Brainard Carey

Elmaz Abinader is an author and a performer. Her most recent poetry collection, This House, My Bones, was The Editor’s Selection for 2014 from Willow Books/Aquarius. Her books include a memoir: Children of the Roojme, A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, a book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams… which won the Oakland PEN, Josephine Miles Award. Recently she was awarded a Trailblazer Award by RAWI (Radius of Arab Writers International)  Her plays include Ramadan Moon, 32 Mohammeds, and Country of Origin. She has been a frequent contributor to Al-Jazeera English. She has been anthologized widely including the New Anthology of American Poetry, and in The Colors of Natur

She has been a fellow at residencies in Marfa (Lannan) Macedonia, Brazil, Spain and Egypt and a Senior Fulbright Fellow.  Her teaching includes Master Workshops for Hedgebrook In India as well as for VORTEXT. Elmaz is one of the co-founders of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices) a writing workshop for writers-of-color. She teaches at Mills College, is a fitness instructor at the Oakland Y, and lives in Oakland with her husband Anthony Byers.

Her latest book of poetry is This House My Bones.

Shontina Vernon is a theatre artist/filmmaker/ musician/creative facilitator/ and educator. Her work champions the necessity of arts and culture to catalyze social change. As such, it has been recognized nationally and internationally for both its artistic merit and risk taking.

Drawing from her belief that “If you can’t tell your own story honestly, then you certainly can’t tell anyone else’s,” Vernon responds to today’s landscape of political urgency with a creative process centered on social justice. She fuses performance, live music, and multi-media amplifying the voices of traditionally marginalized communities. Her work has been particularly impactful in shifting the narrative around gender/sexuality and criminal justice reform using abolition as a framework. Vernon is a recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation “Artist as Activist” Fellowship for the creation of the Visionary Justice StoryLab, a collaboratory of interdisciplinary artists, culture workers and community members working to address the impact of systemic oppression through storytelling, media and performance based healing practices. She is also this year’s Herb Alpert/MacDowell Colony Fellow in Theatre and a 2017 MAP Fund grantee.

Her theatre work has been developed and produced by New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle’s ACT Theatre, the Hansberry Project, the Hip Hop Theatre Festival, and featured at the World Wide Words International Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. Most noted among her plays are WOMEN OF THE WILD ROOT, A LOVELY MALFUNCTION (nominated for a 2016 NYC Audelco Award), and WANTED. She is currently developing FORGING AHEAD on the impact juvenile incarceration has on who we become as adults with Flying Carpet Theatre, and LAST

KIND WORDS, the story of two black queer women and their erasure from the American blues canon. Her recent short film, GRRRL JUSTICE, exploring the pathways of girls and gender nonconforming youth of color into the juvenile justice system is scheduled for release in September of 2018.

Curt Hoppe is a New York-based artist whose photographs and realist paintings chronicle his life and interests over the past 40 years.
His diverse work ranges from caricatures for sex tabloid Screw to meticulously rendered photo-realist cityscapes of the ethnic neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan or the Hamptons. He is currently working on a series of photographs and larger-than-life black-and-white portrait paintings of the artist friends who were part of the bohemian milieu of his youth.

Exhibition “DOWNTOWN PORTRAITS” coming April 2019 to Bernarducci Gallery and Howl Happening an Arturo Vega Project.