"Writer, artist, and all-round creative type who's slowly letting go of her perfectionistic ways and learning just how messy and beautiful life can be."
Welcome to Chesapeake Shoppe. My name is Lisa Christie. I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As a child, I was a horse lover, and an avid book reader. I wrote stories, crafted things with my mother, and loved acting. I studied theatre arts in college, had a horse and a pony, a smattering of cats and kittens, a couple of dogs, and several parakeets. I have always had a love for the arts and for nature, and I decided to take that love and turn it into something more.
For many years, James Kiwuwa has entertained, thousands of individuals from all over the world. Countless lovely people who brought him into their lives and made him a part of their communities.
The opportunity to perform countless compositions around the world would appear to be a worthy influence of delight; but beyond the call to entertain, he connects with every audience in a way that participants understand and value each other’s culture.
James Patrick Sheehan lives in Baltimore City. His produced plays include one-acts Holidays In, Ball Lightning and Urban Pioneers; full-length comedies R.G.B. and Random Dríft, or the Finches of Galapagos; and the two-man show Wicked Pudding (co-written with Ed Valentine). His plays have been presented in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Baltimore.
He also has written libretti for two chamber operas, Dummy (Gil Kline, composer)and The Window Seat (Kendall Kennison, composer), both of which received premieres at Goucher College.
GWYDION SUILEBHAN is a writer and arts advocate who serves as both the Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and the Project Director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network. A founding member of The Welders—a Helen Hayes Award-winning playwrights collective in Washington, DC—Suilebhan previously held the position of Director of Brand and Marketing for Woolly Mammoth. Earlier phases of his career included extensive work as a brand and technology consultant and in publishing, education, and journalism.
Aziza Afzal is a queer, multi-racial artist residing in Maryland. She creates art in many mediums, such as performance, adaptation, script-writing, painting (murals), linocut and intaglio printmaking, drawing, jewelry-making, design, collage, and puppetry.
Sarah Avery is an escaped academic who writes contemporary and epic fantasy. She won the 2015 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for her novella collection Tales from Rugosa Coven. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Space and Time Magazine, Great Jones Street, and Fantasy Scroll, as well as Black Gate, where she wrote a column on teaching and fantasy literature for a decade. She lives in Maryland with her family and over a hundred kinds of medicinal plants.
Jennifer N. Shannon has written and self-published a novel titled Silent Teardrops and two collections of poems, short stories and visual art, for the LOVE…Vol. 1 & 2. Her poetry, short stories, photography and an essay have been in exhibits, published in an anthology and featured in literary magazines such as Deep South, The Auburn Avenue and North Dakota Quarterly.
Sarah Clough is a visual artist, writer, teacher, and curator who grew up in Oklahoma and Nebraska. Her work is about semiotics, the poetic, the physics of light, and the connections between them. She has received awards in screenwriting, journalism, and the visual arts. She has exhibited in Oklahoma, New Mexico, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and the United Kingdom. While a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she was awarded a GradEX solo show and her paintings were also featured in the annual First Year Juried Show.