No matter what stage we are at as artists, we need our mentors- the beacons that guide us through the fog and darkness and storms. Toni Morrison has been just that. And we will try to honor her trailblazing a semblance of justice in our own ways because as she said in 'Sula,' "I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”
Featured Artists:
Daemond Arrindell is a poet, playwright, performer and teaching artist. He is a 2013 Jack Straw Writer and a 2014 VONA Writer’s Workshop fellow. He has written for City Arts, Specter, Crosscut, Poetry NorthWest, Seattle Review of Books and co-adapted the acclaimed novel “Welcome To Braggsville,” by T. Geronimo Johnson into a stage production for Book-It Repertory Theater and earlier this year performed his first one-man show, “Frozen Borders,” a performative exploration in imagery, poetry and emotion on the subject of the United States’ southern border.
Naa Akua, 2019 Citizen University Poet-in-Residence, a queer poet, emcee, and actor. They are a WITS writer-in-residence at Franklin High School. Intentionality, love, and encouragement is the focus of Akua’s work that can be found in tracks like “The Elements” or “Till It All Goes Away” from their mixtape Odd(s) Balance (on SoundCloud.com). Naa Akua was a cast member of Book-it Repertory Theater’s adaptation of T. Geronimo Johnson’s “Welcome to Braggsville”, a cast member for Theater Schmeater’s production of “Welcome to Arroyo’s” and a participant of an original boilesque ballet called “Tailfeathers”. Naa Akua’s one person show, Akwaaba The Healing of A Queer Black Soul ran as part of Gay City’s Mosaic program and recently Earth Pearl Collectives, Sovereign Queer Black Womyn Festival. When Akua is not writing and performing they are facilitating Sound Healing sessions which focus on breathing, being in the body and meditation.
Natalie A. Martínez is an activist, poet and scholar of rhetorical studies. She received her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics from Arizona State University. Her research and writing has focused on the rhetoric of anger and melancholia among queer LatinX writers / artists/ & activists and the productive ways those emotions have been mobilized.
Her poetry and non-fiction has been published in Ellipsis, Nepantla: A Journal of Queer Poets of Color, and the art zine, La Norda Specialo among others. She is a member of the Alice gallery curatorial collective (with Julia Freeman, Dan Paz, Thea Quiray Tagle, Bettina Judd, Julia Heineccius, & Minh Nguyen).
Juan Carlos Reyes has published the novellaA Summer's Lynching (Quarterly West) and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander(Arcadia Press). His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He was the recipient of the 2018 Gar LaSalle Artist Trust Storytller Grant and is a former writing fellow with the Jack Straw Cutural Center. He received his MFA from The University of Alabama and has taught poetry and fiction with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. He sits on the board of the Seattle City of Literature organization and serves as an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Seattle University. He also serves as the chief editor of Big Fiction magazine (
bigfictionmagazine.com).
