Mentors
CREATIVE WRITING
Heather Laurel Jensen | Arizona, USA
Heather Laurel Jensen is a junior at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Arizona. She serves as National Student Poet of the Southwest 2018, and is co-president of Creative Youth of Arizona, an LLC which assists with the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in Arizona and administers the Phoenix Youth Poet Laureate program. Her poetry, short stories, and photography have been published by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Best Teen Writing of Arizona, diode poetry journal, Polyphony HS, and the Blue Marble Review, among others.
CREATIVE WRITING
Lyrik Courtney | Florida, USA
Lyrik Courtney (b. 1999, Tampa, Florida) is a German Studies and Creative Writing double-major at Agnes Scott College, where they have been the recipient of the Janef Newman Preston Prize and the Betty W. Stoffel Award for Poetry. Much of Courtney’s work consists of abstract narratives about afro-surreal subjects or deconstructs the (necro)pastoral image and landscape. The erotic form, where it appears in the poems or short prose, is often, if not always, rendered grotesquely. They were one of the 2018 Winter Tangerine Writing Fellows and are a June Fellow (2019) of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Lyrik is an alum of various Winter Tangerine workshops and the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program (Class of 2017). They have been published in journals such as Liminality, Ninth Letter, Blueshift, and Strange Horizons, and are the blog editor and interview correspondent for TRACK//FOUR, a magazine for people of color.
CREATIVE WRITING
Darren C. Demaree | Ohio, USA
Darren C. Demaree is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently “Emily As Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire”, which will be published in June of 2019 by Harpoon Books. He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Kate Bucca (Writing) |
Shahé Mankerian (Writing) |
VISUAL ART
Ira Joel Haber | New York, USA
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 230 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists' Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.
VISUAL ART
Lorette C. Luzajic | Toronto, Canada
Lorette C. Luzajic, of Toronto, Canada, is an award winning artist, writer, and founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review. She creates collage and mixed media based works that are at turns abstract, urban, surreal or pop. Her works are inspired by eclectic curiosity, a sense of adventure, and an irreverent outlook on the world. Lorette takes in the stories around her, through poetry, fiction, travel, cinema, art history, music, mythology, psychology, religion, and individual narratives and remixes them in her studio laboratory. She has exhibited in hundreds of shows and venues locally in Canada and around the world, and is collected internationally. Last year, she was awarded top prize for a painting by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Canada. In 2017, she participated in a two week symposium of international contemporary artists in Tunisia, North Africa. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
VISUAL ART
Anouk Vercouter | Ghent, Belgium
Anouk Vercouter , born in 1991 (Ostend - Belgium), lives and works in Ghent, where she graduated as a Master in drawing and printmaking at LUCA School of Arts. Anouk is especially triggered by the period in art history where fine art and the representation of beauty disconnect. She expresses the results of her romantic vision by effortlessly drawing on paper, mainly in graphite or coloured pencil . The artist, whose oeuvre is situated between visual art and illustration , reaches out to her viewers by inviting them to join her on a trip into the imaginary. Her ambition is to never impose an unambiguous interpretation but to hand out only a few "props" in order to uncover a unique story into the individual viewer's imagination. The diversity of the storylines and the unrestricted associations revealed by her drawings, contaminated by the carefully chosen objects that the artist surrounds herself with in her studio/Wunderkammer excite her imagination and force her to draw, continuously.
VISUAL ART
Linden Eller (Visual Art) | Arizona, USA
Born in 1984, Linden spent her youth in the urban Sonoran desert of Phoenix, Arizona before moving to Southern California to obtain her BA in Studio Art. She’s since lived and worked out of New England, Europe, India, Australia, Samoa, New Zealand, and Japan. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. This primary interest in place and self-archival attracted her to the collage medium. Using a combination of found fragments and personal elements, she composes floating abstract shapes sewn together with thread on paper. Her work centers around themes of memory architecture, its process, and the layers of alterations which happen each time a recollection occurs.
Choosing a distinctly pale colour palette together with the use of tracing paper, her pieces attempt to replicate the quiet hazy environment from which a memory is recalled. Blending autobiographical narratives with larger collective subjects such as childhood, longing, and place, Linden thinks of her collages as layered field recordings that represent multiple interpretations and perspectives of the same story.
Linden’s work has been mentioned online in Frankie & Yen magazines, and been included in numerous publications such as Collage by Woman: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists, Create!, Inside Artists, Making The Cut Vol. 1, and Art Ascent. Recent residencies include Dar Slimane (Morocco), La Filature des Calquières (France), Tenjinyama Art Studio (Japan), Cowwarr Art Space (Australia), and Tiapapata Art Centre (Samoa).
MUSIC
leavv | Germany
Leavv is a musician hailing from Germany, with a focus on silky, relaxing instrumental hip hop. Spherical synths and smooth piano chords are often part of his music, which is generally themed around little moments, travels and dreamy memories. Songs from his album Mind Garden (2018) has been listened to over 7 million times collectively on Youtube, Spotify, and similar music streaming services; his work can also be found in lo-fi compilations by Chillhop Music which receive millions of views and real-time streamers. Along with his previous albums recreation (2017), essence (2017), and currents (2017), Mind Garden and his unique, magnetic style have gained him thousands of followers across social media platforms.
MUSIC
Grace Coberly | Illinois, USA
Grace Coberly (she/they) is a composer, conductor, and aspiring music teacher from the suburbs of Chicago. A sophomore at Haverford College, she’s a music and linguistics double major with a passion for ensemble singing. She has sung in thirteen choirs, including the district and all-state levels of ILMEA and the Heritage Chorale of Oak Park, IL (as the 2015 recipient of the Marcie Hartman Mentoring Scholarship). She has also led two a cappella groups — including her current group, the Haverford College Mainliners — and founded two others. This past spring, she bought a pack of plastic kazoos and organized her friends into their school’s first kazoo chorus, just to ensure that no one was taking her too seriously.
Kathryn Satoh (Music) | Illinois, USA
Elizabeth Newkirk (Music) | Illinois, USA
Program Directors
Sarah Feng, Founder & Program Director, is a poet and novelist from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a 2018 Foyle Commended Young Poet of the Year and the runner-up for the Adroit Prize for Prose. Her design, editorial, and creative writing work have also been recognized by Teen Vogue, the Critical Pass Junior Poet Prize, the Live Poets Society of New Jersey, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the Leyla Beban Young Author’s Foundation, the California Coastal Commission, Write the World, the American Scholastic Press Association, and more. Her work is in Gigantic Sequins and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She was Kenyon Young Writer's Workshop '18 and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship '17. At the Kenyon workshop, she participated in an activity where writers wrote non-stop while listening silently to a series of songs, auditory signals, and choral polyphonies played in a single, flowing sequence. She remembered magic happening in that moment, the tremor of gravity buzzing up the base of the skull, the entrance and re-entrance into the mind, the voltage shimmering between music and words. Sarah also instructs charcoals and pastels at a summer art camp and illustrates moodboards for her own short stories. She has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds. You can find her here.
Patrick Tong, Outreach Director, is a high school junior from the northern suburbs of Chicago. His work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of the UK, and appears in Eunoia Review and Rising Phoenix Review. Besides reading for COUNTERCLOCK, he currently serves as an Executive Editor for Polyphony H.S. and a copy editor for its affiliated blog, Voices.
Rachel Lu, Operations Director, is an undergraduate at Hamilton College in upstate New York. She has been recognized for her work by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and her work appears in Voyage and Red Weather. She misses the sun at her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jennifer Rouse, Events Coordinator, is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Parentheses, Cleaver, Always Crashing, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Rouse is a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize. Headmistress Press has published her books Acid and Tender, CAKE, and Riding with Anne Sexton. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.