2026 Alternate Currents Blog Contributors
Amplify’s publishing program attends to the specific histories, ecologies, and cultural knowledge of our region. It supports and circulates inquiry-driven work that affirms publishing as a site of care, experimentation, and shared learning. Central to the program, the Alternate Currents (AC) blog is an evolving online platform and archive that extends creative research produced in the region to national and international audiences.
In 2026, five contributors were selected through an open call process to develop and publish their work on the platform. Published monthly starting in July, their contributions cover a wide range of ideological terrain and cultivate a deeper understanding of place by interpreting the cultural traditions, ecologies, and civic histories of our region.
Keep reading to learn more about each contributor.
2026 Alternate Currents Blog Contributors
Diya Abbas is a first-generation Butch Pakistani writer from the Midwest. Her poems and essays can be found in Poetry Daily, Sinister Wisdom, Adroit, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly and others. Diya is an alumni of First Wave, the only full tuition hip-hop scholarship in the world, and is currently a Masters student at NYU’s Arts Politics program. She believes the poem is a clock. The poem makes time. Find more of her muses at diyabbas.com.
Cady de la Cruz learned abolitionist community organizing as a young queer Latinx person while on unceded Monacan territory in central Virginia. They are growing in multiple skills, including community-engaged curatorial practice, as well as foraging and plant identification. As a visitor on ancestral Umoⁿhoⁿ land, they tend to the collection of Indigenous cultural belongings and the practices of Indigenous artists at the Joslyn Art Museum. As the grandchild of Indigenous Quechua elders, they are interested in Indigenous Futurisms as artistic, social, and political movement both in their ancestral homelands and in diaspora. tupacolypse is Cady’s emerging zine series, of which pachakuti is the first edition.
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is the author of four books, including A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (2025) and The Reconception of Marie (2020). Raised to believe the Bible as factual history and queerness as a lie, Carmody’s writing troubles the line between fiction and nonfiction, and questions of spiritual abuse, trauma, queerness, friendship, and art. Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Agency 3: Novellas, and more. A co-founding editor of Les Figues Press, they currently teach fiction and creative nonfiction at University of Nebraska Omaha.
Patrick Mainelli is a writer, photographer, and gardener living in Omaha. His nonfiction is concerned with themes of wilderness and change in American landscapes and culture. His work has twice been named among other “Notable Essays” in the Best American Essays series, and has been featured on the Public Radio program “Living on Earth.” He is most frequently thinking about flowers.
John Paul is a community-engaged arts leader based in Omaha, Nebraska, whose work centers on arts programming, exhibition development, and the public humanities. He currently serves as Director of Programming and Exhibitions at Clover 24.
Amplify’s programming is made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.