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Staff bios

Heather Marie Cohu is a junior majoring in English and International Studies at VCU. When she isn't busy with classes, she enjoys editing for Amendment and Poictesme, writing short fiction and poetry, reading authors such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, traveling, watching films, and drinking wine--lots and lots of wine. She promises that she's not a snob; she just happens to like snobby things.

Amy Sailer is a native of Roanoke, Virginia. Double-majoring in art history and English, she hopes to be an art history professor or museum curator by day and novelist by night. Her hobbies include drawing, making mosaics, and of course, reading and writing. Her favorite works include those of Evelyn Waugh, Alex Haley, and Zora Neale Hurston. In high school, she contributed several short stories and artworks to the literary journal, and she won two state championships for her original speeches. In college, she hopes to focus on and improve her fiction.

Ruth Baumann is a third year English major. Going to school by day and waitressing by night, she combats the threat of a stereotypical life by writing poetry in all of the in-between moments. Her favorite colors: shades of gray. �It's a good life,� she says. Ruth is also involved with Richmond�s slam poetry community.

Meghan Burrows has been published in multiple newspapers including The Free Lance-Star and The View. She served on staff of both her high school paper The View as well as a Fredericksburg, Virginia paper as a youth correspondent. She is now attending VCU and studying English.

Marleigh Culver is a VCUarts student hoping to pursue Graphic Design. She enjoys reading period plays and art history books. In the future, she would like to earn an MFA and become an educator.

Bereng�e Russell was close friends with Charlotte and Emily Bronte in a past life. They spent many an evening at twilight on the moors of Yorkshire, discussing strong-willed heroines and the morally ambiguous antiheroes for whom they have an undying love. This time around, her interests include photography, magazines, cinema, and the Russian language. She has dreams of working for a publishing house as an editor, and of some day owning a dog named Rigby.

Elizabeth Knowles was raised in a small town, and consequently gets overly excited about traffic lights. She enjoys James Joyce, beat poetry, and Rimbaud. Her first words were "God damn it" and she continues to live by that philosophy.

Emily Stokes is a freshman in the Art Foundation program. She has an extreme addiction to works of literature, and a particular fondness for Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, and Douglas Adams. She enjoys going to used book stores just to inhale the old book smell. Of this, she is proud.

Christopher Terry is from Hampton, Virginia. Having lived in Marion, Indiana (James Dean's hometown) for several years, he has acquired a great deal of his of artistic sensibility from the world around him. He considers himself to be a 'rebel without a cause' and honestly believes he is the reincarnation of a black activist, shot in the fall of 1965.

Leila Rafei is a senior editor, finishing her degree in English. After dropping out of Ripon College in Wisconsin, where she did some acting and later summer stock, she signed a Hollywood contract with Columbia and later Universal. Her roles in movies and TV remained secondary and, discouraged, she turned to a career in professional carpentry. She came back big eight years later with the hit colossal role of Han Solo in Star Wars (1977).

Scott Horner ran away from home at the tender age of 14, learning to play the mandolin on street corners to earn his keep. Lazing about the coal train one day, he found himself in Richmond, where he installed himself in VCU�s art department, where he learned the trade of sculpture. While his passion for the arts will never surpass his life-long passion for the mandolin, he has deemed it fit to join Poictesme as our resident art editor. On hazy nights when the lights of Hyperlink color the clouds yellow, you can still hear him strumming on the rooftop of Beth Ahabah.

Little can be said of Kristin Vamenta, as she is next in line for the succession of the Grand Duchy of the Philippines. Kristin must live in hiding, for fear of her political rivals. In her spare time, Kristin enjoys badminton and Reader�s Digest.

Born in Richmond, raised in Prince George, VA, Denise Virostek is a current VCU freshman was born with a huge desire to write. She enjoys the night life, listening to music, and being with her close friends. Although she is not a huge fan of reading, Denise likes to edit the work of others. She has found that actively editing others also helps her improve her own work.