Arianne Benford is a transdisciplinary multimedia artist most known for her work as a Poet, Cultural Worker, Photographer, and Chef. Her work is rooted in text and its creative applications for social change. A proud native of Chicago’s Southside, since 2006 she has made Flatbush, Brooklyn her home. Arianne is a National Slam Champion, an alum of The School of the Art Institute, The Second City, Vona Voices, Pink Door, Louder Arts, Urbana, SWAP, WOW Cafe Theater, and the 92nd St Y. She has been honored by the Chicago Reader, the Fresh Fruit Festival and Young Chicago Authors among others for her poetry. Most recently her work was published in the Hawai’i Review ’88 and Sinister Wisdom, Issues #103, 106, 107.

Chaun Webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work draws from an interest in the sign of graffiti, the layering of collage, simultaneity, & the visuality of text. Webster utilizes these methods in investigating race – specifically the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. Correspondingly much of these investigations engage the question of absence, how to archive what is missing from the landscape particularly as a number of communities watch, in real time, neighborhoods once populated with familiar presences dissolve in the vernacular of redevelopment and its attendant colonial logic. Webster’s first book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in the April of 2018.