upcoming events
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce the guests for the August installment of our virtual reading series. Join us on Zoom using the password ‘safta’ for an evening of verse.
Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). A 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and City of Asylum/Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh for the last four years. Beginning in the fall of 2020, she will join the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the Center for Poetry there.
Shawnte Orion attended Paradise Valley Community College for one day, but he is the author Gravity & Spectacle (a collaboration with photographer Jia Oak Baker from Tolsun Books), The Existentialist Cookbook (NYQBooks), and Faithful as the Ground (Fve Oaks Press). He is a former Copper State Haiku Slam Champion and his poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Barrelhouse, Georgetown Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is an editor for Rinky Dink Press and he has performed in bookstores, bars, universities, hair salons, museums, and laundromats. Find out more at his website.
JM Wong is a queer child of the chinese diaspora on turtle island via malaysia/singapore. The point is not to interpret and philosophize the world, but to act to change it.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ residency that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All are guided by experienced, professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in East Tennessee.