Donte Collins (they/them; b. Chicago Heights. 1996) is a neurodivergent afro-surrealist blues poet, playwright, and movement artist named the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Saint Paul, Minnesota. They have received fellowships, scholarships, and awards from the Academy of American Poets, The Adroit Journal, the McKnight Foundation, The National Urban League, The Dramatist Guild Foundation, Frontier Poetry, Indiana Review, and BOMB Magazine. They believe poems allow us to wander back to ourselves, to meet ourselves anew. They believe poems are deeply human gestures here to gather us, to propose new, critical & compassionate floor plans for the future, for the self. They believe poems are the beginning. They are an alum of TruArtSpeaks, an arts & culture organization cultivating literacy, leadership, and social justice through the study & application of Spoken Word and Hip Hop culture. Their choreopoem Mercy is forthcoming.
FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT
Mercy is a dreamscape, an un-language-able anti-disciplinary book of erasure, both kneading & collapsing reactive attachment disorder, adoption, apophatic theology, afro-pessimism & be-longing. Mercy is a book of jazz wishing to capture each speaker’s emotional mapping by rupturing lyrical poetry to fuse re-memory, family, culture, dream-inheritances, and history in hopes of radically shifting the speaker’s senses of (selves) in the face of childhood neglect. Punctuated with erasures of a clinical diagnosis, we watch the speaker transform their condition (one many adoptees face) by constructing fire escapes through language, fleeing memory, childhood, and the church. Each set aflame in the name of salvation.
For my fellowship, I’ll focus on further adapting this manuscript for the stage. This project has shed its name and form many times since its inception, and I hope to keep following its pulse to a place of sharing with you. I’ll also spend this time taking professional development courses + seeking mentorship to help shape its theatrical elements. This fellowship will also give me time to center rest and balance as an artist + human. I’m forever in awe of where my wonder can lead me, and it feels particularly surreal to have landed among such a passion-driven cohort + foundation. I cannot wait to share what I find with Jerome’s generous support.