Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from Southern France. After earning a degree in Cello Performance from the Conservatoire National d’Aix-en-Provence, she pursued studies in Experimental Music at Bard College under the mentorship of Marina Rosenfeld. In 2012, she moved to Brooklyn as a dedicated improviser where she became an active collaborator and “rising figure in New York’s Improvised music scene” (The Chicago Reader). In 2019, she released her debut solo LP Headflush, a “real abstract gem” (Boomkat) that “bears the authority of someone who has put many hours of thought and practice into creating her own sound” (Bandcamp).

Bordreuil received composer commissions from the French Embassy at Lincoln Center, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, the French Alliance, Sounds of Stockholm Festival, GRM (Paris) and the American Symphony Orchestra. She is a 2020 artist-in-residence at the GRM, Paris. Past residencies include the McDowell Colony, ISSUE Project Room and E.M.S, Stockholm.

Fellowship Statement

My music draws from Noise, Free Improvisation, avant-garde and other experimental traditions, but adheres to no single genre. Cross-pollination is at the center of my work, both aesthetically and in practice. In my cello performances, I mix my instrument’s culturally inherited melancholia with cathartic harsh noise walls, creating “steadily scathing music [that] favors long and corrosive atonalities” (New York Times). My compositions create immersive environments that enhance psychoacoustic happenings and heighten subjective perception, supported by neuro-scientific research. Often incorporating site-specific resonance, I craft musicality out of an organized awareness of natural sound phenomena. My chamber music pieces are presented at prestigious concert halls and DIY basements alike, in an effort to permeate barriers of musical genre and scene.

During my fellowship I will create large ensemble pieces, study light art to expand my work with perception, and use the resources that Jerome Foundation provides to support the creation of DIY community art spaces after the pandemic.

Photo by Peter Ganushkin

Kashimana is a mother, musician, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist with a rich soulful blues voice. The name Kashimana means “that’s their heart” and you can hear Kashimana’s heart beating in the compelling sound of their music, which combines Soul, R&B, Folk, Afro-funk and more. Kashimana’s Love from the Sun CD of original songs draws from her Nigerian heritage and her experiences growing up in Nigeria and Kenya and living in the United States. In 2019, she was the In Common Composer in Residence in Willmar, MN, a Cedar Commissioned Artist, and a Northern Spark Festival Artist (as well as in 2018).

Fellowship Statement

The need to create change and to use my voice to ignite this change drives my work. I use my voice to see other universes and possibilities. With my voice, I hear the joy, the pain, where I come from and where I am going; with my voice, I heal, soothe, and create; with my voice, I am able to connect, harmonize, magnify, communicate, and transmogrify. This is why I use my voice to write, compose, sing and share.

Currently I’m experimenting with loops to create drones, chants, hums, and dissonant harmonies in an effort to create a visceral tingling effect. I use improvisational lyric writing to engage crowd participation towards collaborative creation. I’m also exploring ways of visually representing the vibrations that result from voices to create a more immersive experience.

Some works in progress include Phantom Cries (the musical), A Sprig of That, composed for a MNiature with MN Opera and a song on The Art of the Revolution album by Black artists in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Jay Afrisando is a music composer and sound artist who employs sound and other media to share awareness of human-nature-technology relationships. His work Gunung Siggalang is in Alex Lubet’s 2020 album Three Strings and The Truth: New Music for Mountain Dulcimer. In 2019, his multisensory work The (Real) Laptop Music :)) was presented at Aural Diversity Conference and he presented a full-sphere installation Gendhing Cosmic at Linux Audio Conference.

Afrisando’s interactive installation Exploring the Music of Your Office was presented by the American Composers Forum (ACF) in the 2019 Landmark to Lowertown series. He received an Award for Excellence in 2019 from the Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia for the United States, a 2016 Minnesota Emerging Composers Award from ACF and an Innovative Art Grant from Kelola Foundation (Yayasan Kelola) to create a participatory performance Mode[a]rn. His piece Water Siter was awarded the 2nd Prize Winner at Prix Annelie de Man 2015. He received a OneBeat 2015 residency in the US and an International Fellowship in Study of Korean Music in 2014.

Fellowship Statement

I use sound and other media to share awareness on complex issues that emerge as a result of our diverse perceptions and the technology we create, including issues on hearing and listening, disability and accessibility, the politics of technology and science, as well as culture and environment.

Through my artistic works, I aspire to capture and convey these intricate phenomena using various approaches, including but not limited to, audio and audiovisual works, 2D and 3D works, participatory work, improvisation, fixed media, and everything in between. Through my work, I want to invite my audiences to closely examine our relationships to other living entities, nature, and technology.

Photo by Kakia Gkoudina

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Dominican and Puerto Rican Pushcart Prize nominee, 2020 Atticus Review Poetry Contest winner, and a BRIO award winner with fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights Rising Stars, The Frost Place, and VONA. With degrees in education and an MFA in Performance Studies this former teen mother, and initiated priestess in Lukumi and Palo celebrates womanhood and honors cultural rituals. She’s a three-time International Latino Book Award winner who authored Conversations With My Skin (2011), and Homage To The Warrior Women (2012). Through Robleswrites Productions, she created The Abuela Stories Project (2016) and Mujeres, The Magic, The Movement, and The Muse (2017). Her work has been featured on HBO Habla Women, Lincoln Center, and her poetry appears in several anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (2020), and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). For more visit Robleswrites.com.

Fellowship Statement

My poetry honors and questions cultural norms, rituals, and the use of Spanglish and Caribbean slang as valuable forms of communication, and language production rooted in oral tradition. My work celebrates women who don’t break but gracefully stretch through emotional, physical, and socio-economic struggles. With humor, heartbreak, hand me down rituals, and speakeasy belief systems that coax Afro-Cuban deities into clandestine gatherings, problems are handled, and communities are sustained. My work embraces the possibility of repair as related to the body and mind of a people marred by imagined and perceived borders resulting from forced immigration, colonization, displacement, and how spiritual practices involving water and words foster survival. These themes derive from my experiences as a rape survivor, teen mother, initiated priestess in Lukumi and Palo Afro- Caribbean spiritual systems, and a daughter of Dominican and Puerto Rican parents whose footing in America was never secure.

Photo by Jorge Alvarado

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, California where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. His debut collection of poems, An Incomplete List of Names (Beacon Press, 2020) was selected by Raquel Salas Rivera for the National Poetry Series and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. His honors include awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, VONA Voices, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Loft Literary Center. Currently he’s an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Visit him at: michaeltorreswriter.com

Fellowship Statement

My writing often focuses on masculinity through a Mexican-American cultural lens. Currently, I’m fascinated by the idea of capacity, and the capaciousness of art in relation to my own self as brown man in America. Moreover, I’m interested in where this fascination with capacity is rooted.

Since the publication of An Incomplete List of Names, I’ve been working on poems and creative nonfiction prose. The poems approach capacity by way of the metaphysical. The nonfiction work seeks to explore capacity through how I understand my own brown body in its various roles—as father, husband, brother, son, homie, colleague—as I move through life in the Midwest, as I exist in academia, as I consider pop culture, and when I visit California, leaning back in the passenger seat of my homie’s Cutlass—windows rolled down, my right arm hanging out the window.

Photo by Henry Jimenez

Michael Prior (he/him) is a writer and a teacher. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Daily, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Global Poetry Anthology (2015 and 2020), and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Sewanee Review, Magma Poetry, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is the author of Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart / Penguin Random House, 2020) and Model Disciple (Véhicule Press, 2016). Michael holds an MFA from Cornell University. He lives in Saint Paul, where he teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College.

Fellowship Statement

As a Yonsei, whose Japanese grandparents were forcibly incarcerated in a camp during the Second World War, my poems explore intergenerational memory, cultural trauma, diaspora, and my own mixed-race identity. My engagement with the lyric often encompasses the ways various verse forms might be reimagined to express my own experience and to attend to conversations about race in North America. I am currently at work on a manuscript of ekphrastic responses to Japanese American and Japanese Canadian visual artists whose work either documents or re-witnesses the Internment.

Photo by Rocio Anica

Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, a soul sweetener, runaway witch, and multi-dimensional performance artist of Black-Caribbean descent, born and working on Dakota land in Minneapolis. She employs poetics, the erotic, and experiences re-membered via ancestral dreaming within her writing. She’s written for the stage, including the aerial-poetic-play, There Are Other Worlds and co-wrote the puppet show, Queen with Erik Ehn. She wrote and directed, Sweetness of Wild, an experimental, episodic film project inspired by wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She is the co-founder of performance collective Free Black Dirt with Erin Sharkey. Her writing can be found in several anthologies, including Queer Voices, How I Resist and Pleasure Activism. Her first YA novel, The Stars and The Blackness Between Them received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award and was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist. She is currently writing her second young adult novel, Black Circus.

Fellowship Statement

For my fellowship, I’ll center on healing and balance as an artist. I’ll get professional career counseling, as well as take more walks, rest and reflect. I will spend intentional time researching Black and queer ancestors of my artistic lineage. I’ll spend time connecting with my artistic mentors, including Alexis DeVeaux and Sharon Bridgeforth. I’ll be writing, researching and editing new books including a young adult book, Black Circus, set in the 90s about a young, Black woman studying aerial acrobatic arts with a mysterious and mystical former circus performer. I’ll work on a collection of poetry, pum pum, as well as an experimental interdisciplinary work called Erotics of Abolition.

Photo by Ngowo Nasah

Susanna Horng is a Taiwanese-American writer, educator, mother, and activist. Her work has been supported by a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has been published in Bennington Review, Minerva Rising, and Global City Review. She is a teaching artist for Girls Write Now and a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University. She lives with her family in New York City.

Fellowship Statement

I write about the silence of being a woman from a patriarchal culture, the silence of being a woman of color navigating white spaces, the silence of being a mother and caretaker on the second shift.

I care about word play, multilingualism, and language. How multiple or misunderstood meanings of the same word(s) trigger deeper emotional truths. What gets voiced. What gets sacrificed. The costs of trying and failing to communicate.

I am finishing a collection of linked stories that examines the success and failures of the American Dream, the sorrows of living in one of the largest Chinese diasporas, and the loneliness of being the perpetual outsider. I am also working on a novel about privilege, class, and equity.

Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned an MFA from Hamline University. She is the author of Soft: A Memoir and is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, and SASE/Jerome Grant. She was a Loft Mentor Series winner in Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Playwright Commission Award Winner, and was selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative. Her poems and essays appear in New Limestone Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, the minnesota review, Rain Taxi’s-Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Poems in the Wake of Racial Justice, and the anthology, How Dare We! Write, among others. She co-curates the Queer Voices Reading Series with writer and performer Lisa Marie Brimmer in collaboration with Quatrefoil Library and Hennepin County Library.

Fellowship Statement

There were glimmers of hope at the start of the 20th century for my Afro-Cubans ancestors who worked in the cigar factories in Hillsborough County, Florida and lived in planned communities designed to stabilize the lives of workers who created enormous wealth for the factory owners. There was a lot to negotiate. They were black men and women in the south experiencing the horrors of that time, and they were sometimes welcomed and sometimes unwelcomed members of the Cuban community. My fellowship goal is to complete my work in progress, Here Before, a hybrid of prose and poetry. I am a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to Barbados and Cuba, and the southern states of Georgia and North Carolina. I want to resurrect my dead and have them tell a truth beyond prolonged disenfranchisement, especially as it relates to their spiritual lives.

Photo by Anna Min, Min Enterprises Photography, LLC

Carson Faust is a queer writer, and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. His writing has received support from the Tin House Writers’ Workshops as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Waxwing, AnomalyJournal, Passages North, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member for 826 MSP—a nonprofit organization that provides literacy- and creative writing-based programming for underserved K-12 students in the Twin Cities area. He is represented by Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary.

Fellowship Statement

My novel-in-progress—A Bible Or A Knife—utilizes the genre of horror to grapple with the ways in which Indigenous and queer identities are represented, misrepresented, or erased within the canon. Canonically, queer folks and people of color are often confined to antagonistic or secondary roles; Native American stories and histories are used as tools and backdrops within horror narratives. My work aims to turn these banalities on their heads: When Indigenous people maintain their hold on and connection to their homeland, how might the lingering shadow of colonialism persist? What does it look like when land is haunted by the colonizers who failed to remove Native American communities?

Photo by Laura Rae Photography