This four-part reading series features acclaimed poets, writers, and comics artists who teach in SAL’s Writers in the Schools (WITS) program. In addition to cultivating the next generation of writers, WITS writers are their own creative forces. Tonight’s program will feature Troy Landrum Jr., ell lin, Cypress Manning, Sarah Mona, Nhatt Nichols, and Ankober Yewondwossen! These resident writers come together to read from their own work, inspiring the same craft and performance skills they teach in the classroom.
All are welcome to join these warm-hearted, fun community events. Murmurations is free to attend but RSVP is appreciated.
Troy Landrum Jr. is a native of Indianapolis, IN and has lived in Seattle, WA for 10 years. His passion for reading and writing bloomed as he navigated a path of self-rediscovery through identity, faith, culture and his family’s migration stories from Jim Crow South to the Midwest. These intersections are at the helm of his human experience and literature process as a Black artist and oral historian. Troy graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Washington Bothell and is an educator, a freelance journalist for the South Seattle Emerald, and a Novelist. His novel In Progress explores the question of “Home” through the Historical American time period of The Great Migration. A period in American history where millions of African American people moved from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities. He dedicates his work to the brilliance of African American History and the brilliance of his family history through the work of literature and preservation.
ta̍k-ke hó! ell (伊/they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator of Native Pacific Islander ancestry with a background in community-rooted written, visual, and performing arts. ell has facilitated multigenerational antiracist theater, developed poetry and creative writing performances with incarcerated youth, taught multilingual language arts courses as well as elementary education, and won awards in photography, teaching, instrumental music, and poetry. ell’s most recent poem is locally featured in a community celebration coupling food with poetry. Her doctoral writing is inspired by the blazing legacy of warrior poets, including Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa, who urged reclaiming language as bridges to liberatory relationship and action. The sacred mists of Coast Salish mountains, protagonist of ell’s first published poem as a child, continue sparking wonder, healing, and dreams.
Cypress Manning is a queer trans writer, artist, and educator from Taos, New Mexico. They received their MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2019, and are current Hugo House Fellow (2022-2023). For Cypress, writing is a process of self-making, a way of engaging with/in community, and a powerful practice of embodiment for all people, young and old. They are in a two-person cribbage league with their mom, and live in Seattle with their partner.
Sarah Mona is a recent graduate and educator from the University of Washington with a degree in English Literature, alongside a minor in Black Diasporic Studies. Anchored in Black Feminist Praxis, her work explores, troubles, and documents Black Fem(me) desire, abjection, be(longing), and the manner in which this manifests/registers relationally. Inspired by the words of Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Sarah believes “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in [the] ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates.” As an apprentice, she looks forward to discovering ways to infuse such inspiration into her pedagogical practice.
Nhatt Nichols is a graphic journalist, poet, and non-fiction cartoonist from the Okanogan. Her work centers around rural narratives, forests, borders, and food systems. You can find her graphic journalism in High Country News, Civil Eats, and The Daily Yonder, and This Party of the Soft Things (Bored Wolves, 2022), a book-length poem about the planer post-people, is inits second printing. Nhatt holds a postgraduate certificate from the Royal Drawing School in London and runs her studio practice from Chimacum. Her illustrated novel, Morels, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves in 2024.
Ankober Yewondwossen is an Ethiopian first-gen fortunate to be born in Seattle & creatively raised by the Seattle Hip Hop scene at the height of its renaissance. Surrounded by a milieu of ingenious, burgeoning artist-groups from Hella Dope to theeSatisfaction; it was Hip Hop, and the Hidmo, which cultivated her pedagogy for community & critical race theory, while grounding her in the ultimate tenet of the art form—being true to oneself. A legacy student of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina; she studied non-fiction writing while pursuing a self-designed major in Womanist Spiritual Quest—melding her love for Plato’s Republic with Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf”. Previous apprentice roles include a Monastic Apprenticeship in the Garifuna populated region of Honduras where, while living in a Quaker nunnery, she surveyed and studied the intersections of writing & spirituality. Ankober believes writing, in its highest form, is prayer, and, as Paulo Freire once said “there is, in fact, no teaching without learning”. You can find her 11 year old poetry blog at ankober.wordpress.com and her essays on Medium.com.