ARTISTS

COLLABORATORS

Diego Quiros

GENRE: Poetry, Photography

BIO: Diego Quiros spent his early childhood in Spain and traveled to the United States by himself at age 10. His photographs have been featured at the Zhu-B Art Gallery in Chicago, and at various galleries in Miami, including Books and Books, Coconut Grove’s KROMA and the historic Deering Estate where he had the privilege of serving as an Artist in Residence.

Diego has been featured by South Florida Opulence Magazine on a six-page interview, and was nominated by the Miami New Times as having the Best Flickr stream in 2013.

He has also served as a juror at the Coconut Grove Arts Fair and in the Young Talent Big Dreams contest.

Diego is also an accomplished stained-glass artisan, artist, and writer; he published a collection of poems under the title Alchetry in 2009. His poetry has been read on public radio, the New World Symphony, and various venues.

Diego holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and currently resides in the Metro DC area.

Carlos A Navarro

GENRE: Painting

BIO: Carlos A. Navarro was born in Havana, Cuba. He spent the early part of his life in New York, moved to Miami in his teens and has lived there ever since. His initial artistic inspirations came from Dali and Picasso. Yet while being in New York, his individual style emerged from the influences of Pop artists such as Peter Max, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring.

He incorporates his own style, which has come to be known as “Pop Suave,” fusing Pop Art with traditional Cuban, Miami and other contemporary themes from his heritage and upbringing. His work depicts different subject matter ranging from nostalgic to political, and humorous to sensual. Although he left Cuba as an infant and has never returned, he has painted images of a Cuba he never knew through what he terms "instilled memories," stemming from the rich culture and traditions he was exposed to as he was growing up in the United States.

FEATURING

Ralph Adamo

GENRE: Narrative Poetry

BIO: Ralph Adamo’s newest book is All the Good Hiding Places (Black Widow Press, January 2020). His seventh collection of poems, Ever: Poems 2000-2014, was published by Lavender Ink. Previous volumes include Waterblind: New and Selected Poems (2002), and two of Lost Roads’ Publishers’ earliest books, Sadness at the Private University (1977) and The End of the World (1979). Among his awards are an LEA Individual Artist Grant in 1998, and a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University in New Orleans, where he also edits Xavier Review and Xavier Review Press.

Marjorie Agosin

GENRE: Short Story

BIO: Marjorie Agosin is the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is a poet, Young Adult novelist, and a scholar. Agosin is also a Human Rights Activist and has received several awards for her work including the United Nations Leadership Award. As a writer Agosin has been recognized by the American Library Association with the Pura Belpre Award for her novel I Lived in Butterfly Hill.

Monique Allain

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Monique Allan is an artist, researcher and educator, Monique was born in São Paulo. She produces urban interventions, collective actions, performances, and audiovisual installations, which promote encounters and exchanges with space and people. The work is experimental and procedural. There is an engagement with socio-environmental issues. Monique has participated in exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, in institutional, public, alternative spaces, and galleries.

Ann Benoit

GENRE: Narrative Poetry

BIO: Ann Benoit has had many lives. A retired lawyer of 30 years, a former dancer with a regional ballet company, a classically trained singer, she served as the Executive Director of a non-profit. A former columnist and photographer for the Times-Picayune | Advocate, the daily newspaper of New Orleans, she also wrote and photo-graphed 3 cookbooks and photo-graphed an additional 2 for Pelican Publishing/ Arcadia Publishing.

Currently, she is the Publisher of a county-wide online community news newspaper and its 8 local affiliates.

Jose Maria Cundin

GENRE: Painting

BIO: Jose Maria Cundin is a painter and sculptor born in Getxo, the Basque Country of Spain. Considered an outstanding advocate of the historical Avant Garde in his native Basque country, the work of this contemporary virtuoso hangs in the permanent collections of The Museum of Bellas Artes, Bilbao; ARTIUM, Vitoria, Basque Country, Spain; The New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Antioquia, Colombia; and Johnson & Wales University, as well as in numerous private and corporate collections including in Europe, Australia, North and South America. He has lived in the New Orleans area since 1964.

Hannah Fulton

GENRE: Fine Art Photography

BIO: Hannah Fulton earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Graphic Communications and a minor in Photography. Briefly, she freelanced and worked part-time as a graphic designer for local newspapers. Later, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts at Louisiana Tech University School of Design in 2021 where she worked as a teaching assistant. She adjuncted at Louisiana School of Math, Science, and the Arts. Currently, she is teaching full-time at Louisiana Christian University.

James Nolan

GENRE: Short Story, Poetry

BIO: James Nolan's newest book is Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans, a memoir forthcoming in March 2024 from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. His latest poetry book is Nasty Water: Collected New Orleans Poems (2018). Previous collections include Why I Live in the Forest, What Moves Is Not the Wind, and Drunk on Salt. His Flight Risk won the 2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir.

Alessandra Rosa

GENRE: Poetry, Art

BIO: Alessandra Rosa is an anthropologist, professor, researcher, activist, public speaker, and consultant. Her research focuses on social movements, digital activism, education, Latin America and Caribbean studies, women and gender studies, post-disaster migration studies, emotional well-being, media discourse analysis, and the intersection between ethnography and Latino/a/x/e health issues. As a transnational feminist scholar, she has dedicated her teaching, research, and service to fostering diversity, equity, and justice.

Veronica Scharf Garcia

GENRE: Multimedia Art, Poetry

BIO: Veronica Scharf Garcia has exhibited her art in the U.S. and Peru. She has read her poetry in Hollywood, San Diego (CA), St. Augustine, Davie and the Miami Book Fair. She grew up outside the U.S. and continues her itinerant life here and there, recently in Europe.

Michael Tolleson Robles

GENRE: Painting

BIO: Michael Tolleson Robles is an Autistic Savant Artist, Author and Advocate. To create his prolific works of art with no formal instruction, Michael relies on his Asperger’s mind. During his 9-year painting career, he’s painted 1500+ gallery-worthy paintings. Michael maintains and operates the Galeria Robles Vallarta, a 6000 square-foot facility that houses an Art Gallery and Fine Dining restaurant and is located in the historic Centro area of Puerto Vallarta. Michael’s art is collected and sought after worldwide.

M.J .Branham

GENRE: Poetry

BIO: M.J. Branham is an octogenarian, who earned her Ph.D. at SUNY and taught at SUNY, Rochester Institute of Techno-logy, and Texas Tech University. A writer of prose and poetry, she is the proud mother of Kathryn and Michelle and granddaughter Hannah. She resides in Covington. Louisiana

Eve Brouwer

GENRE: Narrative Poetry

BIO: Eve Brouwer, MLA, U of Chicago—has been writing all her life, from Chia Pet ads in the ‘80s to parts of the UCL (London) book, The Mad Cow Crisis in 1998. Since turning to fiction and poetry, she’s been a finalist in the New Orleans Faulkner competition, was named the St. Tammany Parish Literary Artist of the Year; was a featured speaker at the Louisiana Book Fair, won first prize in the WNBA poetry contest, and authored the novel, My Grandmother Danced.

Kathleen Rose DesHotel

GENRE: Poetry, Photography

BIO: Kathleen Deshotel is a teacher, writer, photographer, artist, poet, potter, and deep thinker, who was born and raised in New Orleans, a city of love and understanding. For her beloved 30 year career she taught high school gifted students English, writing, yearbook, photography, and digital video editing. To prepare for teaching she earned a BA, MA, MEd, plus 30 graduate hours in photography. Teaching and writing about artists for The Advocate newspaper stirred her own muse and taught her many lessons as she captured the essence of each artist’s journey and explains, “Art connects just as education does.”

Carroll Devine

GENRE: Short Story

BIO: Carroll Devine grew up in New Orleans dancing, loving stories, and with a que-sera-sera attitude. This led her to a 5 ½ year worldwide odyssey, a 12-year, Thoreau-inspired rural Missouri life raising goats, gardens and 3 sons. She’s a freelance writer, ESL teacher, radio announcer, Voiceover artist, Yoga instructor, and author (Sleeping Between the Rails, and Mystery of the Missing Smile). Carroll Devine was St. Tammany Parish Louisiana’s 2023 Literary Artist of the Year.

Cherice Harrison-Nelson

GENRE: Costume

BIO: Cherice Harrrison-Nelson is an educator, narrative beadwork, visual and performance artist, and arts administrator. Her work is primarily autobiographical, as well as, simultaneously ancient and contemporary. She approaches her art as a cognitive provocateur, with the specific intent to engage observers through imagery and performances that explore, sexism, racism, classism and other limiting/confining norms.

Marjan Khorram Golkaran

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Marjan Khorram Golkaran is a multimedia artist working and living in Tehran, Iran. She is deeply inspired by and concerned about the natural world and this is a central theme of her artistic process.

Phyllis Parun

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Phyllis Parun is a New Orleans native and visual artist with a philosopher's pen, pursued the study of philosophy at Louisiana State University. Perhaps she is best known for co-founding the Artists Information Bureau, initiating the city’s first 1% for Arts Ordinance (1976), and transforming gilding into a stunning, fresh contemporary art form. Ms. Parun has been a catalyst, shaping the unwritten culture of the New Orleans landscape and surely one of her living treasures. She is a widely exhibited artist, in private collections, she has published poems, essays, interviews and cover art in fifty plus journals.

Christopher Porche West

GENRE: Fine Art Photography

BIO: Christopher Porche West is an award-winning photographer and artist who has been documenting the people and culture of New Orleans for 30 years. A native Californian with Franco-European roots in Louisiana, Porché West has been featured in more than 40 exhibitions. His work can be found in the archives of the Historic New Orleans Collection, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the Smithsonian and other venues

Jonathan Rose

GENRE: Poetry

BIO: Jonathan Rose is an attorney, educator, writer, translator, editor -- published internationally, active in the arts community. He has led monthly poetry readings, is widely travelled, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is President of Culture in the City, Program Director of the South Florida Writers Association, and is a long-time member of the Theatre League of South Florida.

Bex Saunders

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Bex Saunders is an award-winning photographer from the South of England. She has had success in over 70 awards, which include The Times' Young Photographer of the Year and the ZSL Photographer of the Year. She has been internationally published and exhibited. She is also a law graduate.

Nicholas German Serrano

GENRE: Music Lyrics

BIO: Nicholas German Serrano -- who goes by “Serrano” -- is a multi-genre artist and producer hailing from Miami, Florida. Born and raised into a Cuban family, Serrano, was heavily influenced by Latin, urban, and jazz music in his youth. His discography shares no single genre and instead may be identified as an exploration of many. Serrano has collaborated with many artists and aside from his solo career, he is the drummer and producer for the band, Modern Freaks

Eliana Vanessa

GENRE: Poetry

BIO: Eliana Vanessa is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her new Self-Published collection of poems, Life-Limbs (2022), is now available on Amazon. Also, the forthcoming chapbook, Break-Dancing With Worms, will be released in April (2024).

Shilpa Suchak

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Shilpa Suchak is a multimedia artist with a B.A. in Applied Art from the Sir JJ Institute of Fine Arts in Mumbai, and an M.F.A. in Photography from the Academy of Arts in San Francisco. Suchak is fearless in her exploration of autobiographical concepts within her work involving collage, mixed media or montage but always remaining photographically based. Her work has been exhibited in San Francisco, the Yokohoma Triennale in Japan, and in Mumbai (India), among other venues. She resides in Mumbai, India.

Jose Luis Vazquez

GENRE: Multimedia Art

BIO: Jose Luis Vazquez is a Cuban American born in Havana raised in New York then Miami, and now resides in Atlanta Georgia. He’s a cinemato-grapher, photographer and a painter whose art works are infused with impressionistic brushstrokes and textures. "I apply paint on canvas and allow my emotions to take control while the rhythm of my brush conceives each piece. My works are snapshots of my deepest memories.”

Steve Wright

GENRE: Fine Art Photography

BIO: Steve Wright is a visual and verbal storyteller. His street photography is inspired by Ara Güler, the Eye of Istanbul. He learned from and edited a book about the great Turkish photographer. Wright is a Pulitzer-nominated, award-winning writer and has published more than 5,000 professional articles. His Save My Little Havana, a one-man show photo exhibit opened in August 2023 at the Art Deco Welcome Center in Miami Beach and ran through Thanksgiving.