Surface Noise Says Invitational

For the first Surface Noise Says Invitational, we asked eight language artists with wildly varied backgrounds and levels of experience to share 5-10 minutes of their work in an intimate performance environment. The resulting event was a joy to hear and see, so we’ve decided to make it a regular thing. For this second Surface Noise Says Invitational, we’ll have seven new performers sharing their work. Full bios for the participating artists appear below:

Joey Breakfast is a queer performance artist specializing in original work. Born in Oregon. But always here & now & maybe far from here, maybe up there. He/They/space dust. A lover. A dreamer. And a something of an in betweener. Always finding more routes, meeting at intersections, and walking backwards in circles.

Kymber Ezell is a senior at Indiana University Southeast, studying English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her poems have been published in several of her university’s literary magazines and online at instagram.com/kepoetry__ . In 2017, she organized a poetry reading at her university which involved bringing artists across mediums together to spontaneously translate what they heard into how it made them feel. She has been writing poetry for as long as she can remember.

Paul McDonald is a poet that has been writing since the mid-1990s. His work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Booglit, and 3am Magazine as well as the chapbook “Write of Passage” and the full-length book “Like Neon.” From 2001 to 2006, Paul broadcast morning commentary on WFPL-FM. From 2007 to 2009, he taught English as a Second Language in Jakarta, Indonesia and Bangkok, Thailand. He returned to the US to pursue and obtain a Master’s Degree in Teaching at Spalding University. Since 2013, his day job has been a GED teacher and Social Service Clinician for the Kentucky Department of Corrections. His goal in life is to journal every fucking day until he croaks and produce several more chapters of poetry from the heart.

Corbin McGuire was born on August 10, 1995 in Louisville, Kentucky. She earned a BA in English with minors in Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies at Bellarmine University in 2018. She hosts exhibitions in her home, but her work has also appeared at the Healthy House Art Gallery and the McGrath Art Gallery. She spends s much of her time teaching art to children and admires the honesty and vulnerability of the artwork they create. Her writing and visual artwork explores mental health, gender, fat and queer bodies, and domestic spaces. She is inspired by the English artist Tracey Emin to create in a way that is shamelessly both autobiographical and confessional.

Grown in the primordial ooze of Upstate New York and steeped in the oral traditions of the African diaspora, poet, songwriter, and instrumentalist Hyacinth Miles shines her intellectual light through the stained glass window of her own experiences and onto our tepid reality. With big dreams and small hands, she uses words to shape her greater environment and hopes to organize her madness by sharing.

Susan Norton is a writer, musician, cartoonist, and sound engineer from Vermont currently residing in the Derby City.

Jameson Welch is a native Louisvillian poet and painter. Widely and obscurely published since 1990. Editor of the soon-to-be-revived poetry journal The Vernalist.