Issuu

A MAGAZINE FOR MIXED IDENTITIES, STORIES AND VOICES.

ISSUE 5 | WINTER 2021

Meet the team

Editorial PAULINE JEREMIE Founder and Chief Editor SUMAYA KASSIM Prose Editor MINA MORIARTY Poetry Editor CAITLIN CLANCY Art Editor

Design HAZEL MIRSEPASI Graphic Designer PHOEBE BROADFOOT Illustrator

Community OLIVIA MILLAR-ROSS Social Media Assistant CARINYA SHARPLES Workshop Facilitator

Editor’s note Dear Reader, Whether this is your first time reading Middleground or you’ve been avidly anticipating each issue, you may or may not be familiar with all the reasons this project was started. So let us tell you about one of them: we were tired. Tired of seeing the mixed-race community underrepresented and, when represented, manipulated to fit inaccurate and harmful tropes—from the “cure to racism” to the “tragic mulatto”. We wanted to tell our stories ourselves, to create a platform for mixed-race people to show what our experiences are really like—in prose, poetry, painting, drawing and any other medium that feels right to us. Our lives do not always fit into a convenient narrative. They are beautiful, heartbreaking, conflicting, powerful and complex. Though there is no one size fits all, this issue of Middleground sets the record straight by taking you on a unique journey through what the life of a mixed-race person might look like. Through the editing process of this issue, we saw that each submission we received was a different part of a whole life story, so the poems, essays and pieces of artwork you are about to encounter follow the growth cycle of not one narrator, but instead a polyvocal character with different roots and paths of life. Starting before birth and ending in adulthood, seen through the eyes of grandparents, children, teens and adults, the pieces within these pages cover themes of generational trauma, childhood, religion, family, beauty standards and heritage. We hope that this issue helps correct the perceptions and expectations our non-mixed readers might have of mixedness and that our fellow multiracial readers benefit from having our stories told in all of their complexity and contradiction, as a reminder that our hardships, our successes, our faith and our beauty are all things worth celebrating. Happy reading, The Middleground team

Contents LATIN ROOTS Jessica Carvajal Garavito

GENERATIONAL BULLSHIT AND PEDIGREE Zoe Mei

INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY AND WHAT MEETS THE EYE Tara Modi

SKIN IN THE GAME Shayne Haskens

COUSIN AND ON WATCHING A VIDEO OF PALESTINIAN TEENS DANCING DABKE Mandy Shunnarah

CURLS Shaeley Lincoln

LIGHTENING Laila Sumpton

EARTH WITH HONEYBEES AND RIPPLES Jasmine Coe

ANCESTRY AND WAITING Lucille Ling

ON TRANSUBSTANTIATION Vivian Burnette

RISING SUN Mishu Callan CONTRIBUTORS

28 30

Latin Roots JESSICA CARVAJAL GARAVITO

Generational Bullshit ZOE MEI

I still remember my grandmother who died before I was born. She told me stories when I was young and said I must be strong like a river in a flood sweeping all away before me: forge the road for my own bare feet trod ever on, as she did for me. She said I must forgive my ma forgive her for it, too for she was a mother like no other whose eyes could spill a sea. Her pain was mine, a wish divine, her thirst a roar, born of me: she walked the stones I carved for her sank deep in the prints of my feet. So pray, work hard and sacrifice, your ghosts are rotten hungry. We gave you blade and legacy so daughter, run, be anything.

Pedigree ZOE MEI

Look on me dearly: your stolen sullied sullen

Do two halves not one whole

daughter. I could dig you up to hold your bones but

soul make? I take

want only to wash myself away, like white foam

a breath and leave it

from the seashore. If I burn what is buried,

free.

is it cremation or disintegration? You would fly ashes in the wind, like a wish given lift, like an altar of lit incense. Think of learning of your blood: yellow skin and rice paddies and great-great-great-great-granddaddy grey for the Confederacy.

Skin In The Game SHAYNE HASKENS

I spent my childhood summers in Fresno, California where my father lived with my grandparents and a few of my brothers. Summers in the central valley are hot and dry, which made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in San Jose in a car with no working A/C uncomfortable, to put it mildly. With the windows down, our bodies collided with the hundred-degree air, causing my long hair to mosh around like a kid in steel-toed boots, my dad and brothers laughing hysterically at the spectacle. The sensation was more like a smothering than a relief. In this kind of heat, we kids could only go outside at night when the sun stopped threatening to drain us of what youthful energy we had left. In the dark it was easier to break into the grounds of the local high school and use some orange cones we found in a shed to randomly redirect traffic, or ride downhill on some dollies into carefully arranged trash cans like human bowling balls. The kind of stuff you’d only do in a place like Fresno, where a day’s worth of recycled air will push even the indoorsiest of us outside at the 8

slightest drop in temperature. Slingshotting oranges from a local grove at passing cars was the kind of thing we siblings could only do together, because with me around the boys wouldn’t get into as much trouble if we were caught. Frankly, we were more concerned about the guy that got out of his car to chase us after a sizeable orange hit is window than we were about any passing authority figures, but the oxygen at 98°F was evidently worth the risk. It was on one of these famously hot days that I found myself in the car with my dad on our way to a Hollywood Video, probably to return some action movie I didn’t really care for but watched anyway because—brothers. We were pulling up to the stoplight just before the turn into the shopping center’s parking lot, slowing down as my father moved into the right turn lane. That’s when a friendly neighborhood police officer decided to flash his lights and hit the siren to let my dad know he was being pulled over. It took my father a second to realize the lights were for him. He hadn’t done anything illegal, had he? But, like a good

citizen, my dad pulled over anyway and waited for the cop to tell us what he had done wrong. My stomach was in knots as my dad maneuvered us away from the rest of traffic. At the time I thought it was just because of my discomfort with authority (a family trait). I never liked getting caught breaking rules, not because I’d ever been in love with rules, but because I hated putting people out. My dad (and the rest of my family) used to love teasing me about how well-behaved I was. I almost never had the heart to tell them that it was because I was determined not to turn out like them. Maybe my subconscious also knew that in this instance, my presence would not be a shield. * I didn’t consciously distrust cops as a kid. I actually have a specific memory of a day in elementary school when we had to attend an assembly where a police officer gave a talk on why we should always trust and

cooperate with the police. Police officers are our friends, the officer had us repeat back to him, like a benediction. Before raising their hands to ask if they could touch the officer’s gun, many students could be heard muttering under their breath, “pshh, yeah right. The cops aren’t our friends. I’ll never talk to cops. They’re liars.” Oh yeah, I thought, feeling kind of dumb for not realizing sooner that we weren’t actually supposed to be believing any of this. After all, it was common practice for most kids around my neighborhood to make a break for it whenever police officers rolled around. Why did we do that, anyway? It’s not like I had any reason to dislike the police. Unless, of course, you were to count the fair few occasions on which they felt it necessary to bang on the front door of my family’s home in the middle of the night, only to barge in and insist that we must be hiding somebody wanted here (they were usually looking for one of my strung-out cousins or uncles). I remember being scared on those nights and not really understanding 9

why. Perhaps it had something to do with the loaded firearms they were always carrying, or the accusative tones they always took when speaking to anyone, including little girls. * Back in the car with my dad with both of our windows rolled down, it was relatively easy for this cop to casually stroll up to my father’s side of the car and inform him that changing lanes at a traffic light is illegal (as far as I’m aware, it isn’t), and that he was acting suspiciously like he was trying to avoid the cop (as far as I’m aware, he wasn’t). My father, rightfully frustrated, informed the officer loudly that he had no idea what he had done—which was what, again?—was illegal. After going back and forth with my dad for several minutes, the cop nodded in my direction and asked something along the lines of, “who’s this that you have with you?” “That’s my daughter! That’s my daughter!” my father pleaded, probably sprinkling in more colorful language here and there. This was a phrase I was used to hearing him exclaim while arguing with my grandparents, usually over some criticism of his parenting. My dad was always a little sensitive that way. This time seemed different, though. Maybe in the face of power, this exclamation was all he had. If it didn’t work here, what else could he possibly do? I remember wishing he’d been able to exclaim it at his own funeral, where the vast majority of his (our) extended family had no idea who I was. The officer made his way over to my side of the car and asked me through my window “are you ok? Is this your father?” I gave him my signature preteen girl wtf-are-you-talking-about face and said, “yeah…?” And like that, our antagonist was defeated. The cop finally had to let go of whatever it was he thought he had caught and let us carry on with our day, though 10

he didn’t seem satisfied. The rest of the drive to and from the video store was slightly more tense after that. I could tell my dad was shaken, though he was far too manly to ever admit it. He kept insisting that he must look “too young” to have a daughter my age (and I wasn’t even his oldest), an excuse he would conjure up again almost exactly a decade later when he got pulled over while visiting me at college. It seems pertinent now to mention that, while no one would look at me and think, ‘now there’s a fiery Latina,’ my father was visibly Mexican-American. Obligatory hyphenation because Mexican-Mexicans tend to be pretty gatekeep-y about who gets to call themselves “Mexican,” but let it be known that most of the Mexican-Americans I’ve known simply refer to themselves as Mexican. (Could I just go with Chicano? Probably, but that seems unnecessarily political for the type of Mexican-Americans I’m talking about. To be honest, I didn’t even learn that word until I was a teenager, anyway.) And I use the word “visibly” because my father never had to do what I’m doing— and what I deeply resent—right now. That is to say, he never had to come out as Latino, so to speak. I doubt he ever had to put up with white people “correcting” him about the politically correct term for the various groups of Mexicans. I bet he never had a non-Latino say to him, “I’ve been to Latin America. I know what real tortillas look like.” I’d have a hard time believing that any mean, blue-eyed, Spanish-fluent folklorico girls burst into tears when they found out he’d be performing with them because he “didn’t belong” there. In other words, a friendly neighborhood “peace” officer could take note of his complexion and deduce whatever they might from that information. * The first human conversation I can ever remember having with my father was when I was a young teen, and it was about race. What I mean by “human” is just

that. We weren’t necessarily speaking to each other as father and daughter, however strained and awkward our relationship had been up to that point. For the first time ever, we were simply two humans talking. We were in the car, probably out to pick up coffee. I don’t quite remember why, but I think I must have been opening up to him about the fact that I never quite felt like I belonged around his side of the family. About how people constantly asking who I was to him whenever we were in public together felt oddly reminiscent of getting singled out in elementary school for being white. “See, that always blows my mind when you talk about that kind of stuff, because when I was in school it was the exact opposite. I got made fun of for being the only Mexican kid.” Made sense, I thought to myself, considering the rich suburb he’d grown up in. My dad wasn’t even particularly dark for a Mexican (I have a vague memory of him joking about pretending to be Italian the first time my mom introduced him to my Italian-American great grandmother). I’m fairly certain teens on TikTok would describe him as “white-passing” nowadays (though I do think that term is coming to be overused in popular discourse). By my aunt’s account, he pretty much only had white friends growing up, and I’m a testament to the fact that when it came to women, he definitely had a type. Even so, he felt noticeable in his environment, at least enough that he mentioned it to me, decades after he’d dropped out of high school.

which we’d both always felt like we were on the outside of something. That feeling for me still hasn’t gone away. I wonder if it ever did for him.

This was the conversation that first made me realize that he and I really did come from different worlds, though not in the way you would expect. Wikipedia describes the neighborhood I was raised in as “one of San Jose’s most historic Chicano/Mexican-American districts”, and I was a blond-haired, green-eyed, fairskinned girl steeped in a culture I desperately wanted to be a part of, though I could never make myself look the part. So maybe my father and I really could understand each other, despite everything. Because he didn’t grow up speaking Spanish either, and there was a level on

Earth with Honeybees JASMINE COE 12

Ripples JASMINE COE

Ancestry LUCILLE LING

a cyst bloated: Dynamic, Nameless, Ancestry rests in my body, undetected, like a freckle on my back I dream of Anatolia, never having been there the tornado in my mouth, which you call tongue: toils around the stem of the Indo-European language shaken like the apple tree, by the earthquake of time through the fissures in my iris, examining the microanatomy I see: it is all the same. coiling, intertwining, mingling proteins composing nature’s patterns.

Waiting LUCILLE LING

Wai ting: looks almost Chinese, But I don’t know what it means, Because I never learned it (I rewrite my narrative) Because he never taught it to me. So, I use google to understand 外 wài 歪 wāi 崴 wǎi 歪 wǎi

outside / in addition / foreign / external askew / at a crooked angle / devious / noxious / (coll.) to lie on one’s side to sprain (one’s ankle) to sprain (one’s ankle) / (how about spraining one’s mind?)

听 ting (= try to hear) (to sound, music) 听(聽) (tīng) (to speaker) 听(聽) ... 说(說) (tīng ... shuō) I listen I continue to listen to you but you wouldn’t know, because I am nothing to you everything happens in between, the embrace, redundant, like an

unsent message, thinking:

waiting

to be

On Transubstantiation VIVIAN BURNETTE

The bus ride from Madison to Indianapolis was cramped and hot. My knees butted up against the sticky vinyl seat in front of me, forcing me into an unpleasant hunch. Dark brown hairs were plastered to my forehead and neck, and my gray t-shirt was getting damp under the arms. I imagined what I looked like to others, filtered through all of my cringing 14-yearold insecurity: A fat, sweaty white girl on a bus full of Korean American teenagers. Off of Highway 52, a kind of pan-Asian evangelical youth camp awaited us, though the majority of the attendees were Korean American. As we drew closer to our destination, my body felt more and more like a sin, and not just because of my appearance. Recent doubts about my faith had started coiling like snakes in the hollow of my throat. When I was younger, I felt closest to God in the woods. After school and on weekends, I spent hours outside by myself, but never alone. I chattered to the wind about the dreams I’d had the night before, 18

imagining responses hidden in the moss at the foot of trees. Among gigantic ferns and crushed-berry-andpine-needle paths, Jesus was just another name for the feeling of wholeness. In elementary and middle school, I bounced between wanting to be a teacher, a writer, and a pastor. I gave impromptu sermons to my Korean mother in our living room, much to her delight. I parroted Sunday messages, infusing them with my own brand of hellfire. Wearing my white father’s college bathrobe and clenching a fallen branch from our backyard in my fist like an anointed staff, I fancied myself a female, biracial Moses. I couldn’t fully articulate what was making me suddenly chafe at religion, only that it felt like a betrayal; by me or by God, I didn’t know. (Although, in retrospect, it might’ve had something to do with the fact that I’d discovered porn and developed a keen appreciation for women’s breasts.) It was like sitting in the brackish, standing water of a swamp:

Uncomfortable, confusing, lonely. That same loneliness crouched beside me on the bus, pulling its knees up next to mine. I kept my lips pressed together, breathing heavily through my nose as the flat, humid midwest landscape mumbled by. When I stepped onto the university campus that would house us for the long weekend, I searched unsuccessfully for faces that looked like mine, any combination of those indefinable features that somehow signal “Asian mixed with White.” Back in Wisconsin, I was accustomed to fielding “where-areyou-from-no-really-what-are-you?” questions from white peers and their parents. I was still learning to absorb the pain that swiveled into my chest upon hearing some variation of, “But you can’t be, you don’t look Asian at all!” when I shared my half-Korean identity with Korean Americans. I knew I was intruding upon something sacred at this camp. This was an intentional stretch of time and space reserved for shared Asian American identity, a bale of excitable bodies with similar eyes and mouths and noses—all bound together with the golden twine of evangelical Christianity. I didn’t know if I was even allowed to call myself Asian American. A memory slowly curled itself up my legs, tightened around my stomach. When I was five, my mother brought my sister and me to the Korean Presbyterian Church on the west side of town. A well-known South Korean pastor was visiting. It was said that he had the gift of prophecy and was so filled with the Holy Spirit that he could knock someone unconscious with just a prayer. The wooden pews had been pushed up against the walls of the church sanctuary, allowing people to mill about in the center as they waited to be transformed. A low hum of nervous anticipation wove its way about us. My sister and I fidgeted at our mother’s side. I watched as a man in a neat black suit, flanked by

three or four women, moved methodically through the room. Every time the man stopped before another small pocket of parishioners, the women moved to stand behind them. He raised his hand and murmured some words, and each person promptly slumped into the women’s waiting arms. The sanctuary was quickly becoming littered with bodies. As the man made his way over to us, I can’t recall if I started to panic or if I was already aware of what I had to do. Either way, the man’s hand lifted, I shut my eyes, and I forced myself to fall backwards as soon as he finished speaking. I was lowered gently to the floor. It felt like going underwater, my heartbeat too loud in my ears. I waited a few moments before breaching the surface, pretending to rouse myself from a prayerinduced stupor. Beside me, my mother appeared to be sleeping, her face slack. My sister was crying, violent sobs shuddering through her tiny frame and tears rolling down her tawny cheeks. One of her arms was shaking uncontrollably. “She was touched by the Holy Spirit,” my mother said afterwards, to which my sister responded with wide eyes, “I don’t remember anything.” Turning towards me, my mother asked, “What about you?” I shook my head. “I can’t remember anything, either.” Eight years later, as I waded through the shallows of a crowd of adolescents, that same nervous anticipation swirled in the atmosphere. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, gripping my questions by their hair and hissing for them to hold their breath. I forced their heads down, down to the bottom of the swamp where they could no longer speak. I might not have been able to convince others at the camp that I was half-Korean, but I made a pretty convincing Christian. All I had to do was 19

recite my lines. The script became an invocation, an elaborate apologia, for my presence. During camp check-in, I was matched with a group of five other girls, four of whom were Korean American. We shared a musty dorm room with only two mattresses between us and rotated who slept on the floor. I don’t know if I shared with them that I was mixed on that first night, or what their reactions were if I did, but I do know that I yelled “I love Jesus!” on a dare as we walked to the dining hall together. My voice cracked at the end, and the girls gave me uncertain grins. Over the next three days, I attended workshops in classrooms that smelled like lysol and the peculiar sunbaked staleness of academia in summer. I learned which biblical passages to use when introducing nonbelievers to Jesus and role-played conversations with atheists. I sat in the massive campus amphitheater, one among hundreds, where I listened to sermons about how our genders were unalterable gifts from God. We were part of the “Joshua Generation,” called to commit ourselves to Jesus Christ and usher the nation’s youth into God’s eternal kingdom. (The camp pastors didn’t specify whether we should use the scorched-earth methods found in the Book of Joshua to meet our goal.) Whenever we were led in prayer, which was often, I squeezed my eyes shut and laced my fingers together in a vise, tucked in my chin and drew up my shoulders. I tried to make myself small and ignore the sensation of scratching at the base of my skull. When I opened my eyes, I smiled at the other girls—a desperate, too-bright smile without any teeth. I wondered if they could smell a rat, or if I just looked like one to them. At night, huddled in a thin comforter on the dorm’s cool linoleum floor, I watched as the ceiling tiles rearranged themselves into a tableau of my fiveyear-old self going deliberately limp. I waited as she calculated the minutes she needed to remain on the ground with her eyes closed and breathing carefully modulated. As she rose to a sitting position and 20

glanced down at her mother and sister, I ran my tongue over the many possible explanations of why the man’s prayer hadn’t truly knocked her unconscious. Perhaps she was simply too stubborn to let God in? Or maybe Satan had already claimed her as a vessel? A new, anxious thought struck me. How strange it must have been for all of those Korean adults to see a random white girl running around their church. I hoped they had noticed when that girl had fallen down just like the rest of them. On the final day of the camp, one of the girls in my group approached me. She was a “PK,” a pastor’s kid. Slim, beautiful with thick black hair that fell to the small of her back, and an incarnation of the kind of poise that could only have been a birthright. She reminded me vaguely of an Asian American Regina George from Mean Girls. Over the weekend, she had made a point to pray individually with all of the other girls. I was the last one. As we sat cross-legged together on an itchy red carpet, I clutched at the girl’s smooth hands and tried to keep the hunger from my voice. Like delicate, translucent lily pads, the words we exchanged settled atop my pool of standing water. I had worked so hard to believe—and now, she believed in me. I let her consecration ripple over me, turning my blood to wine and my body to bread. A therapist once told me that children are remarkably adept at rooting out and fashioning tools to fulfill their unmet needs. Safety and attention, love and affection. I wasn’t fully conscious of it in the past. Now, it’s impossible to miss how often I’ve performed Christianity in order to manufacture a sense of connection, particularly among Korean Americans. I’ve made a habit of diving into dark waters. I let myself sink to the floor again and again, my toes trying to find purchase in sifting sand as I seek out that most coveted of blessings: Belonging.

I still masquerade as a Christian in front of Korean Americans, especially relatives. I may only be able to stumble through a few basic Korean phrases, but I’ve never lost fluency in the language of Jesus’s saving grace and God’s ineffable will. At 30 years old, I can admit that it’s become a bit of a tired compulsion. But as long as I receive shallow nods of approval and those cautiously blooming smiles that always leave me with a singular craving, I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon. Under the right circumstances, pretending to be a Christian is like peeking into the window of a previous, well-loved home. I sometimes catch a shaft of sunlight draping itself across the hardwood floors, and a certain remembered warmth lingers there. If I were to enter, though, I know I’d find the wallpaper streaked and peeling, the smell of damp stealing up the stairs. The basement is prone to flooding, no matter how many times you try to seal the cracks.

Today, God exists in those spaces where I commune with myself and others—walking alone in the woods, swapping stories with a colleague, scratching my cat under his chin. I see the sacred reflected in the eyes of my sister and my husband, and take pleasure in small miracles. The sight of the sun and wind nickeling through leaves on a summer’s day; the taste of a bright, homemade meal. I may be a fickle believer in myself, but whenever I return, I find power and glory. I contain bodies of water that are all my own now: Rivers that hug cliff-sides and sigh secrets onto their banks, marshes full of inky mud where good, green things can grow. An entire sea of grace. It’s enough.

International Beauty TARA MODI 22

What Meets the Eye TARA MODI

cousin MANDY SHUNNARAH

from the backseat my lyft driver stares in the rearview mirror you look middle eastern he says eyeing the keffiyeh scarf over the headrest i wonder whether to lie no one wants to hear about the abusive father, the drug addict the exodus from, myself he doesn’t know me but he’s already seen i’m half palestinian me too, he says but i already know from hebron family from ramallah muslim, he follows christian, i reply you speak arabic? i shake my head he nods, unfazed we’re family, he tells me we’re family now.

on watching a video of palestinian teens dancing dabke MANDY SHUNNARAH

black smoke heaves from the ground at their feet scarves tied over mouths goggles suctioned over eyes projectiles whistle overhead it could be mtv, a music video their limbs move to the beat dropping bombs, gunfire vertical frame, cell phone quality camera shaking, unsteady hands they call it transgenerational trauma i don’t dance i turn on the tv instead cnn explains my rage to me again

Curls SHAELEY LINCOLN

Lightening LAILA SUMPTON

After the names of Body Shop foundations. My love dilutes you as I grow a theory of pulse, breath and skin—‘Kali Azalea’ or ‘Havanna Sand’ both far paler than me your ‘Pecan Savana’ brewer has strong, stubborn Indian genes. I mull that you will dodge tan inquisitions and just blend into ‘White, Other’ (though some will query if I am your mother). Your sarees, bhangra and ajwan will squat a secret quarter, plan a slow unfurling of whether to sing from rooftops—depending on how we name you. Which strand will weave brightest? You can choose so much my dear unwritten plot. Wait as we twist your braid— two threads pure-ish Slav, one thread mottled Brit, one thread jangling Desi. One day you will clamber the Zakopane peaks with a rucksack of scones and bhangra leaping from ear to ear.

Rising Sun MISHU CALLAN

for years and years I followed the great white line, disguised the blood, the rising sun —

as I stand at your door, I say, I see you — your provisions in a plastic bag,

which in the body, as still as a pause, lay unawakened

you, burning incense in the mornings, you with your careful dances in the kitchen. I see you

by the gift of light.

mid laugh at the unfinished sentence. I hear you, says my unraveling

light which lives in the hands of my mother, my obaachan,

Japanese.

in sesame seeds in a bento box, in the fissures of language, in the unspoken tendernesses,

and when I finally speak the word itadakimasu, it is not that I am ready to eat, but that I am finally ready to receive —

in the ways of life

all of your light, mother,

not yet learned.

and all of mine.

now, here I am at the age of twenty-four, on the edge of this small Japanese town,

Contributors Vivian Burnette (she/her) is a queer, mixed-race writer based in the U.S. Midwest. A former educator, she now writes personal essays, fiction, and poetry about all the things they tell you not to discuss at the dinner table. Her work has appeared in Hecate Magazine’s DECAY anthology.

songwriting developed in childhood and eventually led her to pursue a career in the music industry in Los Angeles, where she currently resides. Most recently, her poem “Wrested” was featured in an online issue of Eclipse Lit. More of shayne’s poetry can be found on Instagram @shayneliza.

Mishu Callan (she/her) is of Japanese and Canadian descent. She graduated with a BA in Communication Studies from the University of Ottawa. In her poems, she often explores ideas of home, the mother tongue, memory, and grief. Currently, she is based in Japan as an English teacher, and in the near future wishes to pursue graduate studies in Immigration Law.

Shaeley Lincoln is a high school senior based in Baltimore, Maryland of mixed Black and white heritage. She is a sculptor and painter who likes to incorporate 3D elements into her paintings. Shaeley’s artwork revolves around People of Color, women, and hair – particulary focussing on embracing her natural hair.

Jessica Carvajal is an artist, illustrator, and industrial designer living in Philadelphia using the mediums of watercolor, acrylic, pastel, collage, oils and, her favorite, digital illustration. Her artwork is based on the representation of heritage, culture, biodiversity, climate change and community support. Jasmine Coe is a Wiradjuri-British Artist and Designer. Her work is an exploration of identity and a continuous connection to her Wiradjuri heritage following her first trip to Australia in 2016 to meet her Father and connect to her Aboriginal heritage after 20 years separation. Jasmine’s work focuses on harmonising internal conflicts that arise from having two lines of heritage which together hold a traumatic history. Shayne Haskens hasn’t formally studied writing but has been a writer since childhood. As a mixed, depressive, trauma survivor, she’s struggled to feel at home in any environment, and writing has helped provide that space. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, her love for singing and knack for 30

Lucille Mona Ling is a German Chinese poet and artist from Berlin, currently studying in Glasgow. Her poetry has been previously published in The Dark Horse and in the Berlin 2021 online exhibition Sutro, her collaboration can be found on suturo.com. She is part of St Mungos Mirrorball Clydebuilt 14 apprenticeship scheme. Zoe Mei is the American daughter of a ChineseMalaysian immigrant and a white man. She’s nineteen years old, and currently in her third year studying for an Arts and Sciences degree at UCL. She has always loved reading, and especially enjoys books about angry, violent girls. Tara Modi is a high school senior living in the New York City metropolitan area. Tara’s artwork usually depicts her life experiences in various media, and she particularly enjoys expressing details within themes inspired by her travel, experiences, thoughts and interpretations.

Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born, PalestinianAmerican writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Entropy Magazine, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skaters and Skateparks in Middle America, will be out from Belt Publishing in fall 2022. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com. Laila Sumpton is a poet, editor, performer and educator who works with schools, hospitals, museums, galleries and charities on a wide variety of poetry projects. She manages the Arts Council funded initiative Poetry Vs Colonialism and was recently the Keats House Poet in residence. She has co-edited the anthology ‘Where We Find Ourselves’ and been commissioned by Tate Modern, the Tower of London and the Royal Free Hospital amongst others. She has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines including Ambit and Modern Poetry in Translation.

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