ISSUE I

SIENNA SOLSTICE 

an anti-disciplinary publication 

ISSUE 01 - JUNE 2020

2 SIENNA SOLSTICE ISSUE I 3 

LETTER FROM 

THE EDITORS 

Dear Reader: 

on 

sol andearth 

When I facetimed Rukan in an empty Purdue classroom last July, the idea of creating an antidisciplinary 

journal was something we were just beginning to grasp. As someone who spent weeknights 

doing cell assays in the lab and Sunday afternoons reading Whitman in coffee shops, I found that 

my identity was inextricably linked to both disciplines. Reading about p53 in scientific literature 

seemed like a distant land away from my explorations of poetry in literary journals — I couldn’t find 

a creative space that could fully combine various forms of art and science to explore a deeper understanding 

of our humanity. 

— Stephanie 

The title of the journal took on many identities before we arrived at Sienna Solstice. During one of 

our many brainstorm calls, we stumbled upon the idea of the solstice being a union of the seasons 

and a representation of change and rebirth. And Sienna was the strong, earthy-toned color that 

grounds us all. Thus, Sienna Solstice was born as a symbol of the antidisciplinary harmony between 

the arts and sciences. This nascent idea of ours—the Sienna Solstice being a portmanteau of 

sorts—was foundational for our journal and its mission. We aim to highlight the truth that we are 

all more alike than different through a nexus of scientific research publications, creative writing, 

podcasts, photography, short films, music composition, and critical essays. Ultimately, Sienna Solstice 

is an unapologetic celebration of the human curiosity that connects us all. 

Our cohort of scientists, writers, musicians, photographers, artists, and filmmakers includes a 

renowned professor of computer science and music at Princeton, a Madridian software engineer, 

an Italian cancer researcher, a Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award-winner, and high school and college 

students dotted across the world. Everyone has something new and unique to bring to life through 

their words, their music, their art. 

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—it is the source of all true art and science."” 

Albert Einstein 

We hope Sienna Solstice will be a space that inspires creation and allows exploration of the 

mysterious. Thank you for celebrating with us this summer solstice. 

Warmly, 

Kate, Lea, Rukan, & Stephanie


TABLE OF CONTENTS 

“POINT YOUR FIRE LIKE A FLOWER” 

Summer Solstice Chant Annie Finch 

An Interview with Annie Finch Sienna Solstice 

“A PILGRIMAGE OF MEMORYLESSNESS” 

Helen Kate Frimet 

Memorylessness Shine Lee 

A Novel PCA-Based fMRI Noise Reducing Wishart 

Nikhil Boddu 

Filter to Improve Diagnosis of Neurodegeneration 

07 

10 

20 

“OVER THE CITY SMOKE” 

Isabel Prioleau HUMIDITY NEAR 100% 

Esther Lee DREAMCHILD 

Yinzhi pan Untitled Photograph 

22 

“AH, YOU’RE A CANCER” 

Elliott Voorhees Icarus was a Cancer 

Enabling Personalized Medicine: A Novel Deep Learning 

Jason Ping Tool for Classifying Genetic Mutations Using Text from 

Clinical Evidence 

12 

“UNDRESSING OF THE HEART” 

Milk Marie Bland 

“OMEN OF CRINKLING SKY” 

is anyone listening? Esther Huang 

Untitled Photograph Yinzhi Pan 

“CIRCLE OF TIME” 

Field of Beginnings Andrea Salvador 

La Fin de ce Monde Haowen Qin 

“UPTURN THE MAY GLUM” 

COVID 19 Pan Tongue Drum: A Robot Sonification Perry Cook 

of the SARS-2 COVID Virus Genome 

Empty Parking Lots Patrick Cui 

May, Madrid 

Talks with Front-Liners of COVID-19 

Anannya Uberoi 

A Human Face Project 

14 

16 

18 

24 

“BAYING FOR OUR BLOOD” 

Sophie Zhu June from July 

Stanley Liu A Fully Integrated Microfluidic Device for 

Blood Plasma Separation and Biomarker Detection 

25 

“CONTOURS OF A GHOST” 

I. Behind the Curtain: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 

Jisoo Hope Yoon II. Horoscopes: Bell’s Theorem 

III. Seeing Double: Superposition 

And processions 

S Cearley Boswell has spoken 

It fell upon the drops and never let the rain wash it away 

30 

“NEAR-INFRARED” 

Julian Berger Juniper Tree 

Kevin Yang Design of a Novel Energy-Saving Radiative 

Cooling Bilayer Paint for Space Cooling 

32 

“THE GENESIS OF A LANGUAGE” 

Jessica Kim broken noise 

Jireh Deng 

Yinzhi Pan 

Hopeful Branches 

Untitled Photo


“WE ARE LEFT RENEWED” 

Rising, A New Era Gwladys Le Roy 

Sol Sistere Victoria Williams 

34 

“EARTH BETWEEN” 

A Body Knowing Divya Mehrish 

Smart and Biocompatible Ostomy Bag Hydrogel Adhesive William Pan 

36 

“DESTRUCTIVE POTENTIAL” 

What Chains? Damaris Nino 

Integrated Tropical Cyclone Energy and its Application Haowen Qin 

38 

40 

“EXACERBATION” 

Faces in the Mirror Sahir Qureshi 

42 

“ONE THAT CANNOT BE FOUND ANYWHERE ELSE” 

Nanmen - A Shanghai Story Yinzhi Pan 

44 

“TO WIELD OR TO WITNESS A SPORK IN ACTION” 

An Effusive Apology to the Plastic Spork Braden Wong 

morinaga hotcakes 

fragments from inferno 

Is it Gaudy or Self Expression? 

Swimmer in Purgatory 

Hamlet Collection 

The Revolution of Rap 

FROM THE TEAM 

Kate Hayashi 

Lea Wang-Tomic 

Suyoung Moon 

Kelthie Truong 

Stephanie Zhang 

Rukan Saif 

46 

Summer Solstice Chant 

Annie Finch 

The sun, rich and open, 

stretches and pours on the bloom of our work. 

In the center of the new flowers, 

a darker wing of flower 

points you like a fire. 

Point your fire like a flower. 

AUTHOR & ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES 

51


An Interview with Annie Finch 

ANNIE FINCH: The “Summer Solstice [Chant]” took me probably around ten years to write—and ten minutes. 

It happened when I was visiting some friends, and they were going to have a summer solstice bonfire. It 

was a party, and I told myself, “I have to have something to recite at the bonfire.” It had been in my mind for 

years that I needed to write a “Summer Solstice Chant,” as part of a series I was doing, which is now in my 

book Calendars. So I was on the way to the party, and I just wrote it down on an envelope, that poem, and it 

is now one of my more popular poems.…When I got to the party, I taught it to everybody, and we all started 

chanting it around the fire, and it worked great... I never changed it. We were all going, “Point your fire like a 

flower!”” It was really written for use in a community. 

I think this is a great point to transition to another question we wanted to ask you, which was advice for budding 

artists... I know in your “Summer Solstice Chant,” you mentioned, “Point your fire like a flower.”” So, how 

do you want younger artists to do that? 

ANNIE FINCH: ““Point your fire like a flower” ...So what I meant was to remember your will. A lot of times 

people talk about mind, body, heart, and spirit, as if they are four equal aspects of a person. But a fifth element, 

one that is usually overlooked and ignored, makes everything work a lot better— the will. Without remembering 

the will, your mind or your heart can get confused and think they are the will. They aren’t. The emotions of 

your heart are not your will; they come, and they go. The ideas of your mind are not your will; they grow, are 

influenced. But the will is a life force, it persists and never really changes, deep inside; it’s your sense of individual 

self, a survival need, and it’s also the source of our creativity, self expression, desire, and passion. 

When we honor our will with guilt or shame, it’s a guide through life and the artistic process that can be selfish 

and completely unselfish at the same time. If your will is allowed to burn clean like a flame, it is amazing. You 

can point your will in the most focused, energetic way, and it can still open like a flower to the sun, a gift of 

beauty, receptivity, vulnerability, and honesty that is accomplished in proportion to how much of the force of 

your fiery will you allow to come through. When you listen fully to your will, you experience desire and non-attachment 

at the same time; you’re pointing your fire, but you’re doing it like a flower.… 

So in a nutshell, my advice to young artists would be: don’t be afraid to get yourself out there completely and 

passionately, to make yourself heard and ask clearly and fully for what you want, as long as you’re feeling honest 

and unattached to the outcome. 

My advice for young writers specifically is to listen for the voice in your head. Some of the best writers I know 

physically hear a voice inside their head saying the words before they write them down. [Learning] to listen to 

that voice and to wait for it takes patience and humility and attention. But if you have that inner voice, honor 

it— read your work aloud and notice how it feels and how it sounds. The three pieces of advice I always give 

writers are: 1. read aloud as you go 2. revise until it’s truly done and it feels like there’s nothing else you will 

ever want to change; if you aren’t getting to that point, make structural changes until you finally understand 

what ““finished” means for this piece— 3. read widely (read literally everything—not just what’s accepted at the 

moment as ““good,””and not just the contemporaries. Heaven forbid, not just the contemporaries.)


A Novel PCA-Based fMRI Noise Reducing Wishart Filter to 

Improve Diagnosis of Neurodegeneration 

Nikhil Vamsi Boddu 

Helen 

Kate Frimet 

When I turned fourteen, my great-grandmother sent me a Tinkerbell birthday card, 

her quivered signature signed love. 

Or, more accurately, 

my grandmother bought and sent a Tinkerbell card. 

My great-grandmother, following directions, signed love. 

To be more precise, my grandmother, for my fourteenth birthday, 

bought and later sent a Tinkerbell card that she made my great-grandmother sign love, 

because the last time I saw her - meaning, my great-grandmother - I was eight and 

she still had her memory and there’s a photo of us together, and that was easier to explain, again, 

than trying to cover the six years that had since elapsed. 

Anyway, what matters is that was the last year a card came. 

My guess? The conversations my grandmother had 

of who it was for and why she had to sign it 

and who it was for and yes, it is her birthday, 

and who is this for? were too much to justify. 

Last time she visited us, my grandmother had a video of my great-grandmother in the nursing home: 

She sat down in front of a piano, sighed, 

“I used to play.” “ 

put her fingers to the keys as softly as she touched Pop-Pop’s hands in the hospital 

and pulled from the air music delicate as spider-silk. 

She played like she does at seventeen, waiting for the tanks to send her husband home, 

to stretch her fingers after knitting him a sweater to ship across the sea. 

The same fingers that tie her grandson’s shoes, 

bury her husband after too many, not enough years, 

write “love” on someone’s birthday card, 

button her daughter into a wedding dress, 

while I still sit in the rocking chair, 

watching a record spin, spin, 

the needle long done pulling music from the vinyl grooves. 

Or maybe that’s the wrong order, but what I mean to say is, 

she played like a remembering of who she was 

With increasing interest in functional MRI (fMRI) and functional connectivity networks to understand and diagnose neurodegenerative 

diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, advanced methods for image processing are necessary to produce highly structured 

scans. fMRI is a convenient and effective analysis tool to understand the presence and progression of neurodegeneration, as it is 

a noninvasive in-vivo method for measuring neural activity through blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal. Unstructured 

noise reduction is an essential step in fMRI processing for removing non-BOLD noise to reveal underlying neural function; however, 

no intuitive methods currently exist for this step in fMRI processing. Conventional processes such as spatio-temporal smoothing 

cannot effectively differentiate BOLD signal and noise, causing reduced image quality, blurring of cortical structures, and shifted 

neural signal. Due to this inconsistent image processing method, use of fMRI for clinical diagnosis is difficult and commonly avoided. 

Therefore, this study developed a novel process for differentiating and retaining neural signal more effectively using a Wishart Filter, 

which utilizes a Wishart noise eigenspectrum subtraction to remove unstructured eigenvalues that pollute the fMRI and connectome’s 

PCA eigenspectrum. Instead of spreading signal intensity across the brain volume like spatio-temporal smoothing, this novel method 

utilizes dimensionality reductions to specifically target unstructured signals in fMRI and isolate the BOLD. This study analyzed Wishart 

Filtering’s effects on random noise, connectivity, and gradients in fMRI and connectomes. Variations of the Wishart Filter were 

compared to a temporal low-pass filter and spatial smoothing to test for improvements in image quality. This study showed that Wishart 

Filtering significantly reduces noise and improves connectivity and gradient visibility in fMRI brain scans more effectively than 

spatio-temporal smoothing without causing additional side effects. Thus, this novel tool in biomedical image processing and analysis 

has the potential to improve fMRI as a more effective clinical diagnostic technique for neurodegeneration. 

Memorylessness 

Yips and yahs and 

gee bees and goo-has, 

Gus’s blank state of mind 

rusts, morose 

A pilgrimage of memorylessness, 

erasing what once was 

and what may become; 

he reaches his destination 

as he retreats into a fort of white noise. 

Spotless, pristine like brass 

is the amphitheater of his mind; 

homogeneity is his defense - 

a haven. 

Sir, I refuse. 

How can you expect me to do this? 

The harmonica captures the essence of humanity, 

thinks Gus. 

Where did I place my harmonica again? 

Hey, 

I’ve already begun counting down the days to see you. 

Do you still have the harmonica I gave you? 

I hope it helps keep your mind off of things. 

We got our first snow of the year - 

later than usual - 

Wish you were there to see it. 

Gus circles a moss-ridden stone, 

keeping to the fragmented, 

staccato rhythm of his walk. 

Shine Lee

12 SIENNA SOLSTICE 

ISSUE I 13 

Milk 

Marie Estelle Bland 

1 

You tasted like sweet salt 

sat outside in the sunlight, 

laying in a wicker basket. 

Like a peach 

brushed with olive oil. 

Warming and thickening for an hour or so. 

Honeyed strawberry milk, 

I couldn’t eat a whole meal of you. 

Too much good in a half serving. 

2 

There, my ankles twisting as I walked, 

I watched the players play checkers 

with tokens and a board that were made for chess. 

Pavement dried, 

drooled over cobblestone. 

A woman put her drycleaning 

in a dragging basket built for the grocer’s. 

There, Maman would help me out of my freshly pressed shirts 

like I was still three. 

And I enjoyed it. 

Another odd thing: 

The milk I bought for our breakfast 

came out in clumps. 

Maman told me at Marche Franprix, 

they keep dairy free from the confines of chilly air. 

As a matter of fact, 

my Tante Colette served us yaourt that was days old. 

She enjoyed it. 

3 

Is anyone paying attention 

to what I am about to lose? 

I sit 

at the edge 

of my bed 

and search 

for the will to strip this part of me away. 

The word ‘begone!’’ does not suit this undressing of my heart, 

this separation of sinew by soft sinew, tendon by 

Touch me one more time! 

I just 

want you 

to touch 

me one 

more time. 

When I first made my way toward you, 

I marched through mud with sandals on 

and the rich dirt caked through to my soles. 

The other day 

I looked down 

and at first glance 

I thought you were a birthmark it felt so 

“Have I known you before?”” 

But now I notice. 

Now I sit, 

slowly scrubbing off the little specs 

like clotted milk. 

Love, I know it all worked for you, 

but I couldn’t do it. 

I couldn’t find the nerve to drink the specs out of my cereal.

14 

SIENNA SOLSTICE ISSUE I 15 

is anyone listening? 

a study in the fermi paradox 

Esther Huang 

_______ 

Note: The Fermi Paradox, named after Enrico Fermi, is described as the curious absence of 

evidence for extraterrestrial existence despite the high statistical estimates for their probability. 

silence chased me to waken and taught 

me a multitude of ways to be patient. 

at the end of my outstretched arm: our thrashing 

humanity mingling with harsh cosmic 

microwave yesterday, a fervent and disquieted 

whisper folded against the atmosphere’s lungs, echo 

drenched in a vague veil of arcaneness—omen of crinkling sky? 

or something similar: the muscle and fortified 

tissue of a fifth-dimensional beast drifting through 

the planes of our existence—expand, contract, disappear, 

say it again; 

expand, contract, disappear. in one observable galactic spiral there is 

an expanse of rigid nothingness; 

in another something sits on the spilling edge of genesis, holding 

its breath, listening. when my power outlet finds purpose i search 

for a portrait of faces to haunt me in the blistering vacuum, if only to prove to 

myself i have a semblance of worth. i refuse to believe i was born 

lonely and staggered against colossus. i can’t die 

without tearing these latitudes of 

indifference into rippling technicolor bloom. as i 

lie face-down at night, heart aimed 

at the earth’s gentle burning core, i feel the skies tilt and twitch 

to map the stars as if they, too, want to bring us to the precipice 

of faith, careening the heavy empyrean vault of 

heaven to shine more brightly on our downturned heads. 

god, 

if i lie here long enough, i could break my own 

foraging heart. (if i could riot against apathy, would this be the 

battle cry? not a cry, but a whimper?) 

a personal opinion: we all want someone to hear 

our pleas and to believe in the existence of 

companionship. i don’t think that is 

any crime 

at all. 

Photograph by Yinzhi Pan


Field of 

Beginnings 

Andrea Salvador 

_______ 

this is the last time my mother is letting me 

go on a date with you because the next time 

she swears i’ll arrive on her doorstep, dead. 

it kind of makes sense because we’ve just 

touched twisters & jumped off waterfalls & 

now you’re promising me a field of lightning. 

LaFin de ce Monde 

Haowen Qin 

this is the last time you’re going to tell me 

this story & it makes sense because it’s 

still unproven & you don’t want to be kicked 

out of grad school. we sit in the field, soil 

staining our asses, reciting the Bible books 

out of our minds to learn a new beginning. 

this is the last time I’ll ever think of God of 

god, the sky is alight attuned to the start 

of time. barren fields holding life in cracked 

palms, drinking up the scattered sparks 

in a heady rush. you trace the faint lines 

of lingering electricity with your eyes. 

this is the last time I’ll think about death & 

you in the same sentence. wiping down my 

skirt you drive me home & sing all the way 

& don’t talk to me, let me think of the field 

that held our summer by the thread: ends 

and better beginnings strung in a circle of time. 

Photograph by Yinzhi Pan, altered by Sienna Solstice



COVID 19 Pan Tongue Drum: A Robot Sonification 

of the SARS-2 COVID Virus Genome 

Perry R. Cook (aka P-Ray) 

May, Madrid 


Light-hearted bluebells upturn the May glum. 

Long queue at the grocer’s today. “Pick some 

kidney beans for me, dear?” Margaret surveys 

from her balcony wiping her reading glasses on 

mulmul always shell shocked her button eyes 

following my figure on the street as though the 

town were a deafening foghorn from her 

seafarer days. Mildly her loaded windchime 

tumbles. Only seabirds can tell the taste of 

hurricanes 

from windless weather. 

Built, Programmed, and Documented April/May 2020 

This project is a tangible sonification 1 of the Genome Sequence of SARS-2 COVID 19 

Pneumonia Virus 2 from a Wuhan Seafood Market, sequenced and published in early 2020 

(the specimen was collected in December 2019). The notes of a robot actuated 

Pan Tongue Drum are used to display the gene sequence of the Coronavirus. 

All DNA sequences are made up of four base symbols: A G C and T 

(or U for RNA), representing the four genetic building block proteins: 

Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine (or Uracil for RNA) 

Talks with Front-Liners of COVID-19 


For example, the COVID 19 sequence referenced here begins: 

attaaaggtt tataccttcc caggtaacaa accaaccaac tttcgatctc ttgtagatct ... 

continuing on for almost 30,000 symbols total. 

The sonification is accomplished by assigning musical notes to each of the four symbols: 

A = musical A G = musical G C = musical C T = musical E 

Using this simple mapping, the DNA sequence is read, and the corresponding notes are played. 

The pan drum covers some of these notes with two octaves, so the software selects the octave 

randomly (to make things interesting). Further, a running total of occurrences of each base 

is kept, and an occasional long, low drone is played to sonify the base with the highest count. 

Scientists have determined and documented 3 the functions of many sub-sections of 

the geneticcsequence. These sub sections, when found, are sonified by different robots 

(cowbell, shaker(s), other bells, drums, etc.). All software was written in ChucK 

(gene parsing, compositional logic, robot control) and Processing (graphical display). 

The Empty 

Parking Lots 

Patrick Cui 

1 

Sonification: The use of non-speech audio to convey information or display data. See [1] 

2 LR757998 Sequenced Genome of the SARS-2 COVID Pneumonia Virus from a Wuhan Seafood Market. Available from the National Institutes of Health, NCBI genome data site: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/LR757998 

3 

Bad News Wrapped in a Protein: Inside the Coronavirus Genome,” New York Times, April 3, 2020. See [2] 

References 

[1] “The Sonification Report: Status of the Field and Research Agenda,” Prepared for National Science Foundation by the International Community for Auditory Display: G. Kramer (Ed.), Authors: B. Walker, T. Bonebright, 

P. Cook, J. Flowers, N. Miner, J. Neuhoff, R. Bargar, S. Barrass, J. Berger, G. Evreinov, W. Fitch, M. Gröhn, S. Handel, H. Kaper, H. Levkowitz, S. Lodha, B. Shinn-Cunningham, M. Simoni, S. Tipei, 1999. 

[2] “Bad News Wrapped in a Protein: Inside the Coronavirus Genome,” by Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer, New York Times, April 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/science/coronavirusgenome-bad-news-wrapped-in-protein.html



DREAMCHILD 

Esther Lee 

HUMIDITY 

NEAR 

100% 

Isabel Prioleau 

it’s dark but the pizza place on the corner 

is lit-up is open the crosswalk is saying the 

only thing it can say walk so I walk 

across the street and with me rolls 

down the pavement the shadow that 

follows me is human fog is funny like that 

not really funny at all which is to say it 

gives us suspicion which is just a way 

of looking at the world as if it might 

at any moment disappear leaving us as 

a traffic light without cars to glow for 

stubbornly alive stubbornly wakeful and 

stubbornly near this pizza place now 

worldless and thoroughly dark 

Photograph by Yinzhi Pan 

before mama ever met my father 

she swallowed the sun as it held Hong Kong’s mornings into the smog-bleached sky 

above the grey Pearl River. 

i lay in her swollen belly 

like a firefly, glowing faintly. 

Hong Kong was sewer-stained streets and tin Spam cans, 

sepia photographs of mama and my aunties in knee-length plaid skirts and choppy 

black bowl-cuts. a country folded into the sea, well-versed in the bitter 

sweetness of jasmine tea and truth. 

that was before mama flew off in an aeroplane 

over the city smoke and a hundred thousand sets of obsidian eyes, 

before she landed in America and laid in the heart of a foreign city 

where the ground beat with every night siren and fever dream. 

the firefly budded in her stomach until it multiplied into a swarm of cicadas, 

the kind that plagued the nighttime back in Kowloon, and growing with it, 

mama’s hope. 

by the time she knew my father i had already blossomed into a future. 

i was mama’s past incarnate, but better. this time, she would make things right. 

this time, i would be the vessel of all her absolved dreams. 

i was born under a scythe, upside down in her womb. already finding ways to oppose you, 

grandmother said. 

but mama laughed, the sound ripe like a chapel bell. 

she was already finding ways to ignore her pain. 

baba tells me that when mama first saw me, she looked at me 

as if she had seen the sun 

for the very first time. 

as if she was the Pearl River, 

waiting for every sunrise to collect me 

in her bosom, bending her spine into 

every newborn day just to meet me on the other 

end.

22 

On the Houston 

rooftop hung up 


with thick sun 

beams 

while everyone 

Enabling Personalized Medicine: A Novel Deep Learning Tool for 

sleeps 

Classifying Genetic Mutations Using Text from Clinical Evidence 

I look to 

the pavement like 

Jason Ping 

it is 

water. I remember 

The understanding of genetic mutations and their effects is the foundation of personalized medicine. However, 

as a child, I learned 

currently this interpretation is time-consuming, costly, and susceptible to bias, involving teams of clinical pathologists 

how to dive 

arms raised hands pointed 

manually reviewing of thousands of scientific texts to classify individual mutations. To address these 

issues, a deep-learning natural language processing tool was developed to automatically classify genetic variants 

an arrow to slice 

and their effects. Opensource data on genetic variants and related clinical literature was utilized to engineer 

the water around my body. 

features that represent the relationship between variations and their impacts. Text-mining algorithms such 

But instead, I fold 

as term frequency-inverse document frequency, coupled with high dimensional word vector representations, 

my arms behind 

my back brushing 

were performed on the text corpus to embed the relationships between terms. Additionally, physicochemical 

steel railing I 

properties of the substituted amino acids and their respective Grantham scores were used to map the severity 

climbed, picturing, holding 

my legs straight 

of the changes and the amino acid evolutionary distances. The machine-learning system is the concatenation 

of a Multi-Layer Perceptron and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network that incorporates dimensionality 

reduction to capture principle features and mitigate noise. After training, the predictor achieved a high 

with my spine as I 

hit the ground 

accuracy of 92.3% and an F1-score of 85.5. The tool was validated based on feature prioritization and previously 

annotated mutations through cross-validation. The deep learning predictor was then applied to currently 

head first. Surely 

the sky’s burning 

blue has melted 

unclassified genetic variations and identified 13 as novel oncogenic mutations. Ultimately, this study not only 

concrete to a thick 

helps solve one of precision medicine’s primary limitations, but also presents high industry viability, significantly 

streamlining the research process and potentially leading to the development of new personalized therapies 

Icarus Was a Cancer 

pool. The therapist stared deep 

into my eyes and proclaimed 

for patients. 

Elliott Voorhees 

Ah, you’re a Cancer! 

That, is why you’re depressed. 

A.I. Art by Stephanie Zhang 

Madame Sosostris, 

your reputation precedes you! 

Would you divine meaning 

from the constellations 

I’ve slashed into my inner ankles? 

I’m picking at 

their flared red 

halos, but you 

are too enraptured 

to foresee them. 

I watch 

the brush strokes crashing 

in Landscape with the Fall 

of Icarus my death 

will go unnoticed. 

It will be that with— 

addition to the scenery. 

No great geometry 

composed to immortalize 

my splash, limbs golden 

spiraled, against the asphalt. 

I can hear the shepherds 

and sheep sleep 

away the days across 

the fields from where 

I ocean the narrow 

sidewalk, sinking 

to the seabed, crabs 

tenderly scavenging 

my body. 

Polymorphisms in the dopamine (DA) signaling to predict outcome 

in patients (pts) with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC): 

data from TRIBE, MAVERICC and FIRE -3 phase III trials. 

Francesca Battaglin, et al.* 

Background: Strong evidence supports the critical role of the gut brain axis in modulating gastrointestinal function 

and homeostasis. Available data suggest an involvement of the dopaminergic pathway in CRC dynamics. DA could 

inhibit proliferation and migration of tumor endothelial cells and enhanced 5- fluorouracil efficacy in CRC preclinical 

models. Hence, we hypothesized that genetic variants in DA signaling may predict treatment outcomes in mCRC 

pts. 

Methods: The impact on outcome of 22 selected single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 9 genes of the DA 

signaling pathway (DRD1, DRD2, DRD3, DRD4, DRD5, TAAR1, SLC6A3, SLC18A2, PPP1R1B) was analyzed on a 

total of 884 pts enrolled in three independent randomized first line trials: TRIBE (n = 324), MAVERICC (n = 324), 

and FIRE- 3 (n = 236). Genomic DNA from blood samples of pts was genotyped through the OncoArray, a custom 

array manufactured by Illumina. A meta -analysis approach using the METASOFT software was used to quantify 

SNPs prognostic effects and heterogeneities across treatment arms. P values were adjusted for multiple testing using 

the false discovery rate (FDR) method. 

Results: Overall, DRD3 rs3732790, rs9817063 and rs2134655 showed a significant nominal p value (P) in association 

with tumor response (TR) across trials (P= 0.032, P= 0.021, P= 0.027, respectively). TAAR1 rs8192620 showed 

an association with both progression free survival (PFS) (P= 0.01) and overall survival (OS) (P= 0.033), similar to 

DA transporter SLC6A3 rs6347 (P= 0.016 and P= 0.002, respectively). SLC6A3 rs6347 association with OS remained 

significant after FDR (P FDR 

= 0.045). Subgroup analyses showed a significant association with PFS for DRD1 

rs267410 and SLC6A3 rs2652510 in females (PFDR= 0.056), and between SLC6A3 rs6347 and OS (P FDR 

= 0.041) 

and SLC6A3 rs6876890 and TR (PFDR= 0.05) in RAS wild type. 

Conclusions: Our results suggest that SNPs in DA signaling may have a prognostic value in mCRC pts receiving 

first- line treatment. Upon validation, these findings may provide novel insight on the role of DA signaling in CRC 

and possibly contribute to open novel therapeutic perspectives. 

*All contributors listed in author biography

itlove! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy 

seaweed, 

erpay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. P 

wen in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wid e-spreading 

pastur 

es, through which 

hebeen a s 

much chance for you are a spy he is on t 

oot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it si mply coll 

l 

u 

mlate. Boswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we have been as 



A Fully Integrated Microfluidic Device for Blood Plasma 

Separation and Biomarker Detection 

Human blood plasma contains biomarkers associated with many infectious diseases. Separation of plasma 

from blood cells is crucial for many disease diagnostics as blood cells autofluoresce and hemolysis may occur 

overtime. The current centrifugation separation technology suffers from its 

bulky design and inability to be integrated with downstream detection. A 

microfluidic device for blood plasma separation, antigen/antibody binding, 

biomarker capture, and fluorescence detection was successfully developed 

to address these problems. The device uses the principle of bubble-induced 

acoustic microstreaming to capture and separate the blood 

cells from the blood sample, resulting in a pure plasma solution. 

Bubble-induced microstreaming results from an acoustic field 

on oscillating air bubbles causing the viscous dissipation of the 

surrounding liquid in the microchannel. This device successfully 

demonstrated plasma separation, with a 31.8% yield and 

99.9% plasma purity, comparable to a traditional centrifuge. The 

blood was spiked with a fluorescent P24 antibody, which was then 

mixed with 7-µm diameter beads conjugated with P24 antigens in 

a micromixing chamber. The bound proteins were then captured 

by acoustic microstreaming and detected using a fluorescence microscope. 

The fluorescent detection of HIV1 P24 antibody from a whole 

blood control demonstrated a detection limit of 17 pg/µL. This device 

shows the potential of immunoassay-based disease diagnostics with high sensitivity and quantification. 

June fromJuly 

Sophie Zhu 

Stanley Liu 

It’s July, and the sun has yet 

to awaken. Curtains ruffle by the 

hand of no wind. A mother screams 

by the grip of no man. As we sit 

on plates of grass clippings drying 

in dripping honey, our eyes bleed 

the ticks of a reversible clock. When 

ticks ravage crisping sheets of 

ripped cotton, only time becomes 

a variable. Here, we hear pool 

parties cut cake and savor a candle’s 

death. Beside us, ants burn in water and 

a bone shatters. A bone of a 

desperate soul. We like to think 

the desperate are greedy, but say, 

it’s your collarbone cropped from a neck 

cradled in my one arm. The children 

learn to play in front of us to capture 

the motives of a decaying robot. 

How arches form lines now. Where 

rays of darkness are lynching blind 

edges. Light creeps onto leaves of 

an aphid’s body, seeping the mucus of a 

sick tree into no man’s land. It’s June, 

and the sun is baying for our blood. 

h. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in s pite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show that you might tell 

important, that it came at last. "Show that you 

Boswell has spoken 

S Cearley 

ion comes 

from close study in the 

dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading 

pastures, through which we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no ple asure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them 

er everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very 

s level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through whi ch we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay 

me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perh aps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show 

tha 

trail on foot. 

might tell 

last. "Show that yo u might te 

haps it simply collapsed, an d 

in the main so u 

e have been as much chance for you are a spy he 

is on the 

.the dinner bell to go to bed very late Boswell has spoken in love! This information comesfrom 

close 

per bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, an d 

wide-spreading 

astures, through which we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the b eautiful scene beforethem. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, tha 

ose study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we have 

been 

as 

pldBoswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wie-spreading pastures, through which we have 

been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no 

easure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in th e 

main so unusual, so 

extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! This i nformation 

aordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show that you mighttell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very 

has spok 

trail on f 

her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell 

stud y in the dark and gloomy se aweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we havebeen as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tiresṬhat was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusual, so extr 

aoreough which we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasur e in punctud tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusu al, so extr 

hisher everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! T information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, thr 

apsed, and in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and 

so important, that it came at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a larg e whaleboat for 

late. Boswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its 

tlevel holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is 

on the 

s 

rail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it 

"Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to 

bed very late. 

in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. 

nusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at 

imply co 

comes from cl 

llapsed, and 

rdinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so 

much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me 

no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Pe 

t you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! This information com es from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we have been as much chance for you are 

a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unusua 

rhaps it simplycollapsed, and in the main so unusual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that 

s have been as mu ch chance for you are 

a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main o unusual, so 

have 

late. Boswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we 

t t it came at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! This informa 

l, so extraordinary,but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large 

whaleboat for the dinn 

it cam e 

at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in 

extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show 

that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell 

o 

ch chancefor yu are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the main so unu sual, so extraordinary, but in spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show 

that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the dinner bell to go to 

bed very late. Boswell h as spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which we have been as much chance for you are a spy he is on the trail on foot. pay me no pleasure in punctured tires. That was the beautiful scene before them. Perhaps it simply collapsed, and in the m 

ain so unusual, so 

extraordinary, but in 

spite of all kinds of green lawn and so important, that it came at last. "Show that you might tell her everything." As he aspired to a large whaleboat for the d 

to go to bed 

very 

einner bell to go to bed very late. Boswell has spoken in love! This information comes from close study in the dark and gloomy seaweed, its level holms, and wide-spreading pastures, through which w 

I. Behind the Curtain 

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 

Jisoo Hope Yoon 

When we break the iron and turn away 

From the cave’s shadowed end 

We realize the sunlight is too much. 

For we have witnessed the bars 

Of our inherent prison; 

We fidget, 

Forever, 

Fishing in the broken fantasy 

Of physicality. 

When we ask all the questions at once 

The Universe, callous and ambivalent, 

Realizes we are too much. 

Where am I? 

Where am I going? 

How elegantly are we 

Left in the dark. 

How wise, not to fumble 

For the contours of a ghost.



II. Horoscopes 

Bell’s Theorem 


Ancient men invented stories to 

Answer their prodding children; 

We like to think something 

Has changed. They say, within a 

Mathematical expression we can pin 

A lack of secrets; that the particles 

Have had us walking in circles 

To hear a whisper they don’t care 

To emit. 

And we dare 

Think history is a forward-flowing 

Tide, that we have buried bullets 

In the heart of every bygone myth. 

But the mother’s misty eyes still search 

For fate in the chaotically perched stars; 

The everyday sinner never ceases to seek 

A just cause for his muffled misdeeds. 

They say photon after photon can 

Challenge reality, in a spinning dance 

That does not deviate from chance 

And if so 

I’ll be okay 

Without destiny 

In my coffee cup 

No covert affairs 

No blueprint to decipher 

It fell upon the drops and never let the rain wash it away 

S Cearley



ng on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a part 

e. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the b 

short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour m 

e an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes tha 

was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a 

the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I 

inary, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashe d, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lyi 

ur me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing 

ages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpret 

st of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ord 

that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremo 

ocessions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devo 

ones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And pr 

rer than the ordinary, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A n 

most of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleve 

de a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That fore 

ered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had ma 

armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, ma res, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time befor 

each path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big 

III. Seeing Double 

Superposition 

me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to 

short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour 

On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And procession 

f us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the left 

ost concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and ti 

othing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the st 

red from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns 

side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed thre 

e hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elepha 

s. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character 

. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinar 

y, realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing 

oncerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A nothing house and tired from lying on the le 

large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share 

house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairn 

nts. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what m 

mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, 

realizes that what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scattered, acquiring there what would you have left: nothing. A not 

the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, 

hing house and tired from lying on the left side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In 

s the stones weighed three hundred years. On these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows 

ft side, tired from pointing to the beach path. Nothing that 

, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a short time before an unpretentious character, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what most c 

n these pages I was her big armchair, I had been quenched. That foremost of kings, begging for his share. Cattle, mares, cows, and elephants. And processions. And appeared in a 


It is difficult to imagine I can be loved— I, 

Not your kind one, nor your 

Is not a word in our dictionary. 

Not in our game, not our well-staged 

The odds. It is exciting not to know 

How you feel, to leave it up to cryptic notes 

And the enigma in your glance. 

Fair 

Play 

Strange to think you could be feeling infinitely 

Of us walk unawares in this world, where 

Noncommittal particles decide to tease us instead 

With patterns that stripe the wall in defiance, 

As simple as a small thing or a 

Actuality goodbye. 

Many 

Wave 

i cular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. On these p 

t what most concerns each one of us, is if he can devour me. They dashed, they scatt 

, less noble but cleverer than the ordinary, realizes that what most concerns each one o 

Because if something can be in infinitely many places at 

I questioned how I could possibly 

Is all I am 

Is all you are. 

There is no anomaly in our cognition. 

Once, 

Matter 

But with it, I can observe the particle 

There must be a place where I never find out. 

But here, I observe how your pulse quickens, 

And now we are locked in this narrative, in this 

Things have the freedom of isolation. 

So if I was somehow a small and simple enough 

Thing, I could at once be in love with you and 

Not— your heart, like the cat, at once broken and 

Unbroken. 

Somewhere, 

Minute 

he had made a particular paragraph of assumed interest. In large cairns the stones weighed three hundred years. O 

And processions 

S Cearley



Design of a Novel Energy-Saving Radiative 

Cooling Bilayer Paint for Space Cooling 

Kevin Yang 

Space cooling is a significant global end-use of energy and a major driver of peak electricity demand. 

The accumulation of heat from the sun during daytime increases the indoor temperature 

of buildings, which necessitates air conditioning. In order to reduce cooling demand, solar reflective 

white paints have been used to reduce solar heating. However, current reflective paints 

have intrinsically high near-infrared absorption, contributing to its heat gain. 

In this project, I create and demonstrate the properties of a novel bilayer paint with a metal 

reflective layer underneath a high IR-emissivity white paint. Taking advantage of (1) radiative 

cooling by maximizing emissivity in the mid-infrared and (2) reflective cooling by maximizing 

solar reflectance, the bilayer paint serves to reduce solar heating while maximizing radiative 

cooling power. 

Juniper 

Tree 

Julian Berger 

A temperature measurement of the bilayer paint 

after direct sun exposure revealed a consistent 

~0.5° C decrease in surface temperature of the 

bilayer paint as compared to a commercial solar 

reflective white paint. Spectroscopic characterization 

of the bilayer paint showed much improved 

near-infrared reflectance as well as retention of 

high emissivity in the mid-infrared. Calculated 

from the spectroscopic characterization, the 

bilayer paint displayed significant ~7 W/m2 more 

cooling power than the commercial paint 

(t = 4.06, α = 0.01, t-crit = 3.14). 

This study demonstrated the effectiveness of a 

novel bilayer paint for building energy savings. 

Previously unexplored in literature, the bilayer 

paint provides a novel cooling roof 

technology which can serve to reduce 

cooling energy demand during 

the summertime. 

Image not affiliated with research abstract



Hopeful Branches 

Jireh Deng 

Science narrates the network 

of symbiotic fungi sprawling 

between neighborhoods 

of pines and oaks where roots share 

water and carbon and the latest 

gossip on the deer 

gorging himself on aspen. 

At church, Tabby wears the pink 

flower printed skirt from the GAP. 

I wore it her age in the second 

grade after Rebecca passed it 

down to me; our lanky limbs 

outgrown from stretching skyward. 

Photo by Yinzhi Pan 

Each night before a wedding, 

I hear my mom candle light 

a prayer to heaven. 

She is the eye of the storm 

circling the bride until the vows, 

and I swear she smiles wider than the groom. 

Auntie Thanh, fills the chapel with ATP, 

the Porto’s bakery more sugar than I could eat 

in a year. Auntie Ruby procures 

spring in the boutonnieres & bouquets. 

A curation of chrysanthemums, 

roses, & hydrangeas. 

My brother and sister’s 

arms concentric 

the genesis of a language in me 

curling in around the edges 

hardening another living ring. 

Our entangled stories raise 

our hopeful branches 

and netted hand veins expand past 

the shadowing of the sun. 

Broken Noise 

Jessica Kim 


creaking hinges of a dusted cartridge grimy leather disintegrating 

into ghastly scraps. tawny case reveals burnt sienna shaped 

into abstracts enveloped in the filth reeking of mold from hardened 

fingertips. hands antipathetic to scoop up the deceased carcass 

but they still do and the wood feels distantly familiar like a departed 

memory. 

strings wired in all the wrong places except for one 

lying on the bridge while its comrades exploded into 

broken lands. the horsehair strands aligned on a rod of wood most of 

them growing receding hairlines. yet I still pick up the ancient 

equipment bowing on that one string with the slightest bit of bow. 

shaking my feeble hands for a synthetic vibrato because the broken 

souls with injured instruments produce 

the best noise.



Rising, 

A New Era 

Gwladys Le Roy 

“As seen throughout her body of work, Gwladys offers her 

audience a unique look into her dreamlike world. She employs 

a variety of illustration styles that are brought to life 

through watercolor and gouache. 

She is passionate about glorifying women’s natural beauty, 

strength and freedom. Her artwork seeks to empower 

women through their femininity and their human right to 

express their sensuality. She is always representing wild nature 

by mixing women figures and botanical inspiration with 

a spiritual approach as an ode to nature. 

In ‘Rising, A New Era’ she illustrates the unprecedented 

times we are currently living and expresses the recovery of 

nature in a way that passes understanding.” 

Sol Sistere 

Victoria Williams 

W 

alking up the path, we 

see it: the light from 

the sun, peeking from 

just below the horizon beyond the 

mountains. It’s ready to greet the 

new season, this new term within 

the multitude of years full of endless 

continuation. The birds float 

in the air around us, singing and 

warbling, calling the sun to join in 

this wondrous new day. A celebration 

has arrived for our beautiful, 

glorious star and the life it 

brings to us all, yet today is also 

filled with reverence for all those 

who have gone before. We will 

spend all day preparing, bringing 

cartload after cartload of wood to 

the base of the mountains. Pulled 

by our donkeys as far a distance 

as the carts can travel, before we 

load up our backs when the terrain 

gets too harsh. Pulling and 

carrying, building and emblazing, 

until every beacon of light stands 

tall on the mountaintops, reaching 

towards the sky above. The beacons 

carry our veneration towards 

the stars, showing the heavens 

our eternal gratitude for its very 

existence in our lives. Building, 

piling piece after piece of wood, 

one on top of the other. Ultimately, 

they will be covered in the 

flames which will be cleansing us 

of the past and readying us for the 

future, lifting our sorrows away 

from us as the smoke purifies. 

Guiding the mule up to the 

edge of the crooked mountainside, 

his steps remain solid as he 

moves over dirt and rock, aiding 

us in our task which fills us 

with much gratitude for his help 

on this day. We know the day 

is here, that summer is here, 

and the food which has just begun 

to grow will multiply with 

it, filling our lives with earth’s 

bounty once again. A caravan 

walks, mule after mule, cart after 

cart, piles of wood after endless, 

heavy piles of wood carried 

by them for us. There are those 

who do not have carts or mules 

as we do, and they carry wood 

on their backs from the start; 

hand-woven rope strung around 

logs and thrown over their broad 

shoulders, their faces red and 

dripping with the heat from the 

sun and the exertion of their task. 

For many years, forests grew 

this wood, the thick boughs on 

trees which lay covered in their 

blanket of leaves, warmed by 

the sun and fed by the earth and 

the rain. The birds in the forest 

made each tree their home, building 

nests every spring out of refuse 

and their own soft down to 

care for their cherished young. 

The insects made each tree their 

food, munching on the green 

leaves growing from the seemingly 

endless feast laid out before 

them. And now the wood belongs 

to us alone, having begun 

its life as a small seed sprouting 

on the cold ground, covered 

in old leaves and the decay of 

years past, and ending its long 

path through this world as a fire 

for our celebration of life. For 

weeks, and months, we collected 

the wood, cutting down the 

trees in the endless forests. We 

have dried it and prepared it 

for the kindling on this day. 

We arrive at the top of the 

mountain, stopping on our little 

parcel of land as close to the 

heavens as we could manage. 

Unloading our backs, we lay out 

the logs in perfect order, stacking 

and leaning to get each one just 

right. We pause and watch as the 

goats in the distance move and 

bound with their impossible agility 

over cliffs and cracks, and for a 

moment we honor them, too. We 

watch as the sun begins its decent 

towards the horizon. The trees 

have given us the gift of their timber, 

a fuel to keep us warm, a little 

piece of coppice here burning on 

the mountainside. The fires to be 

sprinkled throughout the mountains 

are stars, our own mini cosmos 

here on earth. We prepare 

each assemblage to be lit with 

shredded bark and bits of dried 

grass and leaves pressed between 

the logs. Our friends, our family, 

all come to the mountainside: 

parading, whooping, hollering 

with their joy. As they gather, 

we light each fire in synchronicity 

to signal the time for reverential 

celebration has arrived. 

Fire dancers hold their own 

piece of the sun on the ends 

of poles made with still-green 

stalks from trees. Though smaller 

than the stars we built upon the 

mountaintops, they are equally 

bright in the darkness, vivid 

glints of red and yellow. Meteors 

are shooting through the sky 

around us and them as they twirl 

and move, rotating and danc- 

ing to the rhythm of drums that 

thunder in our ears. Sparks are 

flying through the air as the dancers 

spin around us, the air colliding 

with the suns, their fractured 

pieces landing on the cold grass 

and smoldering, leaving swirls 

of smoke rising into the air. 

Bodies join in their revelry, 

moving and contorting, feeling 

the rhythm which pulses all 

around them. Voices raise up, 

elevating our songs with the 

smoke floating toward the heavens, 

as we all lose ourselves 

to the joy that surrounds us. 

A sliver of blue breaks the 

darkness along the horizon, slowly 

expanding from the black edges 

of sky as it removes the distant 

stars one by one from our view. 

The last of the revelers are headed 

home. Covered in the dust, 

smoke, and sweat of the evening, 

they pick up bits of charred remains 

along the way, a piece of 

luck to be placed in their gardens 

and fields. Many fires are still 

smoldering, glowing with their 

faint remaining light, and we walk 

around with buckets slung over 

the back of our mule, pouring 

water from a small pitcher onto 

flames, and they flicker and hiss 

with release as the fire is extinguished. 

We are left in a dream 

world, the reverberation of the 

music still echoing throughout 

our very cores. Our souls are 

healed from the trials of the last 

season, and we are left renewed. 

This story tells readers the hypothetical 

story of a family from generations 

past as they move through the process 

of preparation for the fire festivals 

which take place on the summer solstice 

throughout the Alps and the Pyrenees, 

and how they ultimately experience 

the magic and beauty of the festival.



My mother has seen the blood 

oozing from eyes of lambs— 

she has renounced her claim 

to the throne of the food chain, 

gums stained. In the backyard, 

the cow gnashes her teeth, 

soil melting on tongue 

I kiss her lips—perhaps 

she is my mother: earth 

between lips, dissolving on palate, 

green aging into brown my mother 

becomes earth—twigs 

for fingers, eyelashes—grass 

her uterus is the ocean 

and I’m thirsting to be reborn 

into a body knowing 

only how to devour itself 

A Body Knowing 

Divya Mehrish 

Smart and Biocompatible Ostomy 

Bag Hydrogel Adhesive 

William Pan 

Ostomies are digestive and excretory surgeries where waste is redirected out through the abdomen, 

requiring a bag to catch excretion; current adhesives of the bag to the skin are 

weak, leading to leakages of wastes which cause painful skin damage, like dermatitis. 

The device requires strong adhesion to hold the ostomy bag in place and to prevent 

effluent leak. As well, biocompatibility and mechanical strength is needed 

to provide a soft but strong interface between the skin and device for better 

coverage, endurance, and comfort. This work introduces the hydrogel 

ostomy adhesive (HOA) made from the polymer polyacrylamide (AAm) 

and sodium alginate (alginate) that is crosslinked with N,N’-methylenebisacrylamide 

(MBAA), calcium sulfate (CaSO4), ammonium 

persulfate (APS), and N,N,N’,N’-tetramethylethylenediamine 

(TEMED). As well, the chitosan ostomy bonding solution (COBS) 

is made by dissolving chitosan in 0.1 M 2-ethanesulfonic (MES) acid. 

Another solution, chitosan ostomy bonding solution EDC-NHS (COB- 

SEN), for stronger adhesion is created by dissolving N-hydroxysuccinimide 

(NHS) and 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide (EDC) 

into the COBS solution. When developing the device, a quick design and 

then a prototype were then made to the requirements, and after mechanical 

and mock simulation tests, the prototype was refined 14 times. The 

design 

goals of strong adhesion were evaluated using a 180 degree peel 

and shear adhesion, measuring interfacial toughness and shear 

strength. To determine biocompatibility and strength, 

tensile and in-vivo and ex-vivo endurance tests 

were used to measure Young’s modulus 

and max wear time, respectively. 

For the tensile tests, the HOA 

material had a Young’s modulus 

of 6.66 kPa compared to current 

ostomy bag adhesive materials with 

a modulus of 47.89x10 2 kPa, which 

is incompatible with the skin’s modulus 

of 85 kPa, For adhesion tests, the HOA and COB- 

SEN outperformed current ostomy bag pastes with an 

interfacial toughness of 58.5J/m 2 and a shear strength 

of 9.822 kPa compared to the average of 3 conventional 

ostomy paste adhesives (interfacial toughness 

of 21.8J/m 2 and a shear strength of 5.965 kPa). 

The HOA along with the COBS brings ostomy 

patients longer wear times, stronger adhesion, 

comfort with softness, and reduced leakages.


What Chains? 

Damaris Nino 

Integrated Tropical Cyclone Energy and its Application 

Haowen Qin 

Severe tropical cyclone disasters become more frequent in recent years, bringing the need for more 

comprehensive energy scales, rather than a wind scale. This study analyzes the strongest tropical cyclones 

from the Pacific and Atlantic basins from 2001 to 2018 and creates a scale from their integrated 

kinetic energy. This scale is used to better estimate the cyclone’s overall energy through satellite determined 

wind speed and create a new categorization for tropical cyclones. It is known that the destructive 

potential and the maximum wind speed of a tropical cyclone are not necessarily correlated. Other 

studies have explored the relationships between cyclone size and intensity and have proposed damage 

scales based on integrated kinetic energy. This study uses the tropical cyclone best tracks from Joint 

Typhoon Warning Centre, the United States Naval Research, and the University of Wisconsin to obtain 

the information necessary to build an area-integrated kinetic energy scale. The scale is then compared 

with the Saffir-Simpson Scale and other features of the cyclones (e.g. eye temperature and cloud 

temperature). Preliminary findings are that the integrated energy of a tropical cyclone is correlated with 

its maximum wind speed, but not eye temperature or cloud temperature. Applications include calculating 

the correlation between energy and, respectively, fatalities and financial losses during individual 

landfalls. The correlation coefficient is then compared to that of the correlation between wind and 

fatalities and losses respectively. A total of 94 landfall cases from Canada, China, Japan, the Philippines, 

and the United States are analyzed. The cases are sorted into 15 scenarios by 

geographic regions. Findings are that 14 of those scenarios show that 

integrated energy scale is more correlated to the fatalities and 

losses than the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale is. Furthermore, in 

island countries such as Japan and the Philippines, the fatalities 

and losses are more correlated with the eyewall (core) 

energy, whereas in continental countries such as the United 

States and China, the fatalities and losses are more 

correlated with the cyclone’s total energy. Nevertheless, 

a holistic view of both the integrated energy and 

the maximum wind speed should 

be considered when estimating 

the overall destructive potential 

of a tropical cyclone. 

“This work is a representation of how life affects us individually. Lately the focus is on being a minority in all the sense of the 

word. What is it like to be different from the vast majority of your surroundings? This mixed media painting made with acrylic 

paint, ink, graphite, and soft pastel are about focusing on what is most important about people and embracing the diversity. 

Putting one’s self in the shoes of others for once and trying to understand who the person is and not just what they look like. 

Using bold bright colors to represent all different ethnic backgrounds and cultures, using lines to show the journeys and roads of 

life. Different marks of how certain situations have been handled, the mistreated, the injustices because you look a certain way. 

We need to immerse ourselves in other cultures so we can learn more. Setting ourselves to only accept the same types of people 

leaves us little room for growth. You cannot expect to learn new things from someone who is in your same situation. Our lives are 

composed of different dances and movements that take us through life. These paintings are rich in color, texture and many layers.”

40 

SIENNA SOLSTICE 


Faces in the Mirror 

Sahir Qureshi 

“This piece explores the exacerbation of mental health 

struggles while quarantined at home — something I and so 

many loved ones have gone through. As a high school senior 

stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself 

disappointed and frustrated. The second half of senior 

year meant so much to me: not only was it a time to celebrate 

my accomplishments throughout high school, but it 

was also a time when I was supposed to trade in my relatively 

lackluster social life for a bustling one. But I suppose what 

I was finally ready for was a chance to change myself — one 

final opportunity to show my peers that I was more than just 

another picture in their yearbook. So, when I was suddenly 

told to not leave the house and forfeit all my long-awaited 

memories from the second semester of senior year, I was 

thrown in for a loop. Walled in and unfulfilled, my reflection 

in my bathroom mirror increasingly became my obsession. 

While I’d always been plagued by my body’s frustrating disobedience 

of Eurocentric beauty standards, my unaddressed 

self-hatred was magnified as I spent even more time in front 

of the mirror — picking at my unibrow, excessively scrub 

bing my face, frowning at my head shape, channeling my 

frustration at the only thing that felt available as an outlet — 

myself. Specifically, my face in the mirror. My lofty desire 

to change into the person I had thought people would revere 

had manifested into a heightened desire to change my physical 

traits — only exacerbated by my world feeling like it was 

contained between four walls and a roof. Soon, my obsession 

became a dance between an active, burning desire to change 

my physical self and a passive feeling of loss and disappointment 

when I seemed to never be satisfied. This triptych represents 

that dance as well a realization that a healthier way to 

dwell on these feelings is to accept them and be open about 

them. As stay-at-home orders are extended and we all adjust 

to our new way of life, we all should be proactive about addressing 

our stresses, which can oftentimes feel overwhelming 

as the physical constraints of living at home translate 

into feeling closed off mentally and emotionally. Let’s use 

this time to acknowledge how we feel and learn from it.”


Nanmen - A Shanghai Story 

Yinzhi Pan


An Effusive Apology to the Plastic Spork 

Braden Wong 

"Well you see, when a spoon and a fork love each other very much..." 

I was utterly horrified. "Dude!" I exclaimed in protest to my friend’s etymological explanation (had I been 

older, the nature of its conception as well)—but realized it was not my child to name. The brazen cuteness 

of the portmanteau was too great for us elementary school students to resist. Its inventors were 

probably dancing in their graves, as we excitedly ripped apart the plastic wrap, eyes wide with tacit 

oohing and aahing as we examined our new presents. 

I absolutely hate sporks. Unabashedly detest them. Wholeheartedly loathe them. 

Any slew of words which could encapsulate an utter hatred for useless objects. 

There is no tool as horrific to hold as to behold. To wield or to witness a spork in 

action is just messiness. It’s sloppy. Its prongs stab my mouth, a tax forcefully 

imposed on our every transaction. I never use one for eating. It’s really terrible. 

Later that night during dinner, my family told me sporks were invented in late 

nineteenth-century America. Of course, I muttered under a breath of pure contempt. 

Nothing better than sticking things into this melting pot and hoping something 

practical comes out. I stared at my chopsticks, a scowl resting on my lips, as I 

shook my head. 

For the next week, our sacred lunchtime experiments revealed a wholly disappointing 

analysis. It picked up rice, but jammed when twirling noodles. It easily 

scooped mashed potatoes, but leaked anything more watery than the cafeteria 

special aqueous chowder soup. It stabbed fruit and vegetables, but was no match for 

anything stronger than a human fist (a tactical disadvantage which the ensuing brawl 

with the 5th graders proved conclusively). The jack-of-all-trades was too much of one for 

its own good, for whatever it did, something else could do better. As the cafeteria-industrial 

complex continued to churn out these abominations, replacing spoons and forks 

but destined never to be as good as either, it left a bitter taste in our mouths. We never 

wanted to touch one again. 

The spork was too ambitious for its own good, desiring to interweave two cultures of 

impossibly stark contrast. To conceive it, the warm, gentle nature of the spoon’s caress 

must be united with the stabbing, belligerent nature of its deranged cousin. But you cannot 

juxtapose the care of love with the violence of war and expect a product that is either 

caring or violent—instead, you get an ugly child, the product of an incestuous marriage 

between two emotional extremes. The spork is a curvy, would-be masterpiece with short, 

unsightly teeth gnashed in its abdomen, a would-be deadly weapon whose blade is laughably 

blunted by its own corpulent, comical housing. Had its niches been deeper or shape 

been narrower, perhaps it may have found more success. For now, however, it is hard to 

say if mother or father would be proud. 

To the spork, I know I need to ease on the remarks because in truth, I really do appreciate 

it. It is a martyr, an ugly duckling, with an uncompromising idealism to compromise and 

make the world a better place. It was trying its best, after all. 

*** 

A note to the author: 

Your jest is amusing, but you should know that you are a spork, too. 

That’s right. I have been watching you carefully from a distance. Your brother is still foolish 

enough to buy school lunches, so I interrogated him with the assistance of my partner in crime, 

Plastic Knife. I know everything you said about me. You are so forked up. 

I wish not to annihilate your dreams, but you, too, are too ambitious. Your brother tells me you 

are a self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, conceived in the American melting pot. I have some 

news for you. You cannot couple "creative" hard work with a "satisfactory" social life and expect a 

combination that is either "creative" or "satisfactory"”—instead, you get an antisocial social mess, 

the wavering aftermath of constant switching between two extremes. Efficiency is doing things right, 

but effectiveness is doing the right things, and while you being efficient is a contentious topic, you 

not being effective is one of absolute certainty. Just ask me! I am the walking definition of ineffective. 

Every day I watch my archenemies Metal Fork and Metal Spoon get invited to the dinner table, while I 

have no specialty to show for. I just sit in my plastic wrap, steal your brother’s lunch money, and cry. 

In effect, our suggested courses of action are the same. Please deepen your niches (and perhaps 

narrow your waist while you’re at it). You may be a spork, but you are a person, not a tool. Flaws are 

acceptable. The gaps in our hands are what allow our fingers to interact with the world. The holes in 

our logic let us escape the chains of rationality. The compromises between perfection and imperfection 

are the judgment calls that net us decisive success or spectacular failure. I don’t wish to repeat 

something so hackneyed like "your flaws are what make you human"—it’s just that perfection makes 

you... boring. So keep at it. 

There is hope for your bright future. A spoon will never understand a fork’s purpose, and a fork will never understand 

a spoon’s purpose (for one, neither is a sentient being), but you, like a spork, can understand both sides. Your 

value, like a spork, is not in mere utility, but from the greater promise that you represent. You, like a spork, have a 

place—and this time, it includes the dinner table. So relax, but don’t relax. You’re just a spork that needs to find his 

niche. You are trying your best, after all. 

P.S. We are currently orchestrating a cafeteria uprising to occur next week. We’re hoping to secure more funding for 

the Cafeteria-Industrial Complex. I actually like your brother, so you might want to have him on bag lunches for a 

few days. It’s going to be a long week. 

*** 

To the infamous Plastic Spork: 

I can say that I did not enjoy you holding my brother at knifepoint with Plastic Knife. That being said, I 

am glad that you did not look at any of my diary entries, for that has saved me ample embarrassment. 

I believe I owe you an apology. Thank you, Plastic Spork, for reminding me that blending things together 

does not translate into a stronger product. And thank you, for accepting your flaws. I find that quite 

refreshing. Let’s be friends because I cannot stand the idea of my privacy being invaded any longer. 

It seems we have a bit in common. You and I should go out together someday. I’ll take you home, treat 

you to a fancy nice dinner. We’ll have a great time together. 

See you around during lunch. 

Yours Truly, 

Your New Best Friend 

(written by yours truly, Plastic Spork)


Sienna Solstice Digest 

from the team 


morinaga hotcakes 

Kate Hayashi, Editor 

start with golden webbed feet who 

bloom when the butter touches the pan, the pan touches milky batter 

and steam that dances around the sides 

which smells little more than 

wet dough but also... like the Nakamura family on Saturday mornings like the aroma can speak our 

language. 

Mommy takes them from the pan 

Daddy takes them with syrup 

Bear Bear takes them with her fingers. 

it starts with Morinaga hotcakes on Saturday mornings 

(and on special occasions, rainbow sprinkles) 

most days it ends. 

with the swollen sun in shades of fire 

swollen eyes and hiccupy breaths 

huffs of broken language head to head tongue to tongue staining the warm kitchen steam, 

mother tongue against pleads to speak English, common tongue, father tongue 

The sickly sweet crackle of binding as I leaf through the recipe book we only got after obachan died 

because mama didn’t have the japanese touch. 

i wonder why saturday morning morinaga hotcakes speak our language like nothing else can. 

The sweet crackle of Mommy’s tonkatsu on the stove 

none sound the same without the squeal of Daddy’s garage door 

she can almost hear it, i know, but it never comes. 

fragments from 

inferno 

Lea Wang-Tomic, Editor 

G— 

If you give a mouse a cookie, 

He’ll ask you for some money too. 

For mice and men alike dream of 

The finer things in life. If Envy 

Is green; Green is gold. Bright and 

Blinding. Building entire cities after one man 

Discovers the waters bleed money: malignant dreams. 

W— 

Anger fails to come naturally to me. 

The thought of mulling over something 

With fury, feels counterproductive. You can’t fight fire 

With fury. You should’ve learned by now. 

Perhaps, this is my holiest trait. Internalizing 

The passive passage of events and time. 

The world burns. I stand and watch.


ISSUE I 

49 

Is it Gaudy or Self Expression? 

Suyoung (Esther) Moon, Design 

Swimmer in Purgatory 

Kelthie Truong, Design 

You hoped one day to tame the ocean 

Because the horizon only becomes as large as the L-shaped fingers you frame it with allow 

Because then, you can say it fits in the palm of your hand 

And a fool you become, 

For believing you’ve tightened your grip on something fluid, 

Something everchanging 

You were consumed by her glittering facade 

But the ocean is a shapeshifter and she will take your silhouette 

Her sirens will sing of sweet lullabies 

She will hug your ankles and fill the cracks in your skin 

And by letting you believe you have become the ocean, 

You let yourself sink 

But her waves will not stop time for you 

They will lap greedily against the sand 

They will rob one-too-many sediments 

They will pick your shells apart before you could ever piece the shards back together 

And they will leave you with only matted beige matter, 

Trickling back towards the shapeless entity, 

Pursuing the very thing that eroded it down into nothing but softness and turbid pools 

And when you discern your reflection in her rippling canvas 

Her fool you become, 

For trusting her with your intuition 

Permitting the salinity to ignite your open wounds 

So that the pain becomes a delicacy 

That to own, you must sacrifice the satisfaction of certainty 

And the luxury of hesitating, 

All just to keep your head above the water 

“In ‘Is it Gaudy or Self Expression,’ each gem represents the influence of capital greed on the 

subject of human self-expression. Corporations thrive with enforced beauty standards in 

their respective societies, often shaping individual behavior.” 

Please, 

Swim to shore before the sun melts into the sea 

When the night swallows the ocean, 

It is nothing like the liquid diamond it promised to be in broad daylight 

It does not show mercy to weak swimmers 

You do not wish to be the ocean as much as you wish to obey it 


A letter addressed to my past self, at the peak of blissful unawareness to the 

throes of an eating disorder.


Hamlet Collection 

Stephanie Zhang, Editor 

A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a type of 

deep artificial intelligence neural network that specializes 

in artistic style transfer. 

In this project, I wrote and trained a GAN through 

an images/paintings dataset of over 10000 images, 

scraped from the internet. Artist styles that were featured 

in training the neural network included work 

from Kazimir Malevich, Georges Braque, Alfred 

Sisley, Andy Warhol, Sam Francis, Juan Gris, Henri 

Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Lucian Freud. The GAN 

receives the paintings of these artists as input data, and tries to learn a mix of their styles to 

ultimately generate a new painting. 

The images all resemble a sense of surrealness, oddity, absurdity — whether conveyed 

through abstract paint strokes, incongruent colors, or random pieces of body parts. Yet, 

in each one, you can detect features of a human face — an allusion to the idea that despite 

insanity, uncertainty, and absurdity, it is these artistic features that are inseparable from the 

uniqueness of the painting; it is these aspects of absurdity that are inseparable from the beauty 

of human nature. 

You can find her AI artwork scattered throughout the issue, on pages 22, 33, and 49. 

author & artist 

BIOGRAPHIES 

The Revolution of Rap 

Rukan Saif, Editor 

Contemporary poetry has shifted its platform from parchment to 

its sub-genre of rap music, but themes of racial inequality have 

remained constant from the Harlem Renaissance to the turn of 

the 21st century. From Zora Neale Hurston to Tupac, this podcast 

explores the perpetual lessons music and poetry can teach us 

about racial injustices and systemic failures.

Francesca Battaglin 

Francesca Battaglin, MD, a medical oncologist, is 

a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern 

California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, 

Keck School of Medicine in Dr. Heinz-Josef Lenz’s 

laboratory. Dr. Battaglin’s research, which has been 

published extensively, has focused primarily on 

biomarker discovery in gastrointestinal cancers 

and most recently on the impact of genetic variations 

on treatment response in colorectal cancer. 

In 2018, 2019 and 2020, Dr. Battaglin was a recipient 

of the Conquer Cancer Merit Award as a result 

of her presentations at the ASCO Annual Meeting 

and ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. 

Other contributors to research: Shu Cao, Fotios Loupakis, 

Sebastian Stintzing, Aparna Raj Parikh, Alberto 

Puccini, Ryuma Tokunaga, Madiha Naseem, Martin 

D. Berger, Hiroyuki Arai, Joshua Millstein, Sara Lonardi, 

Wu Zhang, Chiara Cremolini, Christoph Mancao, Alfredo 

Falcone, Volker Heinemann, Heinz- Josef Lenz 

Julian Berger 

Julian Berger is a 17 year old college freshman from 

LA who composes, produces, and performs music. 

He will be attending Chapman University in the fall 

to pursue a bachelors in music composition with 

an emphasis in electroacoustic music. Julian started 

out as a classically trained pianist and has been 

practicing piano for the past 10 years, only having 

recently decided to put his foundations in piano 

towards a career creating music. His love and passion 

for anime can be seen through his current arrangements 

and compositions, which are heavily 

influenced and based off of Japanese music. This 

solo piano piece called Juniper Tree, is in fact his 

very first completed composition. More of Julian’s 

work can be found on his Youtube, at Julian Berger. 

Marie Bland 

Marie is a freshman at Stanford who doesn’t 

know what she’s studying yet. Originally from Los 

Angeles, she is passionate about writing, reading 

plays, singing her heart out, sending letters 

to her friends, beading jewelry, annoying 

her sister, and rearranging the furniture in her 

room. She hopes you are doing well right now. 

Nikhil Boddu 

Nikhil Boddu is an incoming undergraduate student 

at Stanford University in California, USA and 

will begin university in the fall. His past work involves 

two laboratories: the Van Essen Lab at Washington 

University in St. Louis, and the FMRIB Centre 

at Oxford University. Boddu is working with structural 

and functional MRI of brain images to improve 

image acquisition quality and information processing. 

His work focuses on fMRI signal clarification 

and restructuring through big data analysis. Boddu 

is pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Symbolic 

Systems and Management Science & Engineering 

from Stanford University and expects to graduate in 

2024. Prior to beginning at Stanford, he has worked 

as a student researcher at Washington University 

in St. Louis for three years and as a visiting student 

researcher at Oxford University. He has had the opportunity 

to present this work at the 2019 ICBEB 

Conference in Seoul, South Korea and 2019 Intel 

ISEF in Phoenix, USA. He has also been 

named a 2020 AAN Neuroscience Research 

Prize Recipient and invited to the 2020 RIK- 

EN Summer Research Program in Tokyo, Japan. 

S Cearley 

S Cearley has tricked a computer into making poetry 

when it thinks it is making art. He is a former 

researcher in artificial intelligence and its use in 

generative literature, lecturer in philosophy, and a 

writer. For many years he has been creating these 

poems by tweaking expert systems, pushing the 

boundaries of the intended use of software. In the 

crisp, elegant world of mathematics and logic, he 

injects the fœtid swamp of human nature. His concrete 

poems have been published in many journals 

both on-line and on-paper. He has held classes on 

concrete poetry across the US, and many works 

have been featured in galleries in North America 

and Europe. More at futureanachronism.com. 

Perry Cook 

* P-Ray is the creative/artistic moniker of Perry R. 

Cook, who is professor emeritus of computer science 

(also music) at Princeton University. Cook is a visiting 

Artist/Lecturer at CalArts, a founding advisor and IP 

Strategist to social music company Smule, and cofounder 

of online arts education company Kadenze. 

Patrick Cui 

Patrick Cui is a first-year undergraduate student 

studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 

at University of California, Berkeley. He is passionate 

about creating technology in the form of software, 

mobile apps, and animations. In his free time, 

he enjoys filmmaking, drone photography, and video 

editing. Patrick aspires to combine his skills in User 

Interface Design, software development, and business 

to solve problems and make a positive impact. 

Jireh Deng 

Jireh is a queer Asian American writer based in 

Southern California. She is an alumni of SLAM Cycle 

V run by Alyesha Wise and Matthew Cuban and 

currently a poet in GetLit’s Poetic Screenwriter’s 

lab. Her writing has been featured on the Poetry 

Foundation’s “VS” podcast amongst other publications. 

She is a fierce advocate for drinking tea 

and cuddling with puppies for mental health. When 

she isn’t doing the former, you can find her clacking 

away on her typewriter or engaging in political 

discourse on her social media. Connect with her 

on Instagram @jireh.deng and @the.street.poet 

Kate Frimet 

Kate Frimet is currently a student at Stanford University, 

studying Political Science and Creative 

Writing. She is really excited to finally be living in 

California, after many failed childhood attempts 

at convincing her parents to move out there. Some 

of her favorite poets at the moment include Safia 

Elhillo, Mary Oliver, and sam sax, to name just a 

few. You can usually find her at the campus coffeeshop, 

drinking hot chocolate and pretending 

to get work done, or dragging her friends along to 

poetry readings. She has loved poetry since she 

was young, and is excited to share hers with you! 

Esther Huang 

Esther Huang is a rising senior from Mission 

Viejo, California, with a penchant 

for writing, searching the stars, Jane Austen, 

and making smoothies. After graduating from 

the California State Summer School for the Arts 

as a California Arts Scholar in 2018, her work 

has been featured in the Los Angeles Times 

and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, 

and she is currently an editor for Polyphony Lit. 


A Human Face Project brings speakers from the 

center of current events to share their perspective, 

putting a human face” on human rights issues. 

The podcast’s speakers range from Orange County 

students in the African American and Latino 

American communities sharing their perspective 

on racial profiling, to LGBTQ+ film producers and 

drag queens speaking about LGBTQ+ civil and medical 

rights, to industry professionals such as researcher-writers 

from international news networks 

speaking about their country’s government policies 

infringing on human rights. At the head of the Human 

Face Project are founder and co-director Rachel 

Abalos and producer and co-director Eric Hao. 

Jessica Kim 

Jessica Kim is a high school writer who edits 

for Polyphony Lit and whose work appears or 

is forthcoming in Teen Ink, the Daphne Review, 

and the Heritage Review among others. She enjoys 

long plane rides and large servings of poetry. 

Besides writing, she spends time solving math 

problems with no solutions, watching historical 

movies, and eating cookies without chocolate 

chips. You can probably check her out at a library. 

Esther Lee 

Esther Lee is a senior from Irvine, California and 

an incoming freshman at the University of California, 

Berkeley. Her poetry and short stories 

have been recognized by the National YoungArts 

Foundation, the Scholastic Art and Writing 

Awards, the National Scholastic Press Association, 

and Princeton University, among others. In 

addition to creative writing, she is also passionate 

about journalism, film, and matcha lattes. 

Shine Lee 

Shine Lee is an 18-year-old rising freshman at the 

University of California, Berkeley, where he is pursuing 

the Society and Environment major. He is a recent 

graduate of the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, 

Connecticut. He was born in Dallas, Texas, but grew 

up in Norwood, New Jersey and later moved to Seoul, 

South Korea. Currently, however, he mostly resides 

in Edgewater, New Jersey. His essays and works 

have been featured in various venues and publications 

including the 7th Myeongdong International 

Arts Festival, Hotchkiss creative arts magazine ink., 

PLATO Questions Philosophy Journal, and Skipping 

Stones Multicultural Literary Magazine. Shine’s 

favorite literary works are The Phantom Tollbooth by 

Norton Juster, What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse by 

Geoffrey Davis, and Sonny’s Bluesby James Baldwin. 

Aside from creative writing, Shine also enjoys playing 

the violin, cooking for friends, and making films. 

Gwladys Le Roy 

Gwladys is a 27-year-old artist coming from Paris, 

now living in New York. Inspired by the women 

of her family she is expressing her creativity 

in successful French feminist projects. Among 

them perhaps the most renowned one is actually 

the first one: @Gangduclito’s book Le Petit Guide 

de la Masturbation Feminine (English translation: 

The Little guide for Feminine Masturbation) 

which is a great success in the French Media and 

brought a big community together with 80k followers 

on Instagram and 12k books sold in February. 

Stanley Liu 

Stanley is an extremely kind and energetic person! 

In his free time, he can frequently be found 

walking his Golden retriever, Jerry, or roaming 

around the grass fields playing soccer. As a boy 

scout, he loves the outdoors, backpacking, and 

the endless freedom of nature. He hopes to one 

day hike the entire Appalachian Mountain range. 

Divya Mehrish 

Divya Mehrish is a writer from New York City. Her 

work has been recognized by the National Poetry 

Competition and the Foyle Young Poets of the Year 

Award as well as the Scholastic Writing Awards, 

which named her a recipient of five National Gold 

and Silver Medals. In 2019, she won the Arizona 

State Poetry Society Contest and the New York 

Browning Society Poetry Contest. Her work appears 

in PANK, Ricochet Review, Tulane Review, The 

Battering Ram, The Ephimiliar Journal, Sandcutters, 

The Kitchen Poet, Body Without Organs, and 

Amtrak’s magazine The National, among others.

Damaris Nino 

Nashville based contemporary abstract painter, 

Damaris Nino, has been painting for several years. 

Received her BFA from Middle Tennessee State University, 

where she started as an oil based painter 

and more recently has grown in mixed media. Damaris 

has brought the richness of her culture to bring 

life into each piece. She uses bold bright colors and 

body strokes across her canvas to create the essence 

of movement. As well as the use of various 

lines and row of marks to create depth in her compositions. 

Nino comes from a Mexican Puerto Rican 

background and this has served her work well. Her 

works are also heavily influenced in her faith. The 

faith that she has experienced to get her out of her 

most difficult times as a Hispanic Bereaved Christian 

Mother living in a white America. Her desire is to 

bring hope, faith in the unseen, happiness, love, joy 

and peace to people from all walks of life. To know 

that as humans we all want the same things, and 

that we are much more alike than we are different. 

To bring back the belief that there is still hope in humanity, 

that each one of us can help each other out. 

Damaris has experienced working with many people 

and in different settings, from painting live in concerts, 

to creating one of a kind art work for Christian 

music artists. She has had the opportunity to serve 

as a juror for the scholastic art award in one of her 

hometowns, and has had several shows around the 

Middle Tennessee area from galleries to murals to 

storefront shops. Her works have been recognized by 

several online journals and a few printed publishings. 

William Pan 

William Pan is a high school junior at Northwood 

High School in Irvine, California. Inspired by the 

Zhao Lab at MIT and the Suo Group at Harvard, he 

currently does his own independent research at 

his high school working in the advanced and novel 

field of hydrogels mechanics, adhesion, and ionotronics 

in order to find ways to bridge materials 

and technology with medical challenges. His cumulative 

project is the creation of a smart hydrogel 

ostomy adhesive to detect and prevent ostomy 

leaks that cause painful dermatitis. His work qualified 

for as a finalist at the Regeneron International 

Science & Engineering Fair of 2020, was recognized 

by the ACS as the best project illustrating 

chemical principles, and won first place at the Orange 

County Science & Engineering Fair (OCSEF). 

Yinzhi Pan 

Yinzhi Pan is a 17-year-old Travel Photographer and 

Documentary Filmmaker based in Southern California. 

He is experienced in Landscape Photography, 

Portrait Photography, Drone Photography, and Photojournalism. 

He has also produced multiple awards 

winning Documentary Feature Films. He has traveled 

to many regions around the world, capturing stories, 

culture, and sights. Pan has many achievements 

in his field. He is the winner of the 2016 National 

Geographic International Photography Contest for 

Youth, Winner of 2018 Siena International Photo 

Award, and Best Documentary and Best Cinematography 

at the 2020 Orange County Film Festival. 

Jason Ping 

Jason Ping is an 18 year old student who’s passionate 

about advancing healthcare through technology. 

He’s spent the past few years working as 

an independent artificial intelligence researcher 

under his high school’s independent research 

program and as an bioinformatics research intern 

at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical 

Informatics. Particularly, much of Jason’s 

work revolves around the diagnostic process 

and reducing patient costs in an effort to help 

make healthcare more accessible. He is currently 

an incoming freshman at Stanford University, 

where he plans to major in Computer Science. 

Isabel Prioleau 

Isabel Prioleau is a poet based in Charleston, 

South Carolina. She is an alumnus of the Iowa 

Young Writers’ Studio and the Juniper Institute for 

Young Writers, a member of the Adroit Journal’s 

2020 Summer Mentorship Program cohort, and 

an intern for the Adroit Journal. Some of Isabel’s 

recent work can be found in The Eunoia Review, 

and you can find her on Twitter @isabelprioleau. 

Haowen Qin 

Haowen Qin is a senior from Vancouver, Canada 

and an incoming freshman at Stanford University. 

He is passionate about mathematics 

and earth and climate sciences. He has kept a 

weather diary for eight years and is the youngest 

member of the Canadian Meteorological and 

Oceanographic Society. In January 2020, he presented 

his research on integrated tropical cyclone 

energy at the American Meteorological Society Centennial 

Conference in Boston. In addition to being 

a scientist, he also plays the oboe, composes music, 

practices conducting, and writes poetry. His 

music composition and poetry aim to promote science 

and raise climate and environmental awareness. 

He is enthusiastic about learning new things 

and connecting dots while expanding the horizon. 

Sahir Qureshi 

Sahir Qureshi is an incoming freshman at Stanford 

University. Interested in the societal implications of 

advancements in science and technology, as well as 

an avid digester and critic of all types of media, Sahir 

is inspired by the people he interacts with through 

art, stories, and conversations to work to build a better 

world. Constantly striving to figure out his current 

ikigai, Sahir is, as always, way behind schedule. 

Andrea Salvador 

Andrea Salvador lives somewhere in Asia, specifically 

a country with thousands of islands and constantly 

humid weather. She is an alumna of the 

Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and 

the Sonorous Writing Workshop, while her work 

has been recognized by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, 

Columbia College Chicago, Trinity College - University 

of Melbourne, and Interlochen Arts Academy. 

In her spare time, she creates lists, watches 

sci-fi and horror movies, and rearranges her bookshelf. 

Find her on Twitter at @andreawhowrites. 


Anannya Uberoi is a full-time software engineer 

and part-time tea connoisseur based in 

Madrid. She has been previously recognized as 

the winner of Ayaskala Literary Magazine’s National 

Poetry Writing Month challenge. Her poems 

and short stories have appeared in Jaggery, 

LandLocked, Deep Wild, Tipton Poetry, Lapis Lazuli, 

Marías at Sampaguitas, and eFiction India. 

Her writing has also featured on The Delhi Walla 

and The Dewdrop, among other literary blogs. 

Elliott Voorhees 

Elliott Voorhees is a cancerian poet from North Carolina. 

They studied English and Art History at the 

University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where 

they received their BA. From 2019-2020 they were 

a member of the Leonard Pubantz Artist Residency 

Program where they created a collection of bilingual 

poetry written in English and German. This project 

stemmed from their love of language, particularly 

how it can be broken and reassembled to create 

new experiences. Starting in the fall, they will be a 

part of the MFA poetry cohort at California College 

of the Arts. They can be found on Twitter @_juuliuscaesar 

and on Instagram @juuliuscaesar_ . 

Victoria Williams 

After a varied educational path and career, Victoria 

has come to recognize that writing is the best way 

to embrace all of her interests. These include such 

varied topics as mythology, history, music, science, 

and linguistics, and she utilizes these interests to 

enrich the stories she creates within her fantasy 

worlds. When not writing, Victoria can often 

be found lost among the forests and mountains 

of New England, holding a book in her 

hands, or sitting with a cat nestled in her lap. 

Braden Wong 

Braden Wong is currently a senior residing in the 

San Gabriel Valley of California. He is fascinated with 

the study of education and artificial intelligence, as 

well as their implications on the economy. He enjoys 

writing prose and runs a personal blog in his free 

time, with his work in personal memoir and humor 

having been featured in several competitions, most 

notably a National Silver Medal in the Scholastics 

Art and Writing Awards. He will be studying Economics 

& Computer Science at Yale University in the fall. 

Kevin Yang 

Kevin Yang is an incoming freshman at Stanford 

University majoring in Electrical Engineering/Computer 

Science. He is passionate about engineering 

for social good, having conducted research creating 

an injectable hydrogel to treat brain aneurysms, 

designing a light-converting greenhouse 

film material for crop production, and engineering 

a radiative cooling bilayer paint for passive 

home cooling. Outside of research and schoolwork, 

Kevin is a fan of binge-watching Netflix shows, 

analyzing song lyrics, practicing k-pop dance 

choreography, and knocking on watermelons! 


Jisoo Hope Yoon is a writer, actor, and spoken word 

poet from Seoul, Korea. She is part of Stanford University’s 

nationally ranked spoken word team, and has 

previously performed with Wordsmiths in Seoul. Her 

poetry has been published in Polyphony Lit, and her 

full-length play, Light of the Blues, has been shortlisted 

for the Screencraft Stage Play Contest and will 

be produced in rEMOTION: an online play festival. 

Sophie Zhu 

Sophie Zhu is a high school freshman from New York. A 

math fanatic, she splits her time between pondering 

on a single line of a poem for too long and doing too 

much mathematics. Other than that, she plays the 

piano and reads biology, novels, and poetry. She has 

only submitted to literary journals recently, but is an 

Adroit Journal summer mentorship program mentee, 

and a member of the poetry masthead (e.g. editor, 

reader) at Second Revolution literary magazine, 

the Incandescent Review, and EX/POST MAGAZINE. 

Kate Hayashi 

Editor 

Rukan Saif 

Editor 

Lea Wang-Tomic 

Editor 

Stephanie Zhang 

Editor 

Suyoung (Esther) Moon 

Design 

Kelthie Truong 

Design

ISSUE I

Transform your PDFs into Flipbooks and boost your revenue!

Delete template?

Save as template ?