KulttuuriKauppila welcomes Cheryl J.Fish to the residency on September 2018!
Cheryl J. Fish. is a poet, fiction writer and scholar who teaches environmental justice, writing, literature and gender studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She was a Fulbright professor at University of Tampere in 2007 teaching environmental justice in American literature and film and at that time she met Sami filmmakers at the Tampere Film Festival. Since then she’s written and published essays about how Sami filmmakers and photographers respond to mining and extraction and the importance of maintaining their identity and culture in arctic Fenno-Scandinavia.
She plans to work on a new manuscript of poetry called Gulf of Finland that examines her experience and friendships from time spent in Finland juxtaposed with Kalevala myth and Sami cosmologies. She will also work on short stories and a novella. Fish’s fiction has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream, (Autonomedia Press, 2017) and Liars League NYC. Her poetry publications include a chapbook Make It Funny, Make it Last (#171, Belladonna, 2014) and her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry; Hanging Loose; Terrain.org; New American Writing; Santa Monica Review, Reed Magazine. She is grateful for the opportunity to generate new work at Art Centre KulttuuriKauppila and looks forward to meeting other artists and the local community as well as exploring the nature around Ii.