PRESIDENT

Sophie Mo is a junior in Branford college from the Bay Area in California. She enjoys playing around with cyanotypes and 3-string guitars, but wants to explore other photography processing formats and maybe even learn to DJ. In her free time, she enjoys watching squirrels on Old Campus and listening to Boiler Room sets on YouTube.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Kane Trundle is a junior in Branford and a Physics major. Growing up in the small town of Monterey, California, Kane spent most of his time exploring all things nature from the rugged sea cliffs of Point Lobos to the undulating hills of the Salinas Valley. When he’s not outside touching grass, Kane can be found reading weird Sci-fi novels, struggling with his PSETs, or chatting with friends over coffee. Kane is passionate about all things science and hopes to use story-telling as a way to explore the many mysteries of the universe.

TREASURER & SOCIAL CHAIR

Emily is a junior in Morse College from Baltimore, Maryland. She is majoring in MB&B with a Japanese Certificate, but her broader interests include linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science. When she is not wrestling with mice in lab, she can be found devouring pastries from Atticus to satisfy her massive sweet tooth, singing karaoke with her friends, or discovering obscure experimental music. She is enamored with flower-pressing, sudoku, divine machinery, and all things ephemeral. She can be spotted in the wild with a chronic caffeine shake and always wearing a bit of pink. Eventually, she hopes to be a professor so she can be paid to wrestle with mice.

VISUAL ARTS LEAD GENRE EDITOR & INSTALLATION HEAD

Juliana Bell is a sophomore in Pierson College majoring in MB&B. She is from Madison, CT, and hopes to pursue an MD, PhD, or MD/PhD. Drawn equally to medicine and art, she works in the liminal space where science and the humanities converge. She specializes in realism/hyperrealism with the occasional element of surrealism. Despite the chaos of her sleep schedule, she survives on coffee and tea (Earl Grey).

FICTION LEAD GENRE EDITOR

Joy is a sophmore in Silliman college interested in worldviews: philosophies, cultures, and religions. She grew up with her palms cupped around fireflies, hands always reaching up for the next branch, and shoes crunching across make-believe fantasy worlds in Austin, Texas. She wrote her first novel in 5th grade about a girl who could turn into a phoenix. Outside of creative-writing, she enjoys bird-watching, playing violin, and feeling small beneath the stars.

MUSIC LEAD GENRE EDITOR

Bella is a sophomore in Silliman College and an aspiring Electrical Engineer. Born and raised in Connecticut, Bella loves spending time outside gardening, going to the beach, and curling up with a nice book and a cup of hot cider. Bella has been playing violin since the age of 6, when she first began learning with a tiny cardboard violin. Over the years she’s had the pleasure of playing with the Wesleyan Symphony Orchestra, Middlesex Music Academy String Ensemble, and Northern Region High School CMEA Festival. Bella also plays guitar, and just started learning mandolin. Bella loves everything music, and you can often find her plucking through a song she’s trying to learn in a practice room or the Silliman courtyard, or tinkering with tunes on her violin to find the perfect melody for a new piece she’s composing. Bella also loves working in the CEID, wiring up and soldering her latest project for her engineering class. Outside of CORTEX, Bella is part of Design for America, she plays IM Table Tennis, and she’s a member of the Society of Women Engineers.

NONFICTION LEAD GENRE EDITOR

Ava is a sophomore in Pauli Murray interested in pursuing a chemistry degree. She loves to explore new spots on campus, checking out the local convenience stores, and thoroughly trying a variety of caffeine-involved beverages. Unfortunately, no article about the detrimental effects of energy drinks has yet to scare her off. From Southern California, she excitedly anticipates snow and hopes to visit the beaches and hike spots around New Haven, despite her more than questionable hiking ability. In her free time, she loves to crochet while listening to indie rock mixed with various 60s bands and to read any sort of book that catches her eye.

POETRY LEAD GENRE EDITOR

Chloe Prasetya is a junior in Stiles interested in English, anthropology and history. She is Indonesian and Korean and grew up in Singapore. Her favorite genres to read are historical fiction and magical realism; her current favorites include The Overstory, The God of Small Things, and Midnight’s Children. She’s always looking for recommendations (though her ever-growing TBR might disagree). She enjoys thinking about the process of narrativization as much as narratives themselves, and who is excluded or misrepresented on the page. Outside of writing poetry, she likes museum-hopping, taking photos around campus, trying her hand at calligraphy, and avidly rewatching musicals (Les Mis and Hadestown never get old.) She can spend hours down various rabbit holes - hidden object games, jigsaw puzzles, stubborn rounds of NYT Connections, you name it - and she's excited to be part of the similarly winding, exploratory production process of Cortex.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Aster Jin is a junior in Silliman College from San Diego, California studying neuroscience and art. Aster loves brains, sketchbooks, microscope images of brains, digital painting, and thinking about the brain's connection to visual art, especially visual perception and pathways. When not pursuing her hobbies/majors (fortunately, the Venn diagram is a circle), Aster can be found enjoying the sunlight while it lasts, laughing a little too loudly a little too often, and listening to podcasts while making the long trek between SCL and 100 College Street.

MUSIC EDITOR

Elle Davisson is a sophomore studying MCDB, humanities, and music. She misses her home and German Shepherd in the Bay Area but finds fulfillment by drowning her sorrows in dining hall ice cream. Since coming to Yale, Elle has begun guitar lessons at the Yale School of Music, joined 17o1 Records as a producer, and slept through numerous chemistry lectures. Outside of school, she enjoys representing Trumbull College in soccer IMs and watching said chem lectures on the treadmill. Elle is also an avid supporter of classic movies, Shakespearean plays, and engaging in various shenanigans with her suitemates.

POETRY EDITOR

Logan Lee is a sophomore in Morse College intending to major in Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology and Statistics & Data Science. Originating from Honolulu, Hawai'i, he spent much of his childhood either tumbling through the Pacific Ocean or exploring the verdant Ko'olau Range. In his free time at Yale, he enjoys making hojicha and matcha in the Branford dining hall with his friends, avoiding the Bow Wow's pseudo-poke bowls, and listening to music in the Calliope Court hammocks (some of his favorite artists include Julie Byrne, Caroline Polachek, Jane Remover, and Amaarae). Regarding writing, Logan is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, with poems forthcoming or published in Star 82 Review, Five on the Fifth Magazine, and more.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Ashley Liu is a sophomore in Branford prospectively majoring in computing & the arts and applied math. She has spent her entire life in both the city and suburbs of New York, which have inspired her attraction to the themes of American suburbia and liminal spaces. She is obsessed with all kinds of art, especially photography: you will spot Ashley taking pictures of traffic lights during a late night walk or color grading photos during lecture. When not agonizing over psets at a cafe, she can be found practicing bass guitar to Radiohead or beating her friends at Word Hunt.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Jam is a junior in Berkeley hailing from Albany, NY. He is a dabbler in many arts - linguistics, politics, geography, math, programming, pop violin, and dance, but above all urban planning. He is a fan of the esoteric, of the built and natural environments, of careful observation and long thought, enabled by his horrendous sleep schedule. When not travelling up and down the East Coast, you can find him learning guitar, crafting his bow and arrows, making maps, playing board games, or tracking the phases of the moon.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Oliver Sweet is a junior in Trumbull College planning to major in linguistics. He has a longstanding passion for the visual arts, nowadays putting his focus into his painting, photography, and filmmaking. He made his debut into the world of art in Kindergarten, painting a cheetah he saw on the cover of National Geographic. Some of his favorite things include Bob Dylan’s early discography, English Breakfast Tea, and the color purple.

POETRY EDITOR

Julia Howe is a freshman in Davenport College from San Francisco, California, interested in cognitive science and education studies. She spends an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how people think, with remarkably little success in actually understanding them. Outside of Cortex, she sings with the Yale Glee Club, wages a losing battle against her Chinese homework, and enjoys reading poetry far more than writing it (though she does both, with varying degrees of success). Her other interests include collecting sea glass, being useless in escape rooms, wandering around unfamiliar places, and daydreaming about “would you rather?” questions. She is fascinated by the strange ways people make sense of the world and has a particular fondness for things that don't make much sense at all.

FICTION EDITOR

Aaron Yejoon Lee is a sophomore in Silliman College from Seoul, South Korea. Double majoring in English and Philosophy with a creative writing concentration, he is obsessed with exploring humanity: whatever that might mean these days. When he isn’t losing his mind trying to finish his WIP fantasy novel, he can be found pulling all-nighters with friends, cooking Korean food, or overtaken with wonder by his surroundings. He’s a deep believer in meaning: both in the existentialist sense within life overall, and the artistic sense. His ultimate goal is to become a professional fantasy writer, meet the love of his life, and teach creative writing.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Anchen Che is a freshman in Branford College, hoping to major in physics and philosophy in order to understand the world a little better. She is from Shanghai, a city she loves most at the very last subway train past midnight, and in the ride that often follows, cycling with friends through cool air beside wide, quietening roads. She is drawn to possible worlds, anti-aging, and ways of seeing things as more than what they are. She eats Southern Jujube Cakes (南酸枣糕) far too quickly and has convinced dozens of friends to try them. At Yale, she also plays frisbee.

FICTION EDITOR

Ishika Chakraborty is a first-year in Grace Hopper college. She was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon, and is thus very familiar with rain. She plans to major in Neuroscience and English with a Creative Writing Concentration. She loves warm colors and hates uncooked apples. Outside of academics and writing, her hobbies include playing the piano, baking, and trying out perfumes she will never buy.

MUSIC EDITOR

Bryce is terrified of rubber chickens. The story is long and includes adventures into a mountain lake, an evil older sister, and a cataclysmic game of charades. Besides that, he is a sophomore in Trumbull College, likely studying Applied Math or Applied Physics, with broader interests in robotics, cognition and consciousness, ontology, and physical sciences. Outside of class, he loves to compose music, ranging from orchestral / symphonic to rock and jazz (he's also starting a band on campus and would love to talk more about it)! He also enjoys 3D modeling and design, on-campus research and simulation, martial arts (specifically kenpo), cooking (though he's not great at it), and worldbuilding (he's been working on one narrative for over four years). Bryce has also long been obsessed with liminal spaces (and their psychology), exploration, the Backrooms, experimental music, and the SCP Foundation. Finally, he was born and raised in a small town outside of Tucson Arizona, where snow comes about as often as pigs fly. Last year's blizzard nearly wiped out the fella.

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

Raph Yoon is a freshman in Pierson who loves making comics about the social outcasts and emotionally battered dregs of society, especially the LGBTQ+ kind. Their media proclivities, combined with their neurotic fixation on the sociology of internet culture, has given them a simultaneous fascination with fiction being treated as a better reality and a deep distrust of the entire concept. He likes channeling this distrust through art. When they're not obsessing over comics ("Read Chris Ware and Joann Sfar!" is their endless mantra to comics newbies) or grinding in a humanities class, they like playing Disco Elysium, watching corny American Psycho clips, and passionately rambling about Jeff Goldblum.

FOUNDER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, ‘25

POETRY LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘25

VISUAL ARTS LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘25

MUSIC LEAD GENRE EDTOR, ‘24

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘25.5

PRESIDENT, ‘27

VISUAL ARTS LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘25

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘26

POETRY EDITOR, ‘26

MUSIC EDITOR

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘24

FICTION LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘26

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘25

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘25

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘27

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘27

POETRY LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘26

NONFICTION LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘26

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘26

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘26

FICTION EDITOR, ‘26

FICTION EDITOR, ‘26

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘26

FICTION EDITOR, ‘28

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘28

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘28

POETRY EDITOR, ‘26

NONFICTION & MUSIC EDITOR, ‘28

POETRY EDITOR, ‘27

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘27

FICTION EDITOR, ‘27

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘27

POETRY EDITOR, ‘28

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘29

FICTION LEAD GENRE EDITOR, ‘26

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘25

FICTION EDITOR, ‘25

MUSIC EDITOR

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

VISUAL ARTS EDITOR

MUSIC EDITOR

MUSIC EDITOR

FICTION EDITOR

MUSIC EDITOR

NONFICTION EDITOR

NONFICTION EDITOR

NONFICTION EDITOR

PRESIDENT & VISUAL ARTS EDITOR, ‘27

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, MUSIC & FICTION EDITOR, ‘27

TREASURER & LEAD POETRY EDITOR, ‘27

MUSIC EDITOR, ‘27

VISUAL ARTS & POETRY EDITOR, ‘28

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘27

POETRY EDITOR, ‘28

FICTION EDITOR, ‘29

POETRY EDITOR, ‘27

NONFICTION EDITOR, ‘29

FICTION EDITOR, ‘28