Illustration by Gisela Levy
Year: Pseudo Senior (December 2020 graduation date)
Major/College: English at CC
Where are you from?
Florida, unfortunately
What do you love about Quarto?
Quarto was the first extracurricular I joined at Columbia, and I think the power it has to curate the campus creative writing community has always astounded me. As a Columbia undergraduate magazine, our population is specific and we have the privilege of allowing our authors to imagine a world they want to live in, both on campus and beyond, which I think is truly a beautiful aspect of this magazine and the power of creative writing that has a hyper specific audience. Quarto staff has always felt like a family to me, as well, and some of my closest friends are people I met here.
What inspires you to do the work we do?
I'm inspired by my academic skepticism. I think the way the academy, and in this specific context, the writing academy, has confined "proper" poetry, prose, and art to very specific, historically white, college-educated, canonical work is a huge disservice to the vibrant community of writers that exists in the world. While Quarto (for obvious reasons) cannot escape publishing exclusively college-educated writers, I do think it's important to make a home for work that challenges the academy and the world that produces it.
Do you have any pets?
Yes, I have a houseplant named Francis. Mita gave her to me.
Where can we find you in your free time?:
I love going on absurdly long walks, and have recently gotten into running! And if it's not the afternoon, I am most likely watching Desperate Housewives, which is consuming my life.
What else are you involved in/what are your other interests?
Pre-COVID, I was a barista, and I plan to resume working as a barista if coffee shops ever exist again. I also work on the Barnard Slam Poetry Team, and have been beginning to publish some work with non-Columbia journals. I'm currently doing some fairly significant work with the New York City of MedSupplyDrive, which is coordinating PPE donations to in-need hospitals. On a surprisingly related note, I plan on teaching high school English eventually, where I will inevitably have over-caffeinated frazzled perpetually-lost-glasses energy.
Favorite author/artist/work?
Mitski, Lorde, Joan Didion, and Ocean Vuong are my current favorite authors (Mitski and Lorde ARE authors and I will not take any incorrect different opinions into account at this time). The first poem I ever called my "favorite poem" is "Bipolar Gets Bored and Renames Itself" by Jacqui Germain.
What else should we know about you?
I can't tell my left from my right!