Elisabeth "Els" Albeck (Gasparka) (she/they) is a writer, artist, musician and strategic communications professional with a one-way ticket to Denmark. After living in Milwaukee for about fifteen years, she's embracing the changes of her 37th year's astrological nodal return, and her family's lineage of travel and worldliness. As she travels, she's hopes to process and reflect on many life changes, including the loss of some of her closest kin through explorations of memoir, dreams, songs, and magical realism.

Erica Bower (she/her) is a multigenre writer who has primarily focused on writing creative nonfiction in ways that feel most authentic to her way of experiencing the world as someone who is neurodivergent. Sometimes that means the piece itself takes on a borrowed form. It may be braided, collage, or some other form of nontraditional essay. Her approach to deciding how to tell the story is often guided by how she can best interrogate a thing. As she once told her thesis advisor, her thoughts are birds and she is only ever able to catch a handful of them before the rest fly away.

In terms of genre, she has only dabbled with poetry. In those brief explorations, she has found that some experiences beg to be poems no matter how skilled the writer. Maybe because some ideas move as quick as a comet, and must be shared that way. However, her primary genre is creative nonfiction. As many “nontraditional” forms are not always widely studied in higher education, she is excited to dedicate the space and time to learning with a cohort again.

Jenna Knapp (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist and space-holder. She earned her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2014 and is a recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for emerging artists. In 2016, she was selected to attend The Center for Substructured Loss residency in London, where she workshopped her debut poetry collection, “I Kept Things I Did Not Need,” self-published in 2017. From 2017-2018, Knapp ran The Yellow Wallpaper Project from her attic, curating exhibitions about mental health. Currently, she writes weekly newsletters about self-love on her Substack, dedicates time to her latest studio project, Dear Self With Love, and continues to care for the labyrinth she created in 2019 for her Lynden Sculpture Garden artist residency. She’s elated the labyrinth is now visible on Google Maps and honored to have it featured on The Worldwide Labyrinth Locator.

Claire Poshusta (she/her) was born and raised in Spokane, Washington. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington. The area’s beautiful landscape, rich literature community, and forests inspire her to write about the way she sees and often challenges the world she navigates as a neurodivergent person.

A dancer and performance artist from the discipline of modern dance and inspired by diverse people and the natural world around us, Betty Salamun (she/her) creates dances, splash/flash dances and talk-dances. Company performances are collaborations inspired by diverse artists across disciplines and the natural world. Programs within community agencies explore our common heritage of earth, water, air as we engage all our senses and abilities to create stories, poetry, movement and films, etc. All these elements influence the dances for her company, DanceCircus, as well as inspire people throughout the community. Although retired from artist residencies in schools, Betty continues to engage all ages in the creation and participation in eco-movement possibilities.

Eileen Stillwell (they/them) is a poet and visual artist from Wisconsin. Their work helps them explore hope and grief, mirth and loss. They currently live in Milwaukee where they worry about the public's health for a living and try to be good as a practice.