Silo City Reading Series: Jericho Brown, Ashia Ajani, Florist, Johann Diedrick

Featured Artists

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  Ashia Ajani poet & storyteller
  

  Ashia Ajani

  poet & storyteller

  Ashia Ajani (they/them) is an award-winning Black storyteller soulchild hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, Arapahoe and Comanche Peoples. They are a UC Berkeley Lecturer in African American Studies, environmental justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network and co-poetry editor of The Hopper Literary Magazine. Their work explores Black diasporic environmental stewardship, harm & placemaking. Ajani’s words have been featured in Sierra Magazine, World Literature Today, Atmos, EcoTheo Review and Frontier Poetry, among others. Their poetry debut, Heirloom, is forthcoming in April 2023 from Write Bloody Publishing.

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  Jericho Brown Poet
  

  Jericho Brown

  Poet

  Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

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  Johann Diedrick Artist, Engineer, Musician
  

  Johann Diedrick

  Artist, Engineer, Musician

  Johann Diedrick is an artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for experiencing the world through sonic encounter. He surfaces resonant histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back vibratory layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is the founder of A Quiet Life, a sonic engineering and research studio that designs and builds audio-related software and hardware products for revealing new sonic possibilities off the grid. He is the Director of Engineering at Somewhere Good, a 2022 Future Imagination Collaboratory Fellow at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, a 2021 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient, a 2020 Pioneer Works Technology resident, a member of NEW INC, and an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP program. His work has been featured in Wire Magazine, Musicworks Magazine, and presented internationally at MoMA PS1, Ars Electronica, Somerset House, and multiple NIME conferences, among others.

  photo credit: Anjelica Jardiel

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  Florist Songwriter & Instrumentalist
  

  Florist

  Songwriter & Instrumentalist

  Emily A. Sprague creates long-form instrumental music inspired by her personal and sonic explorations, and is the prolific songwriter behind the indie folk group Florist.