My own island burns inside of me

Our collaboration reflects on the relationships—contemporary, historical, mythical, fictional, poetic—between people and the water that sustains us.

About the Artists

Mary Giaimo’s poetry and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Interim, The Journal, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, The Ocean State Review, ItalianAmericanWriters.com, Poetry in Performance, American Book Review, Newtown Literary, Ovunque Siamo, and in the anthology New Hungers for Old: One Hundred Years of Italian American Poetry. She holds an MA in Poetry from the City College of New York. She is currently an editor at Barrow Street Press, and teaches English literature and writing at La Scuola d’Italia, a dual-language Italian/English school in Manhattan.

Rejin Leys is a mixed media artist and paper maker based in New York, whose work has been exhibited at such venues as Centro Cultural de España, Santo Domingo, DR; Kentler International Drawing Space, NY; Queens Museum, NY; and Les Ateliers J.R. Jerome, PaP, Haiti. Her work is in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University, and Rutgers University Caribbean Studies Department, and she is a recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.