Miel Sloan

Artist Statement

My career as a writer has been one of unexpected detours leading to life-changing discoveries and new mediums. In 2021, I shifted from writing poetry (the genre that has dominated my twenty-five-year career) and plays (the art form I embarked upon over twelve years ago) to writing a memoir. Mother Matter, the manuscript in progress, begins with my son’s rapid decline starting March 2019; it narrates my obsession with saving him and learning to cope with his self-harm, suicidal tendencies, and precarious state. While this is my first memoir, my 2017 poetry collection and 2018 play both center around themes of motherhood and matriarchies. Stylistically, I have relied upon some techniques used in theater and poetry while utilizing prose and narration to reach a broader audience. The manuscript is unique in its balance between accessibility and a literary style. The research is paraphrased in layperson’s language, and the metaphors enable me to address the ineffability of grief. Readers can find images for what they have experienced and have struggled to articulate.

First page of "Mother Matter," title chapter, published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter/Spring 2024. This image can be used with acknowledgment of the publication

Bio

Miel Sloan is the pen name for a poet and writer who is publishing under a pseudonym to protect her son. She is currently writing a memoir about raising a son with mental illness; the title chapter “Mother Matter” is in the winter/spring 2024 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review. “Glossary for Mothers of the Suicidal (Quantum Version)” won honorable mention in the Fourth Genre Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest,

(https://fourthgenre.org/news/2024-contest-news/). ”Letter to My Suicidal Son, Take Three” was a runner up in the 2023 WOW writing contest: https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/downloads/printable/109-FE1-Q42023EssayContest-Miel-Sloan.html

Hannah Kingsley-Ma

Artist Statement

All my work is interested in exploring the various textures of intimacy as it exists within different relationships: work allies, former lovers, codependent sisters, close friends at a crossroads in each of their lives.

Bio

Hannah Kingsley-Ma is a writer, radio producer, and former bookseller. Her work have appeared in publications including The Drift, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, Joyland, Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine, and Zyzzyva. She is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program for fiction, where she was the recipient of the Jan Gabrial Fellowship; she was the 2020-21 Axinn NYU Writer-in-Residence and was awarded an honorable mention for the 2021 The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. She has taught creative writing at NYU, and Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn.

www.hannahkma.com