Congratulations to Eder J. Williams McKnight!
Trillium Arts is delighted to announce Eder J. Williams McKnight of Tulsa, Oklahoma as the 2022 awardee for the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers. The Fellowship, named in honor of Sarah M. Johnson of Hickory, NC, aims to provide Black women writers a restful environment conducive to reflection and writing. It also offers uninterrupted time to plant the seed of an idea for a new writing project or to develop or complete a project underway. Learn more about the "Miss Sarah" Fellowship Program.
A panel of esteemed black women writers reviewed 27 competitive applications in this year's genre of poetry that were received from around the country, and ultimately awarded the Fellowship to Ms. McKnight for the 2022 cycle. The “Miss Sarah” Fellowship offers a variety of benefits including a $700 honorarium, transportation, and accommodations for a week in July at the Trillium Arts artist residency location in rural Mars Hill, NC and/or at “Montford Manor” in downtown Asheville, NC.
About the “Miss Sarah” Fellowship Awardee:
Eder J. Williams McKnight is an educator and poet residing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her time in Tulsa has allowed her to delve into the multiracial history of Oklahoma and produce works featuring Greenwood’s Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre in collaboration with visual and performance artists. Her poetry has been performed live and featured in local publications including Art Focus Oklahoma, Oklahoma Today, and the anthology After 1921: Notes from Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and Beyond, edited by Crystal Z Campbell (2021). She will also be featured in an upcoming anthology Creative Field Guide to Northeastern Oklahoma, edited by Liz Blood. Eder received an M.F.A. in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She has authored two hand bound art books, But Move Not (2012) and A Burlap Bloom (2013) with artist Suzanne Sawyer of Wild Ginseng Studio.
Eder is grateful for the Miss Sarah Fellowship for Black Women Writers. She will expand her chapbook manuscript Riptide about MaVynee Betsch and the first African American beach in Amelia Island, Florida.
About the Review Panelists
Trudier Harris is University Distinguished Research Professor of English Emerita, the University of Alabama, and J. Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, UNC Chapel Hill. She has authored and edited twenty-five volumes, among which are Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Saints, Sinners Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, and her award-winning memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. Her latest book is Depictions of Home in African American Literature (2021).
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones is an artist/scholar/facilitator who employs Black Feminist aesthetics and theatrical jazz principles in her work. Her original performances include sista docta, a critique of academic life, and Searching for Ọ̀ṣun, an ethnographic performance installation around the Divinity of the River. Her most recent book is Theatrical Jazz: Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment, a collaborative ethnography focusing on three theatrical jazz practitioners. Omi is Professor Emerita from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D, is Founding Director of the Women's Research & Resource Center at Spelman College and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies. She is past president of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also edited Words Of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought and co-authored with Johnnetta B. Cole Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women's Equality In African American Communities.
Trillium Arts Welcomes Three New Board Members
Trillium Arts is excited to welcome three new members to its Board of Directors, Gina Cornejo, Lori McLeese and Anne Rawson. Gina, Lori and Anne will bring tremendous energy and stewardship to the organization.
Gina Cornejo
Multidisciplinary artist Gina Cornejo lives in Asheville, NC. She is the daughter of a Peruvian mariachi singer and a professional jazz dancer from Chicago. As an acclaimed artist who embraces risk and honesty, autobiographical writing, performance, and sacred travel serve as guides to her creations of exposed storytelling.
For 17 years, she claimed Chicago as her artistic home where she performed on the stages of the Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, 16th Street Theater and the Neo-Futurist Theater. As an ensemble member of Teatro Luna (Chicago, LA, touring), Gina contributed her original writing, performance and choreography to this multiple Jeff Award winning ensemble.
Gina is a Core Member on Asheville’s Revolve Advisory Board. As part of its First Draft Residency program, her solo performance when sugar was sugar was sugar, received a month-long theatrical run of performances and her pandemic-born original solo piece, Atmosphere, was featured as a collaborative film.
In the fall of 2020, Gina teamed up with North Carolina-based Stewart/Owen Dance to produce a stage production of Atmosphere as a part of a greater evening-length work, Still: Life at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts, which has also been reimagined by Asheville film-maker Michael-Jamar Jean Francois as a stage work for film. Most recently, Dirty Laundry, features Gina’s autobiographical script with choreography from Stewart/Owen Dance. This ambitious dance/theater work discloses the irreverent unraveling of marriage and divorce and its multimedia companion film was created during a one month artist-in-residence at the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts.
Gina looks forward to returning to Chicago this spring to perform in Teatro Vista’s World Premiere of Emmy nominated artist, Brian Quijada’s new musical, “Somewhere Over the Border.” Visit ginacornejo.com for more details.
Lori McLeese
Lori McLeese is a North Carolina native who is the Global Head of Human Resources for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Longreads, and much more. Lori is responsible for Automattic’s global workforce working distributedly across 90+ countries. With her team, she focuses on making Automattic the best place to work. Prior to working in Human Resources, she taught elementary school in the public school systems in San Francisco and North Carolina, and abroad in private schools in Kuwait, Egypt, and South Korea. She lives in Asheville and enjoys gardening, writing, hiking, and hosting friends for dinner.
Anne Rawson:
Anne Rawson brings abundant experience in non-profit management to Trillium Arts’ Board of Directors. After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Dance, she worked for seventeen years with the Special Olympics on regional (Central California coast), national and international levels. She has directed the Grants Program at the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County (NC) and is a former Executive Director of the Madison County Arts Council (Marshall, NC). She has served on non-profit boards in Western North Carolina including NC Stage Company, Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre and NC Arts. Anne was a consultant on the Asheville Art Museum’s capital campaign. She resides in Mars Hill, NC in a restored eighty-year-old farm house where she now enjoys gardening and collecting contemporary art.