Issue 4 // Fall 16 // "PERSPECTIVE"
Alexa Albanese is a recent graduate of Emmanuel College in Boston, MA. She received her BA in English: Writing & Literature and Theatre Arts. This is her first piece accepted for publication, and although her primary focus is comedy, she is thrilled that such a personal piece will be her intro to the writing world. She can’t wait to see what’s next.
Angela Doll Carlson is an author whose work has been published in publications such as Thin Air Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, Relief Journal, St. Katherine Review, Rock & Sling, Bird's Thumb, and Ruminate Magazine. Her memoir Nearly Orthodox was released in 2014. Her latest book, Garden in the East, is due out in 2016 from Ancient Faith Publishing. Angela currently lives in Chicago with her husband David and her four children.
Johnie Catfish is a local street poet in the Oklahoma City area. His work has appeared in many Oklahoma poetry publications such as Dragon Poet Review and the Woody Guthrie anthologies. JC owns the Funky Hair Ranch Salon in Edmond, where he works as a hairstylist. He would like you to remember life is good, and if it isn’t fun, don’t do it. Catch him at many of the local readings: Scissortail in Ada, Benedict Street in Shawnee, and Sauced in OKC.
Ellen Estilai received a BA in Art from the University of California, Davis, and an MA in English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran. Her essay, “Front Yard Fruit,” originally published in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, is included in New California Writing 2011 (Heyday) and was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2011. Her work has appeared in Broad!, Snapdragon, (In)Visible Memoirs 2, and Writing from Inlandia.
Carlos Gauna is a photographer based in Malibu. He's travelled widely capturing the world through his lens. Gauna pursues a wide range of subject-matter from portraiture, to landscapes and wildlife. Some of his most riveting work is of the northern lights, captured on a recent trip to Iceland.
D.G. Geis currently lives in Houston, Texas. His first full-length book is forthcoming from Tupelo Press (Leapfolio) in January 2017. His chapbook Mockumentary will be published later this year by Main Street Rag. Most recently his poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming in) Fjords, Skylight 47 (Ireland), The New Ulster Review (Ireland), Permafrost, Memoryhouse, and Les Rêves des Notre Ours. He is a former Anglican priest.
Charity Gingerich is from Uniontown, Ohio, where she teaches creative writing part-time at the University of Mount Union. She taught writing at West Virginia University from 2008-2013, where she also obtained her MFA. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Quiddity, The Kenyon Review, Redivider, etc. She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference this summer. When not writing and teaching, she sings with various choral groups.
Linda Flaherty Haltmaier is an award-winning poet and screenwriter. She is the winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rolling up the Sky (2016). Her debut chapbook, Catch and Release, was published by Finishing Line Press (2015). Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Wildness: Voices of the Sacred Landscape, Canopic Jar, Poetry Breakfast, and more. A Harvard graduate, Linda lives on Boston’s North Shore with her husband and daughter.
first collection of poetry was published by Sage Hill Press in 2013, and her second full-length collection was released by Steel Toe Books in 2016.
Allison Kentle, a graduate of Truett Theological Seminary, is a mother, wife, minister and photographer based in Shawnee, OK.
Cameron Alexander Lawrence lives and writes in Decatur, GA, where he shares a home with his wife and three young daughters. His poems have appeared in Image, Asheville Poetry Review, Exit 7, Rock & Sling, Saint Katherine Review, and elsewhere.
Nick Oxford is an award-winning freelance photojournalist currently based in Oklahoma City. His clients include The New York Times, Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN, NPR, The Daily Oklahoman, Angies List Magazine, AARP and various others. He has covered some of the largest natural disasters in Oklahoma and spent a large chunk of 2016 covering the presidential primaries.
Stephen Whitmore grew up in Shawnee attended Oklahoma Baptist University with a major in biochemistry and minor in art. In painting, mixed media, and photography, he explores overlooked biological, social, and religious microcosms and the interactions between seemingly unrelated systems. He is fascinated not only by the beauty and complexity of the universe but by the ways ideas and language shape our experience of it.
In one of the iconic moments from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, a classroom full of necktied prep-school boys stand atop their desks and recite the first line of Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln: “O Captain! My Captain!” The students are paying tribute to their “Captain,” English teacher John Keating (played memorably by Robin Willliams). Earlier in the film, Mr. Keating had made each student climb up on his desk and look down at their familiar classroom from a new, unfamiliar vantage point. When the boys stand atop their own desks at the end of the movie, it’s clear that their perspectives have been changed—permanently.
For Issue 4 of Ink & Letters, we invite artists and writers to respond to the theme of “perspective.” What happens when, like Mr. Keating’s students, you look at something familiar from a new angle? What might bring about such a shift, and what consequences might come of it? What happens to the surface of an image when the perspective is skewed, multiplied, divided, or layered? What points of view might you try on in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, visual art? How might faith tie into these questions of perspective?
The submission deadline for this issue is Friday, July 15. We hope you’ll submit art and writing that explores perspective, and that in doing so, you’ll change ours.