Named by The Guardian as a musician “who will enrich your life,” Shruthi Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer and vocalist with a unique dual background in Carnatic (South Indian classical) and Western classical music. Shruthi has won numerous honors, including the Global Women in Music Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her compositions are performed worldwide; in 2021, her work premiered at the United Nations COP26. She is a Carnatic vocal disciple of her mother, musician Nirmala Rajasekar, and has studied as a Western classical soprano with Jerry Elsbernd, Rochelle Ellis, and Patricia Rozario, OBE.

Shruthi has been in residence at the Anderson Center, Tusen Takk Foundation, and Britten Pears Arts. An alumnus of Princeton University and a former Marshall Scholar, Shruthi pursued graduate study in the United Kingdom in ethnomusicology and composition. She serves on the board of new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Through music, I explore identity, community, and joy. In my work, my two idioms of Carnatic and Western classical intersect and converse to show how different influences coexist in all of us. Each of us is a mosaic of our experiences. When recognized, our varied backgrounds allow us to understand each other, no matter how different our individual stories are. This is what drives me to create: to build spaces for reflection and exchange.

Community is central to every aspect of my composing, from the cultural and diasporic experiences that inspire me to the different groups of listeners and performers that I bring together in the music that I create. I love writing for the voice because singing is simultaneously personal and communal. To sing together requires us to breathe together, to sense one another, and to listen to our neighbors — making us more present, grounded, and giving.

Photo by Alia Rose Photography.

The Narcotix is a West African art-folk band based in Brooklyn, with feathers all over. It is many-limbed and limber, a five-piece with voices, guitars, bass, keys and drum set. Reverb-laden vocals blur and swell in dissonant intervals, buoyed by a riverbed of shimmering Congolese guitar riffs, thumping P-bass, cavernous synths and traphouse hi-hats. The result of this band's cohesion is a compelling musical statement whose relationship to identity is as fraught, complex and ever-changing as anything else in this time.

The rave reception of the debut EP Mommy Issues, released in summer 2021, paved the way for The Narcotix to take their musical compositions to new heights. With this fuel, composers/instrumentalists Esther Quansah and Becky Foinchas have reimagined the boundaries with which to push the musical landscapes usually bound by the automatic resignation of conformity. With the instrumental prowess of Adam Turay (rhythm guitar), Jesse Heasly (bass), and Matt Bent (drums), Foinchas and Quansah have amassed the Will, and now means, to harness the creative force and pour it into their upcoming debut album, Dying.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We’re currently working on completing our debut album, a 10-song homage to the practice of exercising unwavering vulnerability whilst creating. The recording process for the album began on September 24, 2022. So far we’ve recorded the foundations of each song and we plan to incorporate the full instrumentation and production elements over the next few months. Following the release of the album, we’d like to plan a series of concerts and a proper US tour. During the fellowship, we are especially keen to sharpen our technical skills through various lessons and workshops. This upskilling will serve as a vehicle through which we will be able to explore broadening our live performances. For example, we’d like to expand on live arrangements by adding elements of improvisation where appropriate. Studying composition will enable us to incorporate additional instrumentalists such as horns, strings, and percussion players.

Photo by Florencia Villa.

Atim Opoka is a Ugandan-American songwriter, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist who fuses afro-pop and hip-hop while embracing the power of transformative story-telling. She is most recently a 2021 recipient of a Waters Grant as well as an Our Space is Spoken For Fellowship from the Twin Cities Media Alliance. Opoka has performed original works at the Stone Arch Bridge Festival and Powderhorn Park Festival. She has a BA in Vocal Performance from McNally Smith College of Music.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We live in a society that is fast paced, go and grab. Looking for the next trend or 7 sec distraction or viral video with no regard to the cost or impact, positive or negative. I believe art is a holistic experience that requires the full body mentally, physically and spiritually. It doesn't judge, but asks for your time and space, modeling and shaping all of our experiences to get us where we are right now. I am growing, and I will continue to grow, and not only feed my garden, but I will add and water those who let me, and one day I will bloom, when I oughta bloom.

Photo by Evelyn Speers.

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer Amanda Ekery creates music filled with imagery and strong narratives. Her work has earned support from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and the Jerome Foundation, and has been featured at the Portland Jazz Festival, Panama Jazz Festival, and The Kennedy Center. Amanda’s 2018 album Keys With No Purpose, was written as a reaction to the sexist culture women continue to face in jazz and informed by her research on females in jazz education which is soon to be published in the 2023 Routledge Companion to Women in Music Leadership. Her most recent album, Some (more) Short Songs, released in 2021 was praised in Downbeat Magazine saying, “her compositions are great” and “full of moments of amazingness.”

She was awarded the 2022 Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalist Association for her dedication to gender equity work with El Paso Jazz Girls. Learn more at aekerymusic.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

Árabe is my ongoing project about Syrian and Mexican shared culture and history on the El Paso border. It covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. I am exploring new sounds and artistic mediums in Árabe including original compositions inspired by research and personal history, essays delving into the stories behind each song, electronic compositions reimagined from 80-year-old family home recordings, and a community centered approach that invites others into her creative process and release of the project. My hope is to complete Árabe as a CD/book that is filled with photos and art, and my essays and music.

Photo by Ross Wightman.

Ka Baird is a performer, composer and sound designer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and a psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. They have worked/collaborated with many other musicians, artists, filmmakers and choreographers, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation and interdisciplinary work.

Recent engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), and Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL). They were a 2020 recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art's Emergency Grant as well as a Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Roulette Intermedium in 2018.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

With the generous support of this fellowship I plan on continuing to explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. By combining experimental sound design with sound-reactive gestures, movement and acts of physical endurance, I will continue to challenge notions of how sound is presented and shared. I plan to further my explorations in acoustic processing, extended microphone techniques, granular synthesis, modular synthesis, sampling and embodied practice. I want to expand my compositional process and create larger scale, interdisciplinary works that involve multiple collaborators.

Photo by Alex Phillipe Cohen.

Jobi Adams and Brandi Foster are long-time best friends who together make up the folk duo Pine & Fire. They met in 2011 while attending an arts high school in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. There Brandi studied music while Jobi studied writing. That’s still reflected in their roles today as Pine & Fire with Jobi being the main songwriter and Brandi being the multi-instrumentalist. Together, they make original music influenced by American Roots music of the past and the struggles of today. In 2021 they gained visibility when they became finalists in the GemsOnVHS: Gems in the Rough Songwriting Contest which saw over 700 entries. Later in 2021 they were featured on Ditty TV’s 12 Artists You Should Know. Over the past three years they’ve released three self-produced projects, We’re All Thinking It… (2020), The Son (2021), and People Come & Go (2022). In 2022, Pine & Fire took their music to 13 different states.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

We describe our music as contemporary American folk music with a punk sentiment. We do what folk music has always done: challenge the status quo and document the times we’re living in. Folk music functions like an archive, a documentation of what common people were experiencing throughout history. We contribute to that archival lineage by bringing traditional folk influences through time into our own music about today. While we often sing songs of struggle and grief, we also sing of joy, growth, and imagining a world beyond struggle.

In 2022, we went on a month-long self-booked tour and released our third self-recorded project. While we take pride in our D.I.Y. ethics, we’re looking forward to the opportunity to work with others in 2023. We’re hoping that this year we can record and release our first full length studio album, a collection of original songs exploring working class life in the Northland.

Jenny Xie is a New York City-based writer and educator. She is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), and the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been supported through fellowships and grants from Kundiman, New York Foundation of the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work charts cross-cultural connections and dislocations, while tracing the enmeshed nature of seeing and of being seen. I’m invested in the concept of opacity: the right to be unknowable—and unmarketable—and the implications of being a site of continually shifting contradictions and unstatic experience.

Recently, my poems have been driven by slippages and scramblings in tenses—when the past ruptures into the present, or when the future leaks into the past—and by forms of historical, collective, and personal memory and postmemory that warp, stain, disfigure, and erode.

I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity.

Debra J. Stone is a writer of essays, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been published in Jarnal Literary Journal, Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She has received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, “Grandma Essie’s Vanilla Poundcake,” Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her short fiction, “year-of- staying–in place,” was Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. Debra is chair of the board directors at Graywolf Press in Minneapolis and board member of the Northwoods Writing Conference in Bemidji, Minnesota. She resides in Minneapolis. https://www.debrajeannestone.com

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will research the migration of my family and travel to the Black towns of Missouri, Oklahoma and the town my ancestors founded when they were Exodusters and ranchers during the Nebraska territory. Currently, I am working on The House on Rondo, a novel-in-progress. As this is a new project, I am developing new skills through workshops, mentors and other tools to complete a finished draft. I am interested in my work joining in the dialogue regarding reparations for the descendants of the destroyed Rondo neighborhood and the ancestors whose generational wealth was stolen from them.

Photo by Anna Min of Min Enterprises.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I am interested and compelled by communal memory, tall tales, and Black expressions of gender and divergence. Inspired by the Black American diaspora to which I belong, I am working on a book about the intersection of family, American surveillance, and Black radical faith. Following the life and lineage of protagonist Alphonso–descendant of a slave and slave owner in a small cotton town of Edgefield North Carolina–as he evolves and shape-shifts from petty criminal and womanizer to sober foot soldier and eventual minister of Islamic Temple No. 1 in New York City. BORN AGAIN is biomythography exploring the consequences of melanin, locomotion, and generational curses.

Photo by Justin J. Wee.

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” is forthcoming in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I will use the fellowship term to explore possibilities for layering sound, integrating graphics and text into literary readings, and imagining new possibilities for venues where literary readings take place. I am interested in how technology and other approaches can expand access to live performance. My interests are inspired by a desire to connect with audiences in a more meaningful way and by my recent work focused on thinking about the potential uses for paper and the physical page.

Photo by Ayanna Muata.