Residency Plan:
My current project involves interworking expressive elements throughout creative work that thrills and terrifies me. Using the residency’s vibrant space, time, and community, I will rework existing poems, experimental fragments, and new work translating them into the elements of a one woman show. My craft draws me to the nexus of memory, testimony, experimentation, and rage. Thematically, my work encircles the lives and afterlives of Black women, bearing witness to their stories navigating girlhood and surviving womanhood. These documentary poems are news stories of Black women as targets for intimate violence and narratives of Black women saving babies, each other, and themselves when no one cares. Shifting from page to performance and experimental space, these poems are multidimensional portals of storytelling and experience. I want to step inside these portals, consider them with polyvocality that isn’t limited by my lone voice’s attempt to read the piece but can be expanded and more fully explored through improvisation, reimagination, staging and installation of vocal elements in an elastic and immersive performance space.

Bio:
Yalonda JD Green, PhD (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic librarian from Detroit. Her poetic work has appeared in TORCH, Reverie, Mythium, various anthologies, bus shelters, on stages, and other creative spaces. She has accepted fellowships from Cave Canem and the American Library Association Spectrum Scholars and residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center and Delaware Writers Retreat. Her creative and critical work encircle the art, lives, and afterlives of Black women, bearing witness to their stories. As a versatile performer, seasoned educator, and former children’s librarian, Yalonda has gleefully joined musical collaborations, voiceover and improvisational projects, studio and stage work, documentary and indie film, youth music camps, children’s shows, and many more community-enriching experiments. Often blending storytelling, improvisation, and song in performance, her workshops, and her teaching, JD also sings with the ensemble, Elevation, as a new member of Wilmington, Delaware’s rich creative community.

Residency Plan:
I will use the BAC residency to continue work on my newest book-length collection of poems which explores my experiences of parenthood, including my struggles with infertility, grappling with how the patriarchy presents itself in a co-parenting relationship, and the act of rebuilding myself after becoming a mother. I’ve written over 40 poems already for this collection, and I’ve created visual art that incorporates some of these poems as well. I will tape my printed poems to the wall and spend time looking at the collection as a whole, noticing where I need to cut poems, which poems need a sharper edit, and which poems still need to be written to round out the representation of my motherhood experience. I will follow the muse, but my practice usually includes a nice balance of judgement-free generation and keen-eyed crafting. I look forward to meeting the rest of the cohort and talking craft with other poets. I can offer editing and feedback, and I hope to share work if others have the time and space to connect.

Bio:
Trinity Tibe (they/she) is a Cuban-American poet, visual artist, and arts organizer. They are a co-founder of Ambrosia Art Salon, an arts community in Savannah, Georgia, that creates space for diverse artists and encourages collaboration. She is a winner of Crosswinds Poetry Journal’s annual contest and Pacifica Literary Review’s winter contest, and her work appears in The Florida Review, Aquifer, Bodega, Duende, and more. Trinity was a poet-in-residence at the Trélex Residency in Switzerland and is a studio member at Sulfur Studios / ARTS Southeast. She has an MFA in Poetry from The New School. Find Trinity on Instagram @TrinityTibe

Social Media:
Instagram: @TrinityTibe

Residency Plan:
While on residency at BAC, I am particularly interested in returning to my ekphrastic roots, and spending time in poetic conversation with the photographs of Justine Kurland’s project “Girl Pictures”. I suspect, studying Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” will spark the nexus of my next collection of poems. I will also continue work on my debut prose project, which is a collection of lyric essays loosely tied by “camouflage” as a guiding theme: queer camouflage, hunting camouflage, dazzle ships, textile patterns and face paint designs that thwart facial recognition, etc. The essays are a blend of cultural critique, memoir, queer theory, and an examination of class in rural Northeastern Appalachian spaces.

Bio:
Kayleb Rae Candrilli is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a PEW fellowship, and of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. They are the author of Winter of Worship, Water I Won’t Touch, All the Gay Saints, and What Runs Over. Candrilli’s work is published in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and others. They live in Philadelphia with their partner.

Social Media/Website:
www.krcandrilli.com
Instagram: @kayleb_rae

Residency Plan:
I’m working on a poetic performance play called Disorganized Attachment—an autobiographical, multimedia cabaret memoir exploring intimacy, queer male sex culture, trans community, and family history. Through poetic vignettes, I move between strangers’ beds, hookup apps, bars, book clubs, and family homes, confronting the closet built by working-class Catholicism and trans-exclusive gayness. I ask: What parts of us get left out? What parts do we bring along? How do we fight to feel whole in a world that fractures us? Woven throughout are meditations on sexuality, public and private space, and the act of storying a self to life within oppressive structures. At BAC, I will develop this work as a multidimensional performance, using rehearsal and outdoor space for physical exploration. I will experiment with movement, staging, and song—incorporating vocal exercises and intuitive embodiment to bring the text to life. Morning hikes and outdoor yoga will ground my process, leading into physical theatre exercises to explore rhythm and emotional landscape. I will also create visual collages for projections, weaving text, photos, and digital poems.

Bio:
rex renée aka rexylafemme is a trans, multi-gendered, multi-genre poet, actor, visual artist, and healing practitioner from Jackson Heights, NYC. As a working class, gender-abundant artist, his work is a love letter to NYC and radical communities grounded in a politics of resistance, healing, and resilience. In all of their creative forms, rex explore the power of revolutionary love in the face of loveless political structures. His work is a living archive of how we from beyond binaries and conventions live, play, rage, and love and he creates as a way to make spells of infinite possibility for people power to win out against systems of destruction.

Social Media/Website:
www.rexylafemme.com
Instagram: @rexylafemme

Residency Plan:
My residency plan includes working on a current poetry manuscript, which traces the journey of a Belizean Colombian American speaker’s journey from muse to mother, as well as hosting a reading for community poets who identify as mothers. The collection I am working on travels, in three movements, from the self-reflective art galleries of pre-war Kyiv, moving back in time and memory to engage with the speaker’s father, a Belizean economist, and the language of his doctoral dissertation written during the speaker’s childhood on the financial liberalization of Belize, the last British colony to gain its independence, and culminating in linguistic space of / Somatic potential in new motherhood/repairing the Mother Wound. The aim of the community reading would be twofold: to build a chorus of contemporary, diverse voices on the subject of motherhood; and to include voices that may not otherwise be included in traditional poetry and academic outlets.

Bio:
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of Basic Needs (Rescue Press, 2021) and Images for Radical Politics (Rescue Press, 2016), which was the Editor’s Pick in the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured by Academy of American Poets, Dia: Chelsea, Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown Podcast, The Poetry Project, PEN American and the Brooklyn Rail. She is a graduate of Tufts University and holds an MFA in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College and an MA from St. John’s University. Of Colombian and Belizean descent, she is from and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Social Media/Website:
vanessajimenezgabb.com
Instagram: @vjimenezgabb
X: @vjimenezgabb

Residency Plan:
My time at the BAC will focus on writing new poems that center joy. I’m thunderstruck by the complexity of the subject. I’ve written poems about loss, war, illness, climate crisis, and other “big” topics, but “joy” is a much harder nut to crack. It’s resistant, tight, non-reflexive, and tends not to linger—and I want to know why. Part of my goal is to gain a better understanding of joy and its history, and to read or return to other poets’ work in this area. We are living in particularly difficult times, which I suspect makes leaning into joy more challenging—and perhaps more necessary. Writing into joy seems subversive, revolutionary. My interest in this topic is an outcome of workshops I facilitated in 2024 in which community members were asked to write about any silver linings they experienced in relation to the COVID pandemic. The question itself garnered resistance, but led to often profound responses. I’m interested in exploring that resistance and why joy can be harder to embrace than the hard stuff.

Bio:
H.E. Fisher (she/they) is the author of the collection STERILE FIELD (Free Lines Press, 2022) and chapbook JANE ALMOST ALWAYS SMILES (Moonstone Arts Center Press, 2022). H.E.’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, Ligeia Magazine, Whale Road Review, DMQ Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and LIGEIA Magazine, among other publications. H.E. was awarded City College of New York’s 2019 Stark Poetry Prize and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. H.E. is a recipient of the Poets Afloat and Stonecrop Gardens residencies. H.E. is the EIC of (RE): An Ideas Journal, and is an independent editor, instructor, and writing coach, currently living in the Hudson River Valley.

Social Media/Website:
https://www.hefisher.com
Instagram: @h.e._fisher1
Facebook: hefisher.com
Bluesky: @hefisher.bsky,social
Threads: h.e._fisher1