our residents
Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, The Volta, the Academy of American Poets, Split This Rock, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere.
Her work engages the affective afterlife of militarization, incarceration, and U.S. imperialism, particularly as they’re lived out through a Black queer femme body and attention to practices of land.
She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization and elsewhere. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
Cait Campbell
Cait Campbell (she/her/hen) hails from small-town Ontario, Canada with Guyanese, Acadian, and German heritage. Now based in East Harlem, she strives to highlight the connections and disruptions that exist in the world through an engaged practice of narrative writing, critical artmaking, and praxis of care. Cait holds a Double Honours B.A. in Anthropology and Environment & Health Geography, with a Specialization in Art History and Studio Art from Western University. In Spring 2021, she received her Masters of Science in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architectural Studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she was the recipient of the Alumni Award for her ongoing efforts as a student leader and community activist. Cait commits her time to working at multiple intersections of justice and the Arts. She is the founder of Wedging Forward, a community ceramics program devoted to providing currently and formerly incarcerated artists an opportunity to engage with clay as a practice of liberation.
Imani e Wilson
Imani e Wilson is a writer, arts educator, independent scholar, and choir member. A born and raised New Yorker of Caribbean ancestry, Wilson's work centers on Black song/dance, sonic memory, and soul thought. Her current project is a collection of essays on water themes in Black sacred song titled Deep: The Song We Sing Down Here Below.
Liz Marie Chestang
Liz Marie Chestang is a dancer, actor, poet and wellness professional originally from Cleveland, Ohio. For over a decade, she has performed domestically and abroad as a professional dancer in theater, film and TV and in recent years began immersing herself in the incredible community of poets in Brooklyn, NY. As an artist, Liz’s goal is always to tell stories and illuminate humanity, with a specific focus on blackness and queerness and how they intersect. Her poetry has been featured recently at Dumbo House and The Fire This Time Festival. She’s honored and grateful to be a POWERHOUSE resident.
our board members
t’ai freedom ford
FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
t’ai is a Brooklyn-based writer who, with community support, built POWERHOUSE to serve the Colored Creative Cohort. her current obsessions include ancestral architectural praxis, Black farming, cultural geographies & topographies, da hood, domesticity, domiciles, dwellings, displacement, disinvestment, eminent domain, houses/homes, housing markets, home-buying (tries, trials & fails), historic home loan practices, generational wealth, gentrification, desecration of sacred spaces, inheritance, Martin Luther King Jr Blvds, money, mortgages, redlining, reinvestment, reparations, revitalization, sanctuary spaces. she is especially grateful for the many many hands that helped to pretty-up the POWERHOUSE. she is infinitely proud to provide a sanctuary space for Black women and all Folx residing on the edges & margins.
Kima Jones
VICE CHAIR
Kima Jones is a poet, and the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, a Los Angeles-based book publicity agency for black and brown writers, where, for five years, she worked as lead strategist on all publicity campaigns. In 2017, Kima founded the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat—a two-week respite and book incubator for black and brown nonbinary and women writers. The Los Angeles Times called Kima "2018's literary breakthrough" and "an important new voice on the national stage." In 2019, she founded Culture, Too—a mentorship conference for black and brown cultural critics.
Kima serves as Consigliere to Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories. She was recognized as the 2019 Recipient of the Energizer Award for Exceptional Acts of Literary Citizenship by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
In the spring of 2021, Kima joined Triangle House Literary as an agent. She is interested in representing literary fiction, essay collections, memoir, hybrid texts, commercial fiction, poetry, speculative fiction, science fiction, and horror. She’s a developmental editor who brings more than a decade of marketing and publicity experience into her agenting negotiations.
Mahogany L. Browne
SECRETARY
Mahogany L. Browne is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members. This position is informed by her career as a writer, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic. Browne is the founder of the diverse lit initiative, Woke Baby Book Fair; and is excited about her latest poetry collection. I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love is a book-length poem responding to the impact of mass incarceration on women and children). She is based in Brooklyn and is the first-ever Poet-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center.
Emily Brandt
TREASURER
Emily Brandt (b. 1980, she/they) is a poet and interdisciplinary artist of Sicilian, Polish & Ukrainian descent. She’s a co-founding editor of No, Dear, curator of the LINEAGE series at Wendy’s Subway, member of the video art collective Temp. Files, and teacher and instructional coach at The Boerum Hill School for International Studies. She earned a BA in Psychology, Women’s Studies, and English from Boston University, an MEd from Pace University, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall and Elsewhere, an Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House, and currently serves on Poetry Well’s Board of Directors. She’s based in New York, between Brooklyn (Lenape) and Speonk (Shinnecock).
Christa Bell
DIRECTOR
she/her/hers & the ancestral we/us; conceptual artist, writer & curator; African (American) Matrilineal Descendant with two Black parents; momty to a twospirit freeform starseed; sister to five living Black brothers; reparations enthusiast; past, present & futurist; womXnist; intersectional Blackass feminist; facilitator; mediator; meditator; microdoser; weed smoker; globe trotter; prototrans; Preachers Kid; backslidden Black Buddhist; devout SHEist; family of origin scapegoat on my CPTSD grind; hoodoouista & ritualist; doula to the underground ultralightbeam; Holy, Holy, Holy AF