Estée Arts is a senior at Brigham Young University studying English, philosophy, and editing. She has work published by Metazen and Outrageous Fortune.
Benjamin Blackhurst studies poetry in the MFA program at Brigham Young University, where he teaches writing and rhetoric. A few people have asked him if he turned to poetry after failing as a musician. He always tells them he’s more of a failed comedian.
Elizabeth Brady is a graduate student in Brigham Young University’s MFA program, emphasizing in creative nonfiction.
Lauren Bledsoe has lived in both California and Utah. She is currently finishing a philosophy degree at Brigham Young University. She won first place in the poetry division of the Vera Hinckley Mayhew Contest and her poems have appeared in The Likewise Folio.
Natalie Cherie Campbell is from Twin Falls, Idaho and is about to finish a degree in English and editing at BYU. She has a wonderful family, where even her six-year-old brother will let her talk about literature for hours. She has always aspired to be like Anne of Green Gables and C.S. Lewis. Her favorite children’s book is Miss Rumphius which she tries to pattern her life after. And recently, while hiking in the United Kingdom, she discovered a love of traveling and her favorite genre: the personal essay. After graduation she hopes to become a travel writer. As such her goals include writing for National Geographic from India, Thailand, or New Zealand. She loves curry, Miyazaki films, playing guitar, and reading. Natalie was recently married and has enjoys having someone to expand and challenge her ideas. Find her other thoughts and essay projects at awholelottagreat.blogspot.com.
A junior studying English and Spanish at BYU, Jenna Carson delights in falling asleep while reading out of doors on sunny days–which explains why she rarely finishes the books she begins. Although she can’t decide what she wants to be when she grows up, she plans to fill her life with color by writing about other people’s lives. Carson would like to one day settle somewhere warm, share life with a man who appreciates poetry, tend a big vegetable garden, and practice yoga daily. Until then, she’ll keep running and basking in the wanderlust of her youth.
Maddison Colvin is an artist living and working in Salt Lake, although she occasionally teaches adjunct art classes at BYU. Check out her work at maddisoncolvin.com.
Adam Clark Edwards hails from the fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. He is studying English at Brigham Young University with plans to attend law school. He served an LDS mission in northern New England. His free time consists of reading, sports, and writing fiction and song lyrics. He currently lives in his grandmother’s basement.
Kristen Evans is a sophomore at Brigham Young University from O`ahu, Hawai`i. She has had work published in the Arizona Daily Star and is looking forward to writing again when she returns from her LDS mission to North Carolina.
Cara Gillespie lives in a white house with four of her best friends, where she enjoys lounging on the couch while speaking in accents and rummaging through the cellar to find forgotten oddities. She is an avid animal lover and has pictures of dogs, bears, mice, and monkeys plastered on her walls. Her mother says she has a dual personality and her father says she’s divorced from reality, but her family speaks in jokes so she takes none of this too seriously. She loves California, dreams of traveling to Greece, and has a deep and abiding love for walnuts.
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Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her collections of poetry include Leviathan with a Hook, A Metaphorical God, and the forthcoming Uncommon Prayer. Her monograph on the poetic developments of post-Reformation poetry was published in 2014. In 2009, Penguin Classics published her translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, Milton Quarterly, and Modern Philology. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mike Lee’s work explores the relationship between multiculturalism and media experiences as they are manipulated into a hegemony. The way we experience media, while gradually becoming universalized or globalization via the internet, is largely dependent on cultural backgrounds. With influences as diverse as Kafka and Henry Darger, new synergies are crafted from both constructed and discovered meanings. Ever since he was a child, he has been fascinated by multiculturalism and the repercussions thereof. What starts out as yearning for identity soon becomes distress, leaving only a sense of ultimate relativism and with it the possibility of multiple new realities. As wavering derivatives become distorted through emergent and critical practice, the viewer is left with a testament to the possibilities of our human condition.
Sophie Lefens is an English student at BYU. Next year she will live in an orange and blue house.
Michelle Lyons hails from the lovely Northeast and is studying both chemistry and editing at BYU. She has the greenest eyes, widest features, and fullest lips out of all her siblings, but she is the shortest. She feels that she is an eclectic person with a wide variety of tastes and interests, and she appreciates a trippy chemistry lecture as much as she does a good Brandon Sanderson novel or Brian Doyle essay.
Megan McManama is the youngest in her family, and she is currently living in Utah and working as a teacher. She is a writer, painter, and runner. She loves experiencing new languages and cultures. She lives for God, literature, people, and oceans. Megan is a senior studying English and editing at BYU.
Jack Murphy is graduating in Philosophy & Russian this semester. He loves to live, laugh, and love.
zach t power has six blue shirts and seven brown pants that he rotates through whenever he puts clothes on, is married to kylie, and studies/loves his two children. he writes.
Makia Sharp grew up in Salt Lake City. She is graduating from BYU with a BFA in Studio Art. Her work represents a minimalist aesthetic and explores ideas of spirituality and ephemera through 2D, sculptural, and digital forms.
Sarah Soderborg grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is currently studying English and Sociology at BYU. This is her first published work. She hopes to one day graduate from college.
Adrian Thayn is an MFA candidate at Brigham Young University. He co-edits elsewhere, an online flash fiction and prose poetry journal. His pieces are published or forthcoming in Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art, likewise folio, CutBank Literary Magazine, and other places he doesn’t even know about yet. He is currently writing a chapbook called Dept. of Inconsolable Griefs.
Wesley Turner is a Junior from Sandy, Utah. He’s hoping to go to graduate school to study English someday. In the meantime, he enjoys rock-climbing, bad horror movies and learning about the history of Haiti.
Sarah Waldron is from Danville, California, studying 3D Studio art and Art Education at BYU. She has had a drive for creativity and expression since she was a small child, and her work is rooted in themes that span her life experience. She is interested in how relationships create identity and how we form our self perceptions in function with the people, places, and objects we interact with. Her work is also highly influenced by collection and the ephemeral, and is meant to evoke reflections on loss, hope, and desire.
Jain Willis
Natalie Wood was born and raised in the mountains of Southern California. She is a BFA student at Brigham Young University and a five year resident of Provo Utah. Her work is based in photography, video and installation and focuses on the inaccuracy of memory.