Katana Wielding Neon Butterfly Slices Through Quotidia: A Rail Reading curated by Chime Lama

Aristilde Kirby is quite a few things. She has published chapbooks with Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Belladonna, & Black Warrior Review. Her book, [Daisy & Catherine²] (2022) from auric press will be back with a reissue in the spring. Her work, currently covering the bases of writing, art, & performance, has been featured in Miguel Abreu Gallery, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Entrance, Smack Mellon, Texte Zur Kunst’s Velvet Voice Club @ Roter Salon & soon at The Poetry Project. You can call her Aris, like Paris without the P.

Kelsang Lhamo was born in Tibet in Lhokha. She received teachings from Sheldrak Khen Rinpoche and Dungkar Losang Trinlé on Tibetan medicine and on the Five Minor Sciences. She received novice vows from His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama, and also studied Hindi and the Vedas in Varanasi. Kelsang moved to the US in 1999 and translated Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying into Tibetan with Ringu Tulku. At present she is working as the Senior Librarian at Buddhist Digital Resource Center. Her other writings and translations include Dreaming at the Sage’s Abode: Biographical Sketches of Four Living Tibetan Nuns, Biography of Great Kalayanmitra Geshe Yeshe Topden, Collection of Contemporary Writings of Tibetan Women, and A Maiden’s Wandering Westward.

Maya Salameh is the author of HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022) and rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She is the youngest-ever winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and a Finalist for the 2022 Previously Published Poetry Prize and 2020 Sublingua Prize for Poetry. She is a poet fellow of the William Male Foundation and a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. She has performed her poetry for three First Ladies, and her work has appeared in Poetry, The Rumpus, The Margins, and AGNI, among others.

Chime Lama (འཆི་མེད་ཆོས་སྒྲོན།) is a Tibetan American writer, translator and multi-genre artist based in New York. She holds an MA in Divinity from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. She serves as the Poetry Editor of Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Arts and Humanities. Her work has been featured in Exposition Review, The Margins, Street Cake, Volume Poetry and Cadernos de Literatura em Tradução, n. 24 (Notebooks of Literature in Translation), among others. Her poetry collection, Sphinxlike, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She teaches Creative Writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).