Rosebud
Ben-Oni
Born to a
Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni was a Leopold Schepp Scholar
NYU and a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is an alumna
of Women’s Work Project Lab for New Perspectives Theater, and currently at work
on a new play. She is a co-editor for HER KIND, the official blog of VIDA:
Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears in Puerto Del Sol, Arts &
Letters and The Texas Poetry Review. Her first
collection of poems SOLECISM (Virtual Artists’ Collective) is
forthcoming in 2013. She is all about 7 Train Love and lives on the border
of Sunnyside and Woodside. Found out more at rosebudbenoni.com
Sean Hembrick
Sean
Hembrick is a fiction/non-fiction writer currently living in Manhattan. He
recently graduated from the Queens College MFA program and is working on his
memoir entitled, "Let the World Dream Otherwise." Sean has read
at KGB bar in Manhattan and at the annual CUNY Turnstyle event. Sean's writing
speaks from emotion and
experiences
in the life of a human being. Check out some of his work at www.maytheworlddreamotherwise.wordpress.com.
Karen Levy
Karen Levy is a New
Yorker who spends her summers in Santo Domingo. She is currently working on a
novel about life in the Dominican Republic.
Jenny Ortiz
Jenny Ortiz is a quite
serious 25 year old New Yorker, except when unicorns (specifically chubby
unicorns) are involved. Currently she is teaching at St. John’s University,
Adelphi University, and LaGuardia Community College (see, quite serious). When
she isn’t teaching, she’s hanging out with her friends showing off earth
and water bending skills (not serious, but super fun). When she is alone
and it’s raining, she likes to read Haruki Murakami, or listen to the Broken
Bells and daydream. If you want to be a fan, you can read Jenny’s work on
fictionatwork.com, Blink-ink.com, Jersey Devil Press, dogeatcrow.com, Break Water Review,Stone Highway Review, Eighty Percent
Magazine and InkSpill Magazine…or you can follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/jnylynn. Very soon her work will appear in Main Street Rag
Magazine's Tattoo Themed Anthology and the Fall/Winter Edition of Carnival.
Michael Stahl
Michael Stahl is another “Boundless Tales” success
story. Having never considered
himself a poet, Mike was essentially forced into reading last October by Pedro
Gonzalez and Aida Zilelian-Silak, with one of them telling Mike that the show
was going to be Halloween-themed.
It was not, so he awkwardly read a scary poem about the end of the
world, while everyone else just read about whatever topic they wanted. Despite the miscommunication and severe
lack of presentable content, Mike was introduced to Audrey DiMola, another
reader that night, who insanely coaxed him into contributing to a website that
both her and her boyfriend published called Sugar-N-Thunder.com. Mike did so, writing miraculously
irrelevant articles about whether or not Keith Hernandez should be in the
Baseball Hall of Fame and where Seinfeld
might belong on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix. Even though his work was completely out
of place in the current social landscape, he had begun to think he could
actually become a professional writer, interviewing F-list celebrity Ted
Alexandro and a director friend of Audrey’s named Nick Calder because Mike
couldn’t get Martin Scorcese to return his calls. Mike began to take steps towards quitting teaching, a career
he had nurtured for 11 years, gathering thousands of dollars in school-loan debt so he could be in the classroom, with the
hopes of continuing on this new artistic path, that may or may not lead to
Scorcese. He procured a job
bartending without any experience to speak of, which lead to an inevitable
increase of alcohol consumption and fatigue. He would however continue to bitterly educate his students,
somehow being granted tenure. Aida
Zilelian-Silak would ask Mike to read for “Boundless” again last April. He continually pushed back Aida’s
submission deadlines and while on stage, drunkenly informed his audience that
the then-pregnant Aida can be really nasty in email correspondence. Mike also dedicated a poem to Audrey,
the only person who had ever published him in his life, entitled “Attention
Whore.” Working more and more at the
bar, drinking more and more, teaching less and less effectively, and alienating
himself from friends as Spring blossomed around Astoria, Mike didn’t write a
goddamned thing, but only grew more sure that a life with no health insurance
was just what he needed. He
finally got around to writing a piece on photography in the summer that was
immediately rejected and mailed a letter of resignation to the high school that
employed him about a week after that.
Now a full-time bartender and waiter, Mike has chosen the writer’s
lifestyle that he hopes will afford him more time to drink and perfect his
womanizing skills.
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