Dear Klio Readers,
Even though it has been almost two years since the last edition of our creative arts journal, the staff of Klio 2021 is excited to present you with the fifth volume of Klio: Glow in the Dark. The title was inspired by Bee Barkley’s artwork, “Jellyfish Gloop”, which is featured on our cover this year. The amount of hard work that our small staff of eight students put in is incredible. We all worked on every stage of the edition, from revamping the website to editing the pieces for inclusion in the final edition. But we would like to thank everyone who has been involved in this semester: our readers, contributors, and interviewees. You have made this year’s edition great, and it could not have been done without you.
This year has included many new additions to Klio that have helped our staff make their own stamp on Klio’s history. We wanted to find more new and creative ways to showcase even more artists at Penn State.
Morgan Seiff, editor in chief of Kalliope, our sister magazine, became our first film editor and created our new YouTube channel, Klio & Kalliope. By showcasing student films and artist statement videos, student musicians and filmmakers can now be highlighted in this combined effort from both of our literary magazines. Morgan launched the channel with “Spring Broke,” a short film submitted to Kalliope’s fall chapbook, Folio. With no place to show the film in the print booklet, Klio & Kalliope was born.
Our website has also undergone small transformations to make it easier to navigate and use. From editing the homepage to reworking our website’s tabs, Mark Laborde put in a lot of work reworking the site. He even took on the weekly scheduling and formatting of our preview submissions, a new feature of Volume Five. We wanted to gain early interest before our final edition, especially as we planned to release in the same semester as Kalliope this year. With weeks for poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and art, we highlighted some of our early submissions and engaged readers early.
While the number of submissions may have been small, all of our editors worked hard to pick the best submissions. Our poetry section, which received the largest number of submissions, was headed by Aliyah Rios. She and the poetry committee had a tough job choosing the 16 poems in this year’s edition. One of the early poems we featured, “A Child in the World of Racial Warfare” by Trae Morgan-White, is a deeply expressive poem that embodies the current tensions in the United States. In the final edition, we will also feature “Goodbye, Father” by Payton Kuhn, another heartbreaking poem about a difficult relationship between father and child.
Among the nonfiction submissions, “Gentle Touch” and “Anna’s Heart Named Henry” stood out to Loren Perry, the nonfiction editor. She and the nonfiction committee created a section that is creepy and tender. Anna’s Heart Named Henry, written by Ashley Ustazewski, is a dark, almost fictional tale about a high school student who stole a heart from a biology lab. We are excited to also feature Gentle Touch, a heartwarming story about the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter, written by our poetry editor Aliyah Rios.
Our fiction section contains seven pieces of various topics, from dark, fantastic pieces like “Night Falls” by Kiran Pandey and “Under the Hill” by Madison Colantrello, to upbeat, hopeful topics like The Elevator Song by Maysen Paul. Isabella Luciani, our fiction and music editor, combed through many submissions with the fiction committee to select stories that are relevant and thought provoking, which we hope you will enjoy. She also helped to update the “Music We Love” feature that was started by the Klio 2018 staff with new hits, by musicians like LEG and Jack Roses.
The art section, with submissions chosen by art editor Graham Millar and the art committee, was a little different this year. Graham, a comic writer and artist himself, encouraged a new kind of submission for this year’s edition: comic strips. Besides the comics, we are also featuring photographs by our fiction editor, Isabella Luciani, like one titled “Mars”, and multiple paintings by Bee Barkley, such as “Sad Snail”.
Our biggest undertaking was the blog, led by blog editor Elise Tecco and with contributions from our entire staff. Elise worked tirelessly to edit, schedule, and upload posts. She even made graphics for each upload and designed this year’s cover! From various posts about theater at Penn State (an interview with Happy Valley Improv creator Andrea McCloskey, a feature on NRT’s tech director, and a podcast about Penn State’s musical theater program during the pandemic) to a new feature of guest blog posts, our first in the form of an interview with former Kalliope staff member Erin Allport, the amount of effort put into this area of our site was a group effort.
I am so proud of the work that everyone has done this year. It was difficult to follow the 2019 edition after a long break, the continuing pandemic, and a small staff, but we worked hard to put out the best edition possible. We hope that we were able to bring light into peoples’ lives with these creative works so that we could all find a “glow” within the darkness of the pandemic. With such a small staff, we all came together and became friends, laughing and bonding as we created an edition of Klio that everyone will love. This is a place where we celebrate all Penn State students across all disciplines, and that’s what 2021 staff did.
Happy reading!
Amanda Nurse
Editor-in-Chief
Klio 2021