Contributors
Helli Fang is a senior at Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Natick, Massachusetts. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Alliance for Young Writers, and she has also attended the Iowa Young Writer's Studio. When Helli is not writing poetry, she enjoys playing the violin and climbing trees.
Isabella Wu (or Bella) is currently a freshman in Oxford College, loves animals, and journals extensively. She also enjoys art and visiting new places. Bella resides in Houston, TX where she wishes she has pets. She has been published before in her high school literary magazine: Pittsford Sutherland's Pegasus.
Leonor Morrow is a nineteen-year-old poet and photographer. She is a first year student at Georgetown University who intends to major in Culture and Politics. She still uses a thesaurus even though she knows plenty of words, and she thinks that sums her up pretty well.
Jamie Han is a poet from California. For her, writing is the feeling of burning from the inside out; knowing another way to evaporate, condense, to put herself back together again after the world has fallen at her feet. Her work has been published at 1:1000, her award-winning blog, and her school paper. Jamie is also the co-founder of her school's Creative Writing club, The INKlings. She has been writing since March.
Victoria Hou is a sixteen year old poet and artist from the San Francisco Bay area. In April 2015, she founded the political and social literary journal Sprout Magazine, and currently serves as the editor-in-chief. Along with Sprout, she is also the executive editor of her school’s print literary magazine, The Highland Piper. Her poetry was awarded Silver Key and Honorable Mention for Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, West Region in 2014. Passionate about politics and law, Victoria spends her free time reading up on current events and prosecuting in her high school's mock trial team. She also loves hip-hop, Taiwanese bubble tea, and obscure video games.
Jimin Kang is a 17 year old student at Chinese International School, Hong Kong. As a Korean who lives in Hong Kong, attends an international school and is fluent in Spanish, she's a self-professed third culture kid who's still trying to figure out her place in the world. What is certain, however, is her love for sweet potatoes, cats and — surprise, surprise — good poetry.
Aleksander Meyer is a seventeen year old writer currently attending his senior year of high school in Duxbury, Massachusetts. He has been published once in Duxbury High School's literary magazine, Ink Blot, and twice in an international teen literary magazine, Teen Ink.
A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications) and Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com. She has an additional poetry collection forthcoming: A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press). She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com.
Nicole Seah is a student residing in Singapore, attending the United World College of South East Asia. Her work has been featured or will be forthcoming in ThingsMag, AWARE SG, JUNOESQ Literary Journal, Wallflowers Magazine and EastLit. Nicole is the editor-in-chief for her school's creative writing magazine ELEMENT and a poetry editor for Parallel Ink, an online E-zine for teens. Her hobbies include playing tennis, eating peanut butter and attempting cool yoga moves to pass the time.
Ezra Burstein is currently a senior in high school, though he would much prefer to be a freshman in college. He studies English, Art History, and Ceramics; all of his other classes are just noise to him. He lives in Brookline, MA, where he reads, writes, and plays with his puppy, and he goes to school in Cambridge, MA, where he sits in the offices of English teachers and librarians.
Audrey Rowland - “Something Wild”
Audrey Rowland is a first year at Oberlin College. She was selected to attend Kenyon Young Writers this past summer. She was the editor-in-chief of Glyphs Literary Magazine, a Columbia Scholastic Press Gold Medalist. Her writing has been published on the Oberlin Review and the Writers Circle Magazine.
Rhiannon McGavin is a young writer from Los Angeles who first started drafting poems to attract the attention of a cute boy in her children’s Shakespeare group. While she never won his affection, she has performed original poetry on the Queen Latifah Show, Grace Cavalieri’s “Poet and the Poem” podcast, NPR, Lexus Verses and Flow, and at venues from the Hollywood Bowl and the California State Capitol Building to Women in The World 2015 and the Library of Congress. She has competed for the last three years at Brave New Voices, representing Los Angeles (and placing third in 2014) through the Get Lit organization; Rhiannon is also a 2016 YoungArts Finalist in Writing for Spoken Word. In her free time, she enjoys reading and making lip balm.
Shilpa Kunnappillil hails from Northern Virginia, and is currently a freshman at New York University. This will be her first time being published.
Talia Flores is a senior at Eden Prairie High School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Texas Book Festival Fiction Contest, she has been selected to participate in the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship program, and she is the proud founder of her school's first literary journal. When not writing, she can be found competing, teaching, and judging for the Taekwondo America Association, of which she is a nationally ranked competitor, and singing in her school's choir.
Allison Leung is a freshman at Syracuse University who is currently interning as a graphic designer for a fashion retailer company. Her current obsessions include french fries, concerts, and metallic spray paint. Fun fact: she loves her school, but dislikes the cold.
Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. Allen studied acting in the Columbia Pictures Talent Program in Los Angeles and digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production.) He currently works in the Vancouver, Canada, as a graphic artist and painter. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation's permanent art collection. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.
Miranda Sun is a sixteen-year-old who loves reading, writing, drawing, and taking cool photographs. She is a Senior Contributor for Creative Kids Magazine and has had multiple stories, poems, and other works published in Creative Kids Magazine. She has placed in several Cricket Magazine contests and won an Honorable Mention in the 2015 $1000 for 1000 Words Writing Contest.
Maggie Gray is a high school junior at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California.
Helen Li is a high school sophomore living in a small town near Charlotte, North Carolina. As far as she can remember, she's been making art, inspired by the forests and tall trees and songbirds around her. Most of her art takes the form of doodles on her math homework and portrait photography. If you can't find her holed up in her room with her laptop and tea, she'll most likely be outside in a nearby bush with a camera and a sketchbook.
Tiffany Madruga is a freshman at Harvey Mudd College.
Isabella Wu (or Bella) is currently a freshman in Oxford College, loves animals, and journals extensively. She also enjoys art and visiting new places. Bella resides in Houston, TX where she wishes she has pets. She has been published before in her high school literary magazine: Pittsford Sutherland's Pegasus.
Leonor Morrow is a nineteen-year-old poet and photographer. She is a first year student at Georgetown University who intends to major in Culture and Politics. She still uses a thesaurus even though she knows plenty of words, and she thinks that sums her up pretty well.
Jamie Han is a poet from California. For her, writing is the feeling of burning from the inside out; knowing another way to evaporate, condense, to put herself back together again after the world has fallen at her feet. Her work has been published at 1:1000, her award-winning blog, and her school paper. Jamie is also the co-founder of her school's Creative Writing club, The INKlings. She has been writing since March.
Victoria Hou is a sixteen year old poet and artist from the San Francisco Bay area. In April 2015, she founded the political and social literary journal Sprout Magazine, and currently serves as the editor-in-chief. Along with Sprout, she is also the executive editor of her school’s print literary magazine, The Highland Piper. Her poetry was awarded Silver Key and Honorable Mention for Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, West Region in 2014. Passionate about politics and law, Victoria spends her free time reading up on current events and prosecuting in her high school's mock trial team. She also loves hip-hop, Taiwanese bubble tea, and obscure video games.
Jimin Kang is a 17 year old student at Chinese International School, Hong Kong. As a Korean who lives in Hong Kong, attends an international school and is fluent in Spanish, she's a self-professed third culture kid who's still trying to figure out her place in the world. What is certain, however, is her love for sweet potatoes, cats and — surprise, surprise — good poetry.
Aleksander Meyer is a seventeen year old writer currently attending his senior year of high school in Duxbury, Massachusetts. He has been published once in Duxbury High School's literary magazine, Ink Blot, and twice in an international teen literary magazine, Teen Ink.
A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications) and Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com. She has an additional poetry collection forthcoming: A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press). She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com.
Nicole Seah is a student residing in Singapore, attending the United World College of South East Asia. Her work has been featured or will be forthcoming in ThingsMag, AWARE SG, JUNOESQ Literary Journal, Wallflowers Magazine and EastLit. Nicole is the editor-in-chief for her school's creative writing magazine ELEMENT and a poetry editor for Parallel Ink, an online E-zine for teens. Her hobbies include playing tennis, eating peanut butter and attempting cool yoga moves to pass the time.
Ezra Burstein is currently a senior in high school, though he would much prefer to be a freshman in college. He studies English, Art History, and Ceramics; all of his other classes are just noise to him. He lives in Brookline, MA, where he reads, writes, and plays with his puppy, and he goes to school in Cambridge, MA, where he sits in the offices of English teachers and librarians.
Audrey Rowland - “Something Wild”
Audrey Rowland is a first year at Oberlin College. She was selected to attend Kenyon Young Writers this past summer. She was the editor-in-chief of Glyphs Literary Magazine, a Columbia Scholastic Press Gold Medalist. Her writing has been published on the Oberlin Review and the Writers Circle Magazine.
Rhiannon McGavin is a young writer from Los Angeles who first started drafting poems to attract the attention of a cute boy in her children’s Shakespeare group. While she never won his affection, she has performed original poetry on the Queen Latifah Show, Grace Cavalieri’s “Poet and the Poem” podcast, NPR, Lexus Verses and Flow, and at venues from the Hollywood Bowl and the California State Capitol Building to Women in The World 2015 and the Library of Congress. She has competed for the last three years at Brave New Voices, representing Los Angeles (and placing third in 2014) through the Get Lit organization; Rhiannon is also a 2016 YoungArts Finalist in Writing for Spoken Word. In her free time, she enjoys reading and making lip balm.
Shilpa Kunnappillil hails from Northern Virginia, and is currently a freshman at New York University. This will be her first time being published.
Talia Flores is a senior at Eden Prairie High School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Texas Book Festival Fiction Contest, she has been selected to participate in the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship program, and she is the proud founder of her school's first literary journal. When not writing, she can be found competing, teaching, and judging for the Taekwondo America Association, of which she is a nationally ranked competitor, and singing in her school's choir.
Allison Leung is a freshman at Syracuse University who is currently interning as a graphic designer for a fashion retailer company. Her current obsessions include french fries, concerts, and metallic spray paint. Fun fact: she loves her school, but dislikes the cold.
Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. Allen studied acting in the Columbia Pictures Talent Program in Los Angeles and digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production.) He currently works in the Vancouver, Canada, as a graphic artist and painter. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation's permanent art collection. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.
Miranda Sun is a sixteen-year-old who loves reading, writing, drawing, and taking cool photographs. She is a Senior Contributor for Creative Kids Magazine and has had multiple stories, poems, and other works published in Creative Kids Magazine. She has placed in several Cricket Magazine contests and won an Honorable Mention in the 2015 $1000 for 1000 Words Writing Contest.
Maggie Gray is a high school junior at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California.
Helen Li is a high school sophomore living in a small town near Charlotte, North Carolina. As far as she can remember, she's been making art, inspired by the forests and tall trees and songbirds around her. Most of her art takes the form of doodles on her math homework and portrait photography. If you can't find her holed up in her room with her laptop and tea, she'll most likely be outside in a nearby bush with a camera and a sketchbook.
Tiffany Madruga is a freshman at Harvey Mudd College.