Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents June Summer Holler Salon

Knoxville, TN —  The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for our June, 2022 Summer Holler Salon. This event will take place on June 25th from 4 to 6PM at 195 Tobby Hollow Ln. Knoxville, TN. The event will feature six artists and include literary readings, comedy, and music. Carpooling to the event is greatly encouraged, as there will be very limited space for parking.

JoAnna Brooker is a graduate from the University of Tennessee, where she studied Journalism & English. They were the 2021-2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts Writer in Residence, & their work has been featured in Lunch Ticket, Figure 1, Jet Fuel Review, & on stage as a standup comic. She can be found on all social media platforms @cupofjoanna.

Krista Cox is a poet, activist, and barista who is currently embracing her midlife unraveling. Krista is Managing Editor of Doubleback Review and The Wardrobe,and an Associate Poetry Editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. She’s a board member for Dream Pop Press, and the LGBTQ Center of South Bend. In 2016, she founded Lit Literary Collective, a nonprofit which serves her local literary community. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Journal, Crab Fat Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her online at www.kristacox.com.

Savannah Jane. Knoxville, TN. dancer, poet & Wolfgram. 

Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. Born in Berkeley, California in the summer of love to a Black mother and white father, Karla spent most of her childhood in Hawaii where she developed a deep love of nature. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Fulbright teacher and author of two books of poetry, Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta- Not so Tragic which was co-authored with Allison Francis, she has performed her work onstage and online, both nationally and internationally. Her poetry, short stories and essays can be found in Konch, Hip Mama,sPARKLE & bLINK, Bamboo Ridge Press, Vibe. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange (WO2WA), which has facilitated cross-cultural exchange between Oakland and West African poets and the publication of  three books Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, Sisters Across Oceans and the upcoming Black Rootedness collection.  Her musical loves include Hawaiian, West African, and Hip Hop sounds. Her work can be found at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/ .

Jasmine is a neurodivergent, queer, non-binary, Southern woman/person living in Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a professional visual artist at West Fifth Studios, a professional musician (finding herself in several folk and classic country bands), and a songwriter. With a degree in Preaching and Church Leadership, her creative practice is largely informed by Liberation Theology (though she does not describe herself as a Christian) and the work of theologian Walter Brueggemann in his book The Prophetic Imagination, in which he describes the role of the artist/prophet/poet as crucial to catalyzing the liberation of their immediate community from ruling class oppressors. The artist invites their community onto a supportive platform of the artist’s personal experience and excavates that experience to discover and provide new symbols to use as tools for collaboration in collective grief and collective play, grieving the crumbling institutions around them, and playfully imagining and building new realities.

Elisha Mykelti is an Ohio-and-Tennessee-raised poet and editor. She dedicates herself to musical, dialectical, and innovative poetry that honors time and place, especially the South. Elisha serves on the editorial board for Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Berkeley Poetry Review. She holds a BA in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Tennessee, and she’s an incoming MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. In her free time, Elisha does beadwork and reads tarot cards.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.