Julie Gard & Heidi Mae Niska
You aren't a thing but a breath, the air in thought. Not a feather but an exhale, world of space. Unpossessable dash, the top of the laugh. Image on eyelid, knowledge without research, snow on stone. Time shouldering the edge and going over.
Julie Gard's prose poetry collection Home Studies (New Rivers Press) was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award, and her chapbooks include Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) and Russia in 17 Objects (Tiger's Eye Press). Julie's poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Gertrude, Fourth River, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ekphrasis, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals and anthologies. A former Fulbright Graduate Fellow in Vladivostok, Russia, she lives in Duluth and is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
Heidi Mae Niska is a photographer who identifies with the solitude and wilderness found in northeastern Minnesota and Michigan's Keweena Peninsula. She earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technical University and subsequently studied art at Northern Michigan University. Whether pounding concrete in the city, skipping across moss and rocks near Lake Superior, or dodging sunbeams in Southeast Asia, Heidi Mae seeks to share her intimate understanding of the soothing, nourishing, and restorative attributes of solitude and nature through her photographic imagery.