma fears for my black body, collapsing to the ground, abruptly.

even though she often says, “You’re not black, you’re a human.”

she envisions a man, with cold pale skin, grinning as warm blood rushes from my wounds. the reporter said he shot me down, 20 times with a .45 caliber handgun.

in court he’ll say the pain was inflicted by my tongue: sharp, brash, bold, reckless.

I ain’t got no respect.

I ain’t got no honor. I ain’t got no regardformyelders. I ain’t got no rights. I ain’t got no home. meanwhile, momma struggles to scrub

away my mark on the pavement.

she shakes her head, sobbing and shouting to the world.

“You can put your body on the line for the entire black race if you want to,” she sighs.

“Only for them to walk all over it once it’s cold and heavy!”

“You’re immature,” she says and also,

“I think you need to grow up and get a job.”

but I don’t think I ever will get the chance to be grown.

she cannot help but see a child when I am in her sight.

I ain’t herdaughter.

I ain’t herpride.

I ain’t herhappiness. I ain’t herjoy.

I ain’t her love.

I am hernightmare. I am her stress.

I am her burden. I am herpast. I am herregret.

Doyouhavecancer?

Liara Aber

His gaze crept slowly up my teenage body, every inch of my long thin legs exposed stomach crop top until it reached my bald head, and then he stopped. Yes, I muttered and picked up the pace. The stranger followed me, You’restillpretty.

Today, my boyfriend and I are breaking up. Apparently, he stopped loving me months ago. I told him I didn’t want his pity, so I ask, Whydidyoustay? And with all the confidence in the world he replies, Iwasstillattractedtoyou.

As if cancer didn’t steal my senior year, my innocence, and the feeling in my fingertips. You’restillpretty.

As if my main concern while bawling, vomiting on the bathroom floor, my head spinning as my mom rushed me to the E.R. was, IwonderifIlookgood?

The Eastern Bloc

Olivia Jakubas

To all the kids who grew up on the Eastern Bloc who collected coke cans, sent by long distance aunts, who stared at TVs, displaying paintings of big cities, Disneyland, no ration cards, who tasted McDonald’s when eating the last scraps of what the grocery store had, so their

Mothers desert them, to chase vivid dreams across the sea. You can’t be mad at the empty parental role “I’m working so you can have some good food at home” sending checks and branded clothes on a eagle, converted into złoty for black market ham, next time, she’s promised to take you with her as

The wall falls, torn to shreds by those who would give everything, every shirt with patched up holes, every last piece of candy they hold to smell sweet Western possibility, while

Fathers, grandfathers die alone missing the kids their wives stole from the land not always called their own, pictures of prosperity surround them during their strokes on the phone as he takes his last breath to call

His son’s daughter, born on the sacred soil, both languages spoken, only one allowed in our cultural home, the paintings are mirrors, no more patches or holes, the brzoza birch family is together in spirit, not the vision they had seen, but

I am their American dream.

TheLandscape

A. Oishii Basu

Phone Booth 1

GhazalEmbodied

Sanjana Babu

Have faith—this parasitic tango will escape the bled body. I stomach no appetite for the resurrected body.

In swift-night, the sword sinks to hilt in her stone lover, who are you, cuckoo-King, to stare at the smelted body.

Reach into the heat and you’ll find silver crowned teeth, My gooseflesh pricks back, beware of this sugaroflead body.

Like Geryon—molten matter—sloughing stalker of craters, I squirm my fingers to sign “interior things” of my red body.

I sing through night-sweats while my heartbeat speaks tongues. Who knows where I start and I end? Melted hands, head, body.

O Mary, hear my loneliness whipped through saliva, I slobber on the precipice of cult, warm in my breastfed body.

My real childhood was in the heartland, traipsing through husks And haybales—can’t ignore the high-fructose shivers of a cornfed body.

Something of the oriental endogamy, the community, still remains Stitched into the creaky, bloody uterus of my inbred body.

Little Pigtails, Sanju-kutty, dances under the neon Syrian cross As June’s sweet-hot monsoon sobs over bishops’ dead bodies.

Out of the Dark

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

A Son Named Slick

Nyx Melancon

Slick is the name He gave to me.

must’ve thought i was sly.

you see, it’s kind of hard to be shy and a little black girl at the same time.

raised on talks about the blue-eyed devil.

elijah muhammad glaring at me before I go to bed. all charged up like father, like son.

while washing my face in the morning

i see my father’s hazel eyes glow beneath my brown orbs.

thinkin’ about how he’d have me swapping pretty gowns for play clothes and tiaras for baseball caps. and he’d get me whatever I wanted, whenever I asked.

striked by a reckless tongue rather than balled fists bracing impact.

first introduced to cars and race tracks, later ponies and barbies by mother and sister.

and he’d get me whatever I wanted, whenever I asked.

Untitled Sofia Staudenmaier

IhateAmericaforwhatitdidtoyou&me

Meredith Riggs

afterJuneJordan

I tell myself that if you died, it wouldn’t have been for nothing. That one day, when you’re on your deathbed, we will have made up. I’ll be speaking to you in your native language as if we are one. One with pride above everything else. All the things taken away from you, coming back to me. We won’t be worlds apart. Moving together in a rhythm understanding words unspoken.

I want abortion. I want affirmative action. I want everything stolen from me to find its way to a little girl with immigrant parents in a beat up house on the west side of chicago. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

I told a boy I loved him the other day and I was watching a television program about these lesbian moms and it made me wish I could’ve told you about it.

I love you. I love you. I love you!

I see people telling themselves that they care a whole lot about certain things, and I just don’t believe them for one second, but I really wish I did. Because if I did, then I wouldn’t be able to understand how women get so angry that they end up on the news for fighting back.

I don’t understand war. I hate that you always will and I never can. But understand that at thirteen, I shouldn’t have told you that you don’t know what it’s like to have a hard life where your friends leave.

I hate America for what it did to you and me.

I wake up and I’m four foot seven inches in the parking lot of the elementary school waiting for you to come pick me up.

whydoesn’tanyonetakemeseriously?

A. Oishii Basu

Homecoming

Mariana Quezada

Sitting on the edge of the pool at the old country club, I thought of submerging myself underwater and coming back up to the surface ten years younger.

I’d noticed it on the drive from my friend’s house to the beach – the sunbleached ads on the highway, the dunes, the abandoned stores with peculiar names. Nothing would ever be the same, and I had learnt that so easily. Here, where everyone looked and spoke like me (unlike up north), the sense of loss lingered.

Why was I here?

Of course, I knew why. I hadn’t just sprung up on the homeland’s soil like a flower, or in this case, more like a weed. A bout of sadness in my relative’s life had led me to a plane, a car, and a house. But not my house. Why bother talking about the old house anyway, seeing as there was no going back?

My grandmother and I had taken a cab to my old district in silence. Wandering in the park where I’d walked my dog so many times, I spotted the building. My window. Our balcony. The new owners had built a little terrace roof. I cried and bit my lip to stop the tears. My grandmother tried to comfort me. And then, because of course, an old friend of my dog’s came up wagging her tail, the owner behind her asking me where mine was.

The only thing I could say was that I walked her in a different park now, which wasn’t entirely a lie.

There was no going back. My friend’s brother, face down in a sunlounger I could swear I’d stubbed my toe on one summer, had the right idea. “It’s just

not the same,” he mumbled in a moment of quiet wisdom. My friend and I kept rubbing our sunscreen in front of the poolhouse mirror. Resignation.

There was no rush to go down the slide. No other friend to compete with to see who swam the fastest. No bunk beds to claim first on our sandy bungalow. No three families trying to fit in a single breakfast table. All washed away like footprints on the shore.

I put on my huge sunglasses that made me look mad. Splashed my feet in the shallow end of the pool. On a positive note, there was no fear of running into a kid from school anymore. Listing on the drive to the beach, a bag of chips on the legs of the unlucky one in the middle seat, who had a country club membership and who didn’t, or who, like me, had a friend who did and could be invited as a guest. Kid games.

But wasn’t that a little sad, too? Our school class scattered across northern continents, studying in fashionable, metropolitan cities, building lives in countries with fewer former presidents in jail. Once a cohesive, extraordinary machine dressed in green uniform, now apart.

Sick to my stomach with thoughts, I plunge into the water. I swim until I’m underneath one of those mushroom spray fountains. This had been the new pool once. My brother and I played with our baby sister here. The baby sister will be turning eleven soon, and then what?

I close my eyes and pretend it’s before again. When I open them I see children everywhere. Spraying each other with water guns, licking the ice cream that drips down their elbows, hugging a parent’s leg, never letting go. Goosebumps down my back: I don’t recognize anyone at all. The old cast of the show gone and done, with the new one wondering who the special guest is. No one knows why she is here. No one knows who invited her.

Cradling my neck with my hands, I push my head underwater. I open my eyes, and it stings. At least one thing is exactly like it used to be. Near me, I make out three small pairs of legs kicking around, trying to float. Looking down at my own legs, I find the sign. All this time complaining about why the place wasn’t the same anymore, I’d overlooked a cold, hard truth. The place wasn’t the only one that changed.

I come up for air. In front of me, the three little owners of the three little pairs of legs stare back at me. A young girl struggling to hold a squirming baby with a pink swimming cap on, next to her, a mischievous-looking boy poking the baby’s nose grins at me. It’s almost a joke. I want to hug them and tell them it’ll be alright, that they’ve got time. A hundred million things.

I hear my mother’s voice calling me home, and I dive back in.

Contributer Bios

Liara Aber

Liara Aber is a senior in Political Science with minors in both Spanish and Media at the University of Illinois. Inspired by a Chancellor’s Scholar poetry class, a love for creative writing, and literature as a form of therapy, Aber hopes to share her experiences with the world.

Sanjana Babu

Sanjana is a Junior in Sociocultural Anthropology, minoring in English. She is currently writing her Honors Thesis on queer spaces in Urbana student houses. She hopes to attend graduate school in Anthropology to showcase how ethnography is a powerful method of storytelling. In her free time, she loves to write formal verse poetry including sonnets and ghazals.

A. Oishii Basu

A. Oishii Basu is a poet, artist, and student journalist from Raleigh, North Carolina. She makes art in reflection of grief, love, and art itself, as well as in celebration of connection and vulnerability.

Ava Delariman

Ava Delariman is a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign currently completing her final year of a Creative Writing bachelor’s degree. Her poetry often meditates on ideas of violence, womanhood, and sexuality, and the intersections that exist between them.

Emily Hackett

Emily Hackett is a poet from Los Angeles, in her final year of studying Speech & Hearing Science at UIUC. With minors in Creative Writing and Disability Studies, she has always felt deeply connected to poetry and to people. Hackett looks forward to forming connections with clients throughout her career as a speech-language pathologist.

Nathan Holder

Nathan Holder is an image-based conceptual artist who creates work that analyzes a range of relationships; heterosexual, homosexual, tionships, impersonal relationships, relations to self, and relations to popular culture. Holder seeks to bring forth raw and intimate details of himself and others, transforming private information and feelings into public imagery.

Olivia Jakubas

Olivia Jakubas is a sophomore studying Psychology, English and Teaching English as a Second Language who loves to write poems in her spare time.

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi

Sabrina Longo-Selvaggi is an illustrator, journalist, and second-year student studying Comparative & World Literature and Studio Art. She works digitally via Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fresco programs. Within her artistic process, she is most fond of incorporating mixed media (e.g., vintage home magazines, tissue paper, stamps) into her digital pieces. Her work is inspired by the strength of people she has interviewed for publications such as Latinx drag queens and first-generation immigrants.

Nyx Melancon

Nyx Melancon is a trans non-binary poet currently majoring in English and minoring in African American Studies. Their literary work is informed by their blackness, queerness, and transness. He is especially motivated by black liberation and afrofuturism. In his free time he enjoys doing research on black queer history.

Maya Miriyala

Maya Miriyala is a senior in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois. In her free time she enjoys reading, playing video games, and annoying her roommates.

Mariana Quezada

Mariana is a sophomore majoring in Journalism. Born and raised in Lima, Peru, she’s always loved writing. Her favorite quote is “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which she is actively trying to do. Creative consultant in all her work is her dog, Jolie.

Meredith Riggs

Meredith is a junior in Political Science with minors in Creative Writing and Criminology. Her writing is inspired by identity in the Cambodian diaspora and current events, among other things. In her free time, she enjoys writing and listening to early 2010s indie music.

Sofia Staudenmaier

Sofia Staudenmaier creates art expressing her struggle with migraines. She uses techniques that bind together multiple media conveying the pain. Sofia illustrates her struggle with migraine auras especially, creating multiple faces as how she sees and feels during them.

Archer Sun

Archer Sun is a queer trans poet from New Jersey who enjoys taking criminally long naps and writing poetry. He can often be found doodling or waiting in the Starbucks line.