October 2021 | visual art
Black Sand Beach
Jim Ross
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in six years he’s published nonfiction, poetry, and photography in over 150 journals and anthologies on four continents. Publications include 580 Split, Bombay Gin, Burningword, Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Lunch Ticket, The Atlantic, The Manchester Review, and Typehouse. Recent photo essays include Barren, Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, So It Goes, and Wordpeace. A nonfiction piece led to a role in the documentary limited series, “I, Sniper.” Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.
October 2021 | visual art
v470 (Faux Spirits Series)
Joe Lugara
Joe Lugara took up photography and painting as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms and objects, inexplicable phenomena, and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital photographs and digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey. Mr. Lugara’s work has been featured in several publications and has appeared in more than 40 exhibitions in museums and galleries in the New York Metropolitan Area, including the New Jersey State Museum and 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University.
October 2021 | visual art
Life
Andromeda Mendoza
All her life, Andromeda has followed at the heels of her passions. Born in the Philippines, and growing up in modest means, she relied greatly on her imagination. Her creativity springs from a past spent climbing trees in the woods, riding in bamboo-made carts in the countryside, and roaming through bustling markets in the city. In 1989, her family emigrated to Houston, Texas where she cultivated her interest in writing and the arts. An ardent student of photography, illustration, and graphic design, she graduated from the Art Institute of Houston with a fine arts degree. Working as a graphic designer for corporate studios, she explored many creative avenues leading her to cement her love of photography where she embraces a great passion.
October 2021 | visual art
Sedona
Christy Lorio
Christy Lorio is a writer and photographer based in New Orleans. In this series “Summer Dream,” Christy’s film photography reflects a nostalgia of summers spent in Arizona and the yearning to return, partially as a fulfillment of her father’s dream of hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon before he died of cancer. Now, as a result of her own cancer diagnosis, Christy has spent two summers hiking in Sedona and the Grand Canyon in order to thrive in the face of her stage IV diagnosis. Christy’s photography has been seen in Auburn Art Gallery (Los Angeles), Millepiani Exhibition Space (Rome, Italy) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans). She was a finalist in New Delta Review’s 2021 Ryan R. Gibbs Photography contest as well as a fellow for Arizona State University’s Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference. Christy holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently working on her MFA in Studio Art from UNO.
October 2021 | visual art
Into the Mystic
Stanley Horowitz
Stanley Horowtiz is a retired Adjunct Professor at Farmingdale College. His work had been included in the 2018 Heckscher Museum Biennial. Recent covers have included Rattle, Stand, Cimarron Review and Kestrel.
October 2021 | visual art
Closed
Tawnya Gibson
Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer and photographer. Her love of photography started young, with a Kodak Ektralite camera in her youth. She is rarely without a camera in hand, ready to document life as she sees it. Though a trained journalist, she has in recent years changed course, combining her arts education from Utah State University in both writing and photography to tell the story of the intermountain west where she lives and the southwest where she was raised. In her work, she places importance on photojournalism and being able to tell the story of those people and objects who inhabit the earth, both past and present. Her strong use of color and knack for seeing the beauty in the everyday and sometimes forgotten has made her work stand out in local showings. She currently lives and works in the mountains of Utah, but her New Mexican roots still bleed through her work.
