Artist: City Lights 4 by Gerry Albarelli
About the artist: Gerry Albarelli is a writer and visual artist based in Trumbull, Connecticut. His fiction, profiles, essays, and poetry have appeared in ItalianAmericana, Pen America, The Fairleigh Dickinson Review, Sarah Lawrence College Review, and in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Gay Short Fiction and The Breast. He is the author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day Books, 2000; reissued by Dzanc Books, 2014), which describes his experiences as a non-Jew teaching ESL to Yiddish-speaking boys at a Brooklyn yeshiva. For more than twenty years, he worked as an oral historian at Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office. His visual-art series City Lives imagines characters who show up in stories he’s already written, as well as stories he’s probably bound to attempt to tell at some point in the near or distant future. Other images in the City Lives series inevitably reflect some of the many oral histories he’s recorded.
About the author: Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book.