Nicole Miller

Artist Statement

Much of my work as a fiction writer, essayist, and critic centers around questions of memory, mourning, movement, and home. I’m especially interested in thinking with contemporary art and literature that helps us make sense of questions about identity, family inheritance, and loss. My approach to these subjects combines rigorous inquiry with the pleasures of uncertainty. My work often slips between forms—stories with a querying, essayistic bent; personal narrative that draws on the tools of fiction or engages critically with cultural artifacts. Additionally, I’m drawn to collaborative work, from co-authored scholarship to the collective labor of running Underwater New York, a community-based arts project that includes a publishing platform, public programming, and institutional partnerships.

My short story "Junkwater Sovereign" is included in the book Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront, which examines more than 600 miles of coastline through rare photographs, history, new fiction and contemporary art.

Bio

I’m a writer, editor, and educator living in Brooklyn. I’ve contributed fiction, essays, and cultural criticism to publications such as Art in America, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Lit Hub, Catapult, and Fence. I teach creative writing at NYU’s School of Professional Studies and serve as an editor for Underwater New York, a digital arts platform that centers the waters of New York City. I earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and have received residencies and awards from the Milton Center at Seattle Pacific University, the Wassaic Project, and Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation.

nicolemariemiller.net

Tsering Yangzom Lama

Artist Statement

I see my writing as a way to access and understand the unknowable past. A way to fight against the invisibility of my family's and people's experiences. For centuries, my country and my people have served as a canvas for the fantasies and stories of other people. But Tibetans have yet to tell our own stories to global audiences. As my country is wiped off maps, as our histories are revised by a colonial occupier, I feel that the creative work of storytelling is a vital terrain of struggle and remembrance. Right now, I'm particularly interested in diving into Tibetan Buddhist cosmologies within the tantric mandala teaching. Comparing that form of traditional mapping to colonial mapping techniques, I'm interested in showing the competing ideologies and strategies of different worldviews and powers.

Tsering_Yangzom_Lama_We_Measure_the_Earth_with_our_Bodies

Bio

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, WE MEASURE THE EARTH WITH OUR BODIES, is a New York Times Summer Reads Pick and a finalist for The Scotiabank Giller Prize, and longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and The Toronto Book Award. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She currently lives in Vancouver, Canada.

tseringlama.com