In June 2014 three of our artists in residence were writers. At the end of their time with us we opened to the public and they each did short readings of their work. Mya Guarnieri read a short story she was working on, Laura Trantham Smith and Peter J. Ramos read their poetry. Their bios are below: Mya Guarnieri is journalist and writer based in Israel/Palestine. Her reportage and commentary has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera English, The Daily Beast, Guernica and many other international outlets. A graduate of Florida State University’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, Guarnieri’s fiction has been published in The Kenyon Review and has been featured as a Story of the Week in Narrative. Her essays have appeared in The Jewish Quarterly and Slate. Guarnieri currently blogs at +972. Laura Trantham Smith is a poet and scholar living in Baltimore, MD. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin while studying poetry in the summer at Naropa’s Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics. Recent creative and scholarly works appear in PANK, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., and Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. She has served as a Poet in the Schools in Philadelphia, PA and Austin, TX and has led gender and sexuality writing workshops at the International Drag King Extravaganza, the Queer Texas Conference, and OutYouth. She teaches contemporary American literature, African American literature, and creative writing at Stevenson University. Peter Ramos’s poems have appeared or will appear in The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Fugue, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online) and other journals. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, he is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections: Television Snow (Back Pages Books, forthcoming); Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). His criticism has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, The Faulkner Journal, The CEA Critic, Mandorla, Verse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, as well as in the collections The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (Eds. Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López, 2011) and Critical Insights: The Awakening (Ed. Robert C. Evans, 2014). An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.
