SONGS IN FLIGHT

Rhiannon Giddens is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, and two-time Grammy Award winner. Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House and served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator. She is Artistic Director of Silkroad, and recently wrote the opera Omar for the 2022 Spoleto USA Festival.

Kimille Howard is a New York based director, deviser, writer and filmmaker. She is an Assistant Stage Director at the Metropolitan Opera and recently worked on the new James Robinson production of Porgy and Bess. She is the newly appointed Artistic Director of the Lucille Lortel Theatre’s NYC Public High School Playwriting Fellowship and a cofounder of the Black Classical Music Archive.

Tsitsi Ella Jaji is an Associate Professor of English at Duke University with expertise in African and African American literary and cultural studies, and with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She previously has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, and National Humanities Center. Her most recent poetry collection, Mother Tongues (2019), was awarded the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Harvard Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Almost Island, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations.

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

GRAMMY-nominated baritone Will Liverman starred in the Met Opera’s reopening production of Fire Shut Up In My Bones. He is the recipient of the 2022 Beverly Sills Artist Award and Sphinx Medal of Excellence.

Reggie Mobley’s concert appearances include Bachfest Leipzig, Early Music Vancouver, the Boston Early Music Festival, Bach Akademie Stuttgart, and a recital of Black American composers at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Karen Slack has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Washington National Opera, and San Francisco Opera and portrayed a featured role as ‘Opera Diva’ in Tyler Perry’s movie and soundtrack, For Colored Girls.

Crystal Simone Smith is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013) Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014), and Down To Earth (Longleaf Press, 2020). She co-authored, One Window’s Light, A Collection of Haiku, edited by Lenard D. Moore (2017), which won the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award for Best Haiku Anthology. In 2019, she won the North Carolina Poetry Society Bloodroot Haiku Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Prairie Schooner, POETRY Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. In 2020, she received a Duke University Humanities Unbounded Fellowship. She writes poetry about the human condition and social change.

Shawn Okpebholo maintains a dynamic career as a composer, including performances of his music at some of the nation's most prestigious performance spaces including Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and the National Cathedral. His music has been featured on the Lyric Opera of Chicago recital series, the Washington National Opera Inauguration Day Concert; the Ravinia Music Festival; and with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Lincoln Trio, among many others. Okpebholo's work as a composer has been featured on PBS Newshour, NPR's All Things Considered, NPR's Morning Edition SiriusXM’s “Living American” series on Symphony Hall Channel, and Chicago's WFMT.

Howard Watkins is an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, and has collaborated with Joyce DiDonato, Diana Damrau, Kathleen Battle, and Grace Bumbry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kennedy Center, the United States Supreme Court, Alice Tully Hall, and Carnegie Hall.