Poet Julia Johnson and Mariam Aziza Stephan have been collaborating on a poetry project of image/poems for the past few years that is loosely structured using the Earth as a protagonist enduring centuries of exploits. Their dream from the beginning was to create a book emblematic of Der Krieg Dem Krieg (War Against War! by Ernst Friedrich, a German pacifist who attempted to rally people against war but showing its atrocities (noteworthy is the 100th anniversary of its publication is in 2024,) and Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, etchings and related text which condemn the cyclical nature of humankind's inhumanity to one another. Johnson and Stephan hope to keep the urgency of these timeless, cyclical conversations present, while adding the consequences of climate change to the list of atrocities.

More About the Artists

Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, earned a BA from Hollins College and an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Johnson is the author of Naming the Afternoon, published by Louisiana State University Press, The Falling Horse, published by Factory Hollow Press, and most recently, Subsidence. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, jubilat, Tin House, Conduit, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.

www.english.as.uky.edu/users/jmjo235, @juliamaejohnso_

Mariam Aziza Stephan is a first-generation Afghan-German American. She holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Washington and a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award recipient and was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt. Her work has been exhibited domestically and abroad and is included in the permanent collections of the Mobile Museum of Art, AL; Raleigh Municipal Art Collection, NC; and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Cairo, Egypt, and currently serves as Professor of Painting at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

www.mariamazizastephan.com, @mariamazizastephan