Before obstetrics and gynecology became specialized subfields in the late nineteenth century, the field of women’s healthcare was dominated by women who were midwives.

Maya Weeks’ work deals with socio-ecological issues from an anticolonial feminist perspective in a variety of media including language, performance, and sound.

Cortney McConnell is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Oklahoma.

Holly Harris is a painter and printmaker utilizing both text and imagery to link the physical and existential. Places and things she encounters are paired with the metaphysical ideas that occur in their presence.

Pablo Francisco Matute is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in South Florida. Inspired by the Caribbean and South American landscape of Miami, Matute uses his surroundings and personal experiences to create surreal images that reflect on the intimate moments of life, examining subjects such as the importance of family, community, and cultural identity.

Emily Perkovich is from the Chicago area. She is the editor-in-chief of Querencia Press, a poetry reader with Split Lip Mag, and on the Women in Leadership Advisory Board with Valparaiso University. Her work strives to erase the stigma surrounding trauma victims and their responses.

Using sculpture and drawings, Langdon Graves creates a real yet surreal world layered with symbolism, building on her interest in storytelling and myths while exploring family legacy and age-based societal norms.

Trevor Coopersmith creates painted objects, installations and organic wall-sculptures utilizing found and mixed media that emphasize a deeper emotional connection to nature.

I never imagined being in the same category as Chrissy Teigen, Kim Kardashian, or Tan France. Nor could I have dreamed of someone else carrying and birthing my child. I’ve never aspired to celebrity culture or cared much about it, but alas, when my fertility doctor suggested pursuing surrogacy as my most viable path to parenthood, I began my journey into what I thought was the seemingly unattainable life of the rich and famous.

Joseph Fasano is a poet, novelist, songwriter, and teacher. He shares with us two poems that feel right for Issue #4–Carry: “At the Winter Solstice” and “How to Survive.”

As an interdisciplinary artist, Kwamé Azure Gomez investigates their internal and external self and community through their practice. Meditating on the Black interior and how Blackness transcends space, Gomez explores the soul's essence, divination, daily life, temporality, psychics, and human nature through painting, video, assemblage, and writing.

Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo crafts an op-ed article arguing for us to rethink our orientation around land ownership, calling for a theology of land. Regardless of religious or spiritual orientation, Melo’s essay reminds us that no thing exists without the earth. How might we reshape our thoughts and practices to reorder the land as sacred in our lives?

Frida Braide is a Scandinavian-born photographer and author based in Brooklyn, New York. She explores urban landscapes, architectural structures, and untouched accidental sculptures in those environmental settings.

Joliene Adams writes a journal entry-like essay processing the grief of losing her father, undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments, and observing the changing climate along the Oregon Coast Trail.

​Rachel Kalman is an observational still-life painter with a commitment to close-looking and foundational skills that guide her practice. She believes there is an ethic to observational painting in the sense that meaningful exchange occurs between painter and subject without any need for possession or ownership.

Kuan-Ya Wu is an installation artist based in San Francisco, California. Her research involves conversations about finding safe spaces and the idea of security and insecurities.

Anabel Hadad is a painter and interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. The figures in her work exist among their lingering perceptions, taking on anthropomorphic forms.

Aleena Sharif’s work focuses on oil painting and almost exclusively nude female figures. The overall scaffolding behind her work is confronting negative connotations around the female body and body image.

In life, failure is always an option. However, failure is not synonymous with the end.

Cheyann Washington is a painter from Los Angeles, California. Represented by Wonzimer Gallery for the last two years, Washington's personal studies encapsulate the essence of human behavior and the figure as it mirrors nature.