(54) Artist Talks

Carlina Duan (54) is a poet from Michigan, and the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Carlina’s poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and other publications. Her writing has been supported with residencies and awards from organizations such as Tin House, the Academy of American Poets, the U.S. Fulbright Program, and the Hopwood Program. Carlina received her M.F.A. in Poetry from Vanderbilt University, and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education, where she also serves as the Poetry Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review. Among many things, she loves river walks, snail mail, and being a sister.

Enrique Garcia (54) is a visual artist living between Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. His work combines sculpture, photography, and found objects to explore the spatial and ideological consequences of colonialism. His work weaves together themes of erasure, inscription, replication, and decay to highlight the paradoxical relationship between creation and destruction.

Enrique studied Sculpture at Pratt Institute. His work has been included in multiple group exhibitions, including, SculptureCenter’s 2022 In Practice exhibition: literally means Collapse curated by Camila Palomino.

Annie Liontas' (54) debut novel, Let Me Explain You (Scribner), was featured in The New York Times Book Review as Editor's Choice and was selected by the ABA as an Indies Introduce Debut and Indies Next title. She is the co-editor of the anthology A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Annie’s work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Gay Magazine (Best of 2019), BOMB, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and Ninth Letter, and she is a contributor to Tolstoy Together: Reading War & Peace with Yiyun Li. She has received a Writing x Writers Fellowship, in 2021 was named the Fellow for Mid-Atlantic Arts at the Millay Colony for the Arts, and in 2023 was awarded a Fellowship at The Lighthouse Works. She is a recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and an Art is Essential Grant through the City of Philadelphia. Before joining George Washington University, she taught as Visiting Writer at UCDavis, University of Massachusetts, and Bryn Mawr College. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers, working with the Prison Writing Project at the Connally Maximum Security Penitentiary. At George Washington University, she is the co-PI for a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice. Annie is a member of The Claw, a salon for women and genderqueer writers. The Gloss, her interview series with women and genderqueer writers, is running at Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Autostraddle, and elsewhere. Her informed memoir, Sex with a Brain Injury, (Scribner) is out in 2024.

Katy McCarthy (54) is a video artist and educator, originally from California and currently based in Austin, Texas. She has had solo presentations at Ivester Contemporary (2021) and the Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas (2019). Her work has been included in group shows at 601 Art Space, NYC; Tiger Strike Asteroid, Los Angeles; Flux Factory, Long Island City; and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Museum among other venues. Her videos have been selected for screening at NURTUREart’s 2018 Single Channel Video Art Festival, the 2018 CUNY Video Festival, the 2018 Queens Boulevard Film Festival, and the 2019 Every Woman Biennial. She has been an artist-in-residence at LMCC Governors Island, SOHO20 Residency Lab, Grin City and The Wassaic Project. In 2018 Katy was the sole recipient of the St. Elmo Fellowship at UT Austin. In 2021 she received the Austin Film Society short film grant. She received her MFA from Hunter College and teaches at UT Austin.