Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2023 Light Bill Incubator Microgrant is Jessica Mehta. She will receive $500, a slot in the Sundress Reading Series, and a residency at the Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, TN.
Jessica Mehta, PhD is a multi-award winning Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary poet, artist, and scholar. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, Indigenization, and de-colonization are the driving forces behind her work, which includes several books and exhibitions. Her doctoral work addressed the meeting point of eating disorders and female poetics.
During her post as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Bengaluru, India, she curated a poetry anthology in the colonizer’s tongue. She is the current Bayard Rustin artist-in-residence in Manhattan, a 2023/24 Peace Studio Fellow, the Lead Poet-in-Residence at New York’s Kristine Mann Jung Library, a forthcoming Laundromat Project Create Change fellow in Brooklyn, and the forthcoming 2024 BigCi Environmental Award fellow in Australia. Visit www.thischerokeerose.com for more information.
We would also like to recognize this year’s finalists and semi-finalists:
Finalists
- Timi Sanni
- Kelsey L. Smoot
Semi-Finalists
- Ashia Ajani
- Isaac Akanmu
- Raejeana Brooks
- Jaiden Butler
- Ashante Ford
- Noor Jaber
- Kei Vough Korede
- LaTanya McQueen
- Elizabeth Upshur
- Irene Villasenor
- Elliot-Timothy Viridian
