APRIL @ MILLAY ARTS
FROM TOP LEFT TO RIGHT:
Alison Espach — Fiction; Providence, RI — Alison graduated from Providence College with her English degree and Washington University in St. Louis with her master’s degree in creative writing. She published her first novel, The Adults, with Scribner in 2011. The Adults went on to be named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick, a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Novel of 2011. Espach began teaching creative writing at Providence College and is now an Associate Professor of English. From 2015-2020 she attended various residencies at Ucross, San Miguel Writing Residency, and Wassaic Artists Residency. There she wrote her second novel, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, published by Henry Holt in 2022. Notes was a Barnes and Noble Monthly Fiction Pick of May 2023, Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year 2022, NPR Best Book of 2022, People Magazine “Best New Book,” Yale Review’s “Favorite Cultural Artifacts of 2022,” USA Today “Must Read,” Indie Next Pick 2022 and received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. From 2021-2022, Espach published three short stories as part of longer series called, In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People as Audible Originals based on her employment experiences transcribing market research interviews. In 2022, she became very engaged in the arts community, starting a local monthly series in her city that features Providence writers and artists, and co-hosted the Cuttyhunk Island Residency, planning the week’s events and hosting readings for the writers each night of the stay. Her third novel, The Wedding People, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August 2024. She is Executive Producer of film adaptation of The Wedding People and is currently at work on her fourth novel, Research Grove.
Tanushree Baidya — Fiction; Cambridge, MA — Tanushree received an MFA in Creating Writing from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in WBUR and several literary journals such as Kweli, New Pages, Pangyrus, Creative Nonfiction, Hypertext Review, Florida Review, and others. She is a Pushcart nominee and a finalist for the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction award. She has received fellowships from the Yale Writer’s Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Grubstreet, The Mae Fellowship, and Kweli. In her parallel life, she is a data management and continuous improvement specialist in healthcare with a degree in Computer Science engineering and an MBA from Northeastern University. Born and raised in India, Tanushree moved to Boston in the fall of 2011 for graduate studies. At the time, the plan was to get an international degree and go back to India where her family is. Little did she know that she would choose to remain here and build her writing life as an immigrant on a work visa while supporting her family back home. She is active in her Boston writing community and as part of the Boston Writers of Color group she has moderated author talks with Liberian American writer Wayétu Moore (She Would Be King, for the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith), Indian American writer Mira Jacob (Good Talk, for Grubstreet), and Cuban American writer Dariel Suarez (for Hypertext Review). For the Mae Fellowship, she moderated events with Yiyun Li, Bryan Washington, and Asako Serizawa.
Juyi Mao — Visual Arts; Brooklyn, NY — Juyi is an artist and filmmaker. He was born in Hefei, Anhui Province, China in 1991 and he currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BA from Xiamen University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is a MacDowell Film/Video Fellow and a grantee of the United States Artists, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He received awards and attended numerous residency programs such as Vermont Studio Center, NARS Foundation, and Franconia Sculpture Park. His work has been exhibited and screened in art venues internationally, including Anthology Film Archives, ARGOS, CAFA Art Museum, Vox Populi, Walter Otero Contemporary Art, among others. His films have played at various festivals including the 2019 Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, 24e Rencontres Internationales Traverse, the One Minutes, 67 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Reykjavík International Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Kinemastik International Short Film Festival.
Hannah Kingsley-Ma — Fiction; Brooklyn, NY — Hannah is a writer, audio producer, and former bookseller currently living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, The Drift, The Believer, The New Republic, McSweeney’s, Joyland, BOMB Magazine, NPR’s Latino USA, KCRW’s The Organist, the CBC and KQED and KALW Public Radio. She is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program, where she was the Jan Gabrial fellow. Upon graduating she was the recipient of the Axinn Writer-in-Residence fellowship, given “each year to a graduating student of exceptional promise.” She was awarded honorable mention for the 2021 The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her work has been supported by the Third Coast Residency at Ragdale and the Norton Island Residency. She is represented by Jackie Ko at the Wylie Agency. She got her start as a reporter at an NPR member station in her hometown of San Francisco, where she made stories about Chinese American beauty queens, decomposing whales, and school bond measures. She has taught creative writing at NYU, PEN America, and Catapult.
Wesley Weissberg — Fiction; Brooklyn, NY — Wesley has recently been shortlisted by The Master's Review Prize for Emerging Writers. She graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson in January 2023. This was a return, as she studied fiction in the early 90s at Johns Hopkins before accepting a job with National Public Radio, with the perhaps unrealistic hope that she would write her many novels on her lunch break. She worked in radio for many years--for various programs at NPR, primarily as the producer of Talk of the Nation, which earned her team two Alfred DuPont Silver Batons, for on-location coverage of South Africa elections (1994) and for The Republican Revolution (1995), and as development producer of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; for Australian Broadcasting (Australia Talks Back), for the BBC (Talk of New York); and for a number ofvindependent shows and special projects (Savvy Traveller, The Infinite Mind, Can You Top This? and The Next Big Thing). While she has produced many stories for radio, she has just begun to send outshort stories for publication. She is a reader for The Common, a Literary Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her dog and cat and often her children, who are not quite out of the nest.
Kei Ito — Visual Arts; Baltimore, MD — Kei is an interdisciplinary installation artist working primarily with photographic media and sculpture. Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Ito’s work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography and artifacts. Ito’s work, fundamentally rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather - a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past, current trajectories, and visualizing the invisible such as radiation, memory and life/death. By excavating and uncovering hidden histories connected to his own, Ito utilizes his generational past to use as a case study for contemporary and future events. Many of Ito’s artworks transform both art and non-art spaces into temporal monuments that became platforms for the audience to explore social issues and the memorials dedicated to the losses suffered from the consequences of those issues. Within these intertwined pasts, Ito shines a light on power and its relationship to larger global issues that often led to and result in both war and peace alike. Ito has participated in a number of Artist-in-Residence programs nationwide including the Santa Fe Art Institute (2023), the Studio at MASS MoCA (2021), the Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography (2021), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2019). His solo and group exhibitions can be read in reviews and articles published by the Washington Post Magazine, Hyperallergic, BBC Culture & Art, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, ESSE Magazine and various newspapers worldwide. Ito’s works are included in major institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach, FL), the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (Fort Collins, CO), En Foco (NYC, NY), and the Eskenazi Museum of Art (Bloomington, IN). Ito’s notable upcoming exhibitions include solo exhibitions at: the Hilliard Art Museum, Lafayette, LA (August 2023); Visart, Rockville, MD (November 2023); and the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (February 2024).