The Unquiet Mind

Rosie Accola is a zine-maker, editor, and poet based out of Chicago. She recently graduated from the school of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in writing. Her first full-length, Tender Dweeb, is forthcoming via Ghost City Press.

Robin Behn is the author of five volumes of poems, Quarry Cross, The Yellow House, Horizon Note, The Red Hour, and Paper Bird, and two chapbooks. She is co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, and editor of a new resource for young writers, Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing. Robin Behn teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.  Her website includes poems-inside-music with Robin both reading and playing music for her poems inspired by traditional fiddle tunes:  https://robinbehn.com/.

Mayra Yvette Gutierrez is a twenty-three-year-old, demisexual, Latina. She is a University of Illinois at Chicago Alum. There she studied English with a concentration in American Literature, and a minor in History. She has a passion for social justice, learning, and supporting other women. She loves sunflowers, books, and laying on the floor. Her debut poetry book White Lies is available on Amazon.

Over the past decade Adrienne Nadeau has facilitated workshops and performed poetry at theaters, schools, prisons, summer camps, coffee shops, bookstores, and bars. ADRIENNE has toured internationally, gracing stages in Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, and Paris … Although she can usually be found cursing at the snow, playing cribbage, and writing in Chicago dive bars.

Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poet Lore, Midwestern Gothic, Wicked Alice, Parentheses, Yes Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, Up the Staircase, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue and was the winner of the 2017 Gulf Stream Summer Contest Issue. Rouse’s chapbook, Acid and Tender, was a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize and published in 2016 by Headmistress Press. Riding with Anne Sexton, Rouse’s second book, is forthcoming from Bone & Ink Press in collaboration with dancing girl press. Her plays have been produced by SPT Theatre Company and Theatre Cedar Rapids. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.

Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a Quaker and a psychologist, lives and practices in Lexington, Mass., but her poetry seems to communicate more closely with the creative senses of Chicago, where she has never lived! She was delighted to read at the Women Made Gallery in 2008, and felt delighted to be asked to again, reading to and listening to the voices of fine women poets in this wonderful venue. Marian is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988),  a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and  two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). She has been a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts,  and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012. She is now experimenting with visual poetry which, alas, is difficult to ‘read’ aloud.

Nina Corwin is the author of two books of poetry, The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Her work has appeared in ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Verse and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curates readings at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago where she co-edited Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has read and performed her work across the country, at times set with musical or choreographic compositions. In daylight hours, she is a psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.

Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Award. Her work appears in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and other journals. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she is a poetry editor for RHINO, a reader for New England Review, and a publicity coordinator for Woman Made Gallery Literary Events.