Matt Donovan is a writer of prose and poetry, living in Amherst, Massachusetts. As a writer, Donovan finds inspiration in simple objects that cross history, often which he uses to give meaning to contemporary life. In Vellum, a collection of poems inspired by the paper Ireland’s Book of Kells is written on, Donovan meditates on beauty, art, and the violence sometimes inherent in both. A collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, features a treatise based on Mount Vesuvius’s famed eruption as a point of inquiry into power and the loss of it. Donovan serves as the Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.

Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and spent her childhood in London, England. She received her education at Vassar College and at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her creative work combines sculpture with performance, digital video and photography to recreate appropriated narratives. Each project wrestles with the intersection of functionality and narrative, drawing on sources from art history, literature and science. Recent projects have been shown at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery in London, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, The Philadelphia Enquirer and The New York Times. Ligia Bouton is currently Associate Professor of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico.

Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by The Washington Post. Liang started composing at the age of six, ansd came to the US after joining the protests in Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution. In works like Cuatro Corridos, a chamber opera about human trafficking, he explores contemporary topics pertinent to him as both a Chinese immigrant and an American citizen.