Sundress Academy for the Arts Grant Manager and current farmhouse Writer-in-Residence, Alexa White, spoke with SAFTA intern, Kyle Wente, about her writing and residency.

Kyle Wente: Why is art important for you to create right now? What’s been inspiring you lately?

Alexa White: What I’ve been writing lately has been pretty introspective and, paradoxically, I’ve been inspired to explore it through my surroundings and the landscapes I’m coming into contact with— it’s very setting-driven. In fact, the holler and spaces in the vicinity of Firefly Farms have been very inspirational!

However, with all the terrible things going on globally right now (and always), it feels weird to write about my own problems when such overt oppression and violence take place daily, hourly even. I don’t know the best way to talk about it in a creative mode at this point, so I’m hoping what I’m writing can connect with at least a few people in the meantime.

KW: You’ve said in the past that Knoxville is your “semi-hometown.” Where else do you call home, and how do you think your writing manifests both sides?

AW: I was born in Chesapeake, Virginia and lived there until I was 10. I’ve only visited once since leaving so I feel pretty disconnected from it, physically and mentally, despite all my memories. While I’ve connected more to Knoxville creatively and think of it as my home, having previously lived somewhere very different has given me an ability to examine and appreciate this area that I wouldn’t have if I was born here. I’ve been here almost 15 years and am still finding new ways to look at it and write about it.

KW: What excites you the most about your writing and writing experience during the SAFTA residency?

AW: Definitely the other residents! I’ve met so many amazing people from all over and had some great connections, conversations, and shared experiences. As for my own writing, being around other writers makes me want to write more. As an introvert, I was pretty nervous coming in, but the environment here is instantly communal; often we’ll all be writing and doing our thing in the same room right after meeting. I especially love sharing work and hearing what other people have been working on. 

KW: What are you working on right now?

AW: I’ve noticed in the past year or so that most of my poetry often revolves around driving or cars, so I’ve been leaning into that obsession and trying to understand where the urge is coming from. I like the idea of exploring my experiences with isolation, escapism, and depression through the lens of a driver moving through landscapes while being detached, alienated or even threatened by them. I’m hoping these poems could become a chapbook at some point.

KW: What forms are you interested in working with at the moment? What’s a form or style you want to write in?

AW: Along with fiction, I’ve been wanting to experiment with screenwriting for a while now. I’ve always loved film and, after taking a great screenwriting class during my last semester at UTK, really came to enjoy and appreciate it as a form. For me, it’s almost a bridge between fiction and poetry because, in addition to being narrative, scripts rely on imagery and attention to visual details. Every description should be there for a specific reason. I’ve started writing a few scenes for a little project I’ve been working on— right now I’m just seeing where it takes me. 

KW: What has been your favorite part of your SAFTA residency?

AW: After the human residents, my favorite things are the animals and space. As someone who gravitates towards chaos rather than routine, it’s been nice to have an immediate responsibility to jumpstart my day. The furry ones gotta eat, and once that’s done I’ll go from there. I’ve really come to love the holler and its lovely quirks too. It’s serene and quiet but very alive and sometimes bustling. It’s become a home away from home but only 25 minutes from home.

KW: What’s something you want everyone to know about your upcoming work?

AW: That it may take some time and is probably going to be pretty weird!

Alexa White is a mixed-race, neurodivergent writer and graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her BA in creative writing and studio art. While attending, she won the 2022 Bain-Swiggett prize for traditional poetry forms and her poetry and art has appeared in The Phoenix, the school’s literary and arts magazine. Alexa lives in Knoxville, her semi-hometown, and is the Grants Manager at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She takes delight in backroads, quarries, and the last few seconds of sunset and redefines her bedtime nightly.

Kyle J. Wente (he/him) graduated from the University of Tennessee, where he studied English and Creative Writing. He has served as Editor of Poetry for Sequoya Review in Chattanooga, TN. He loves nature, playing bass, and co-parenting his partner’s ten-year-old beagle, Marlowe Eugene.

Poets in Pajamas (PiP), a Sundress Publications reading series, is organizing a cohort of readers for 2024 and invites you to apply! 

Poets in Pajamas is an online reading series which prides itself on producing high-quality poetry readings for an online audience. Hosted on Zoom and live-streamed to Facebook, two readers are paired together per reading to perform for twenty minutes each and answer audience questions for an additional fifteen minutes. 

We are interested in hearing from all writers around the globe, but we particularly welcome writers that identify as being a part of disenfranchised communities (such as, but not limited to: persons of color, those from immigrant populations, native and indigenous people, LGBTQ+, d/Deaf and Disabled, non-binary folks, members of non-dominant religious groups, all women, Dreamers, the formerly incarcerated, and more). We want to promote you and your work. 

This year, we are pleased to offer a $250 honorarium to each of our readers by way of the Poetry Foundation’s generous “Poetry Programs, Partners, and Innovations” grant! 

To apply, submit three (3) poems or up to six (6) pages of flash fiction or micro fiction. Also submit a short video of you reading your work (note: please send a new video of you reading in a quiet place, such as at home, in your garden, in front of your computer, or in your living room). Read for no more than 1 to 2 minutes. Include in your submission a bio, a brief cover letter, and an author photo. Submissions must be addressed to: poetsinpajamas@gmail.com. Submissions close December 18, 2023. 

Note: We’re NOT concerned with audio/video quality, nor your appearance. We are looking to get to know your reading style as a means of connecting your magical words with your personal flair! Don’t overthink, please apply! We would be honored to consider your work. 

In the wake of the release of her full-length poetry collection, Nocture in Joy, Tatiana Johnson-Boria spoke with Sundress Publication’s editorial intern K Slade about Black Womexhood, generational trauma, and the beauty of unrestricted Black joy.

K Slade: The speaker recollects their time during childhood, sharing intimate and loaded moments with their close family. Was it hard to transport yourself back in time to a place where the world was so big but you were so small? Or were these moments the speaker reflects on ingrained in you, something you could innately write about?

Tatiana Johnson-Boria: I currently live with PTSD, and I think that I needed to care for myself while also allowing myself to speak the truth of my experience in this book. The process was difficult, and these moments will always be prominent because they are the core of my own survival. I am not thankful for these moments, yet I’m not afraid of them. I am mostly in earnest care for the versions of myself who endured the things I discuss in this book.

KS: How did you navigate the separation between the male characterization in your poems (particularly in “My Brother Outruns a Dog on W. Concord St.” and “My Father Hums in the Kitchen and for the First Time This is Art”) and the characterization of your women?

TJB: I really wanted to center the Black womxnhood/womanhood in this collection. I don’t see the male characters as separate but as in connection with the speaker. Some of these connections are harmful, yet some of them are loving and full of care. I also think there is a moment where tenderness is central to the male figures in this collection. Yet, this isn’t an overarching characterization of males in general. I tried not to make overt generalizations and focus on the humanity of all the people in this collection while also being truthful to my own experiences.

KS: You’ve dedicated your poetry collection to “Black Womxn” of any and all embodiments. How do Black Womxn shape your unfolding narrative? What pieces of Black womxnhood mean the most to you within your collection?

TJB: There’s this famous quote by Toni Morrison that says: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” As a writer, this is something I’m always doing. As a Black woman who comes from Black womxn, of all origins, it felt organic to dedicate this book to them and to the versions of myself that desperately needed to read this book. There are also so many parts of my healing journey that center Black feminist teachings and for me, I would not have survived without the ecosystems created for me by Black womxn.

KS: In “Ars Poetica,” you write “A walk through a field carrying my mother’s wounds // The glorious gap in my grandmother’s teeth // The iron swallowing the wrinkles from my sister’s dress // My stubborn brothers throw their heads back in laughter I marvel the harvest of their uncombed kinks //A phantom of a father the tremor of his voice.” What does it mean to carry all these lives on such tiny shoulders?

TJB: I think a lot about generational trauma, and I find it surreal to know our lives stem from lives lived before us. All of these things are embedded in who we are, from the smallest detail to the most immense memory. I focused on the things from my past that I only saw glimpses of but that tell such a big story about my lineage. I got so much inspiration from Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” and the way she uses a kitchen table to weave through time, memory, and ancestral experiences.

I wanted to emulate the way a poem can do that, and I found an avenue through fragmented mages. These fragments, to me, feel easier to hold onto, and because of this more possible to hold.

KS: Many of your poems center on the weight of generational trauma, such as the opening stanzas of “Ars Poetica” and “Another Death.” How do you think the uniqueness of the Black experience contextualizes generational trauma? How does it impact the speaker in your collection?

TJB: The Black experience is rich and vast, and racism, in the United States, actively violates the depth and beauty of Blackness. I recently visited the Simone Leigh exhibit entitled “Sovereignty.” The art was created in an examination of Black femme identity and the state of being sovereign. Simone Leigh writes: “To be sovereign is to not be subject to another’s authority, another’s desires, or another’s gaze, but rather to be the author of one’s own history.”

I saw this exhibit after writing this book but couldn’t help but see the connection. Simone Leigh is examining Blackness and I’m examining Blackness, and there’s a thread of “being the author of one’s story” that binds us. This is something I see as a unique aspect of Black identity. We are learning to love, care, and be ourselves in a society that actively violates us.

Blackness is infinite and sacred. It’s not only the relationship between Blackness and white supremacy that echoes into the life of the speaker, it’s the relationship between the speaker and their own Blackness that encourages the writing of their own story and existence. This is core to the speaker’s survival.

KS: “Add Half & Half for Sweetness” embodies what it’s like being a Black girl in the South. You write “The woman whose hair is as unruly as mine says there is something wrong when the cake is too dry to always add creamer to please the palate. My hair is burning in her kitchen an iron close hissing my scalp the static of my hair bakes knots smooth.” How do the female relationships within your collection speak to the trauma of growing up as a Black girl?

TJB: There’s a line in the poem “Nocturne in Joy: where the speaker states: “I am old enough to know that no man has ever come to save me//the way a woman has.” This line encompasses much of the core of how crucial Black women, womxn, and femme relationships are. These relationships are crucial not just for survival, but in being seen. In being seen, we can be heard, and being seen in a community of Black people upends what has historically and what is currently occurring (violence, neglect, etc.) for Black women, womxn, and femmes in our society. In archiving these moments of care between Black people, we are tending and caring for Black people to thrive.

Nocturne in Joy is available to order on the Sundress website

Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is a writer, artist, and educator. Her writing explores identity,  trauma, especially inherited trauma, and what it means to heal. Her work has been selected as a  finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest (2020),  and others. She is a recipient of the 2021 MacDowell Fellowship and the 2021 Brother Thomas  Fellowship. Johnson-Boria completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and is a  2021 Tin House Scholar. Find her work in or forthcoming at Ploughshares, Kenyon Review,  Pleiades, and others.

K Slade (she/her) is a Black gothic and speculative fiction writer pursuing a BS in Digital Journalism and a Japanese minor at Appalachian State University. She currently serves as Visual Managing Editor for The Appalachian, her collegiate newspaper, and specializes in multimedia journalism. Horror media deeply inspired her love for the craft and in the future, K wants to write a script for a horror game. After undergrad, she hopes to move to New York and pursue an MFA in Creative Writing. 

Knoxville, TN—The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce Poet-Tea Community Reading with The Bottom, featuring Joe Tolbert Jr., Jazmin Witherspoon, Felecia Outsey, a.k.a. “Sistah Felecity Luv,” and Asante Knowles. Join us on Saturday, December 9th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 2:00-4:00 PM for Sundress’ special tea blend, a reading, and open mic!

Joe T. is a minister, scholar, writer and cultural organizer whose work is at the intersections of art, culture, spirituality and social justice. He received his B.S. in Communications from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and completed his M.Div. with a concentration in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York.

Jazmin Witherspoon is a poet from Saint Louis, MO, though she has spent all her adult life thriving in the mountains of East Tennessee.  She received a BS in Communication from the University of Tennessee in 2017.  In 2020, she accepted a fellowship with the 5th Woman Poetry Collective.  Her poem “Roots of Revolution” was featured in the first issue of Pigeon Parade Quarterly. Jazmin is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing Poetry (‘24).  In her free time, Jazmin enjoys reading, singing, and cooking, and she dreams of combining her love of literature and travel into a television show.

Felecia Outsey, a.k.a. “Sistah Felecity Luv,” a native of Birmingham, AL and Graduate of Berea College is a Dancer, Instructor, Cultural Organizer, Community and Youth Advocate, and Artist. As Artistic Director of Divine Urban eXpressions Cultural Arts N Dance Productions, she founded the program in 2007 for talented yet underserved youth and young adults in Knoxville, TN. She aims to spread Faith, Hope, and Love in the community through Poetry and Dance alongside all the youth and young adults she serves. She is Motivated to Overcome Violence through Expression and truly believes that Love is the Answer.

Asante Knowles is a UTK grad student, creative artist, poet, musician, and philosopher. He aims to seek truth, find peace, and spread love through artistry. He’s the author of ebook titled “10 Dimensions of You” which gives a perspective of how looking at the space within can bring us into the space beyond. How your very essence in entangled with the essence of the universe. In the depths of nothing you are there expanding and growing into everything. Come take a look at this perspective to see where you can go beyond where you have ever been

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Emory Night. This generative workshop event will take place on Saturday, December 17^th from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”. 

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

Emory Night is a queer author from East Tennessee. They are currently a senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are working on getting their bachelor’s in creative writing. They have worked as an intern for both Sundress Publications and SAFTA. They have been published in The Phoenix, a literary magazine at the University of Tennessee.

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission. 

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

Each month we split any Xfit donations with our community partner. Our community partner for December is The Bottom. To learn more visit https://www.thebottomknox.com/ 

Knoxville, TN— The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “A(n) (Un)holy Alliance: Braiding the Sacred and the Profane,” a workshop led by Donna Vorreyer on December 13^th, 2023, from 6:00-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

The word profane refers to the secular world, the parts of a life that are not directly related to spiritual or religious practice. However you may define the spiritual in your own life, what might happen in our writing if we blend the sacred and the profane to make a liminal world where these two things coexist? 

Looking at poems by Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Li Young Lee, Katie Manning and others, we will discuss how writers use sensory image, ritual description, prayer structure, giving of thanks, reframing traditional stories, and borrowing language to braid their memory or experience of the divine into the everyday. After a discussion of model poems, we will complete a generative exercise that will lead to communal, quiet writing time to consider these things in a new draft. Time for questions and to share work will be provided.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Donna Vorreyer via PayPal through paypal.me/vorreyerpoet.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

This event is brought to you in part by grants provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the Tennessee Arts Commission.