Notes on Essex

Gregory Adams helped found Station-to-Station Performance Poets and Writers’ Collective, a seminal group in the emergence of Washington’s, vibrant Black LGBT arts scene in the early 1980s. In 2021, he served on the five-member team that documented that scene’s history in the film Fierceness Served! He has had poetry, essays, and articles appear in Blacklight, Nethula Journal, Street Sense, and The Washington Post.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, 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.

Gregory Ford has been exploring theater in the DMV since the 1970s. In the 1980s he worked at numerous small theaters in the area, notably Off the Circle Theater Company performing musical revues at DC Space under the direction of Fred Lee. He was a member of Station to Station, a group of African American men who—influenced by The Last Poets, as well as gay poets Chasen Gaver and Essex Hemphill—did “performance poetry.” In the 1990s he became a company member of DC Playback Theater under the direction of psychodramatist Jeffrey Yates. Gregory formed Positive Image Performance Project, a company of African American men who performed Playback Theater at AIDS retreats during this time under the auspices of Us Helping Us, an AIDS services organization that focused on supporting Black men living with/or affected by AIDS. He is a clinical practitioner of psychodrama. He currently works with the Playback Theater Unit of Verbal Gymnastics under the direction of John Johnson.

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965 in Bronx, New York) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to video installation and performance art, examining the impact of race, gender and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic globally through intersections of the personal and the political. Harris has been widely exhibited globally and his work is represented in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Modern among numerous public and private collections internationally. Over three decades, Harris has been on the faculty of New York University, where he is a Professor of Art and Art Education.

Wayson R. Jones is a visual artist, musician, and spoken-word performer. He received a degree in music from University of Maryland and later went on to perform with poet Essex Hemphill, as part of Washington DC’s pioneering Black gay and lesbian arts scene of the 1980s and ‘90s. The two performed in venues including dc space, Blues Alley, and The Kennedy Center in Washington; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; and New York’s LaMama Theater. They also worked with filmmaker Isaac Julien (Looking for Langston) and videographer Marlon Riggs (Tongues Untied, Black Is/Black Ain’t). Wayson’s visual art is informed by these experiences and by an exuberant approach to materiality and process. He has had solo shows at BlackRock Center for the Arts, Arts/Harmony Hall, Northern Virginia Community College, DCAC, and Prince Georges County Publick Playhouse. He received a 2017 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Prince George’s Arts and Humanities Council, and a 2023 Artist Grant from the Belle Foundation. His artwork is in the collections of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Maryland/National Capitol Park and Planning Commission, and The Hotel at the University of Maryland, and other public and private collections in the DC area and nationally.

A native Washingtonian, Christopher Prince is a multi-talented writer, singer, actor, and activist. His poetry has been published in several literary publications, including Haki Madhubuti’s Black Books Bulletin, the Black Bear Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and the Baltimore Sun.

Chris has sung at The Kennedy Center, the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and the legendary Blues Alley jazz. As a member of the vocal group The Four of Us, Chris has performed at the San Remo Jazz Festival in Italy and the Festival de Castelle in the South of France. He performed with Wayson R. Jones as the duo Nightskin, creating original, lyrically rich neo-soul fusion. Today, Chris's music is a moving jazz/funk/neo-soul hybrid. He is a member of the acapella group Reverb. 

As an actor, Chris was active in the Black gay and lesbian arts scene during the 1980s and '90s, and has collaborated with Michelle Parkerson, Larry Duckette, and Essex Hemphill. Chris is one of the voices of the now iconic “Brother to Brother” choral sequence in Marlon Riggs’s award winning documentary Tongues Untied. Presently Chris's solo performances are a non-linear mixture of music, poetry, and character-driven monologues. His piece “War Torn” was included in the DC Queer Theater Festival’s Going Solo. He has twice been co-chair of the entertainment committee for the DC Black Pride Festival and directed multiple productions of the DC Coalition for Black Lesbians, Gay Men and Bi-Sexual’s Renaissance-A Cultural Showcase of Artists. 

Chris joined the spring 2023 residency program Atlas Arts Lab sponsored by the Atlas Performing Arts Center during which he created “Loud as the Rolling Sea: Songs of Resistance and Recognition.” In 2024 he was awarded a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship. 

Writer/filmmaker Michelle Parkerson’s creative career burgeoned in the late 1970s and early 80s as a major contributor to a Black gay and lesbian renaissance of DC artists, musicians, activists, writers and performers.

Michelle’s award-winning films include Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock, A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde and Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box. Her documentaries have screened at prestigious festivals, including The Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin International Film Festival and AFI Fest. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the Mayor’s Art Award, grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Rainbow History Project’s Community Pioneer Award and a HumanitiesDC DC Docs Grant. The 2021 documentary Fierceness Served! The ENIKAlley Coffeehouse revives the storied history of a DC Black LGBTQ cultural hub in the 1980s. Camille A. Brown: GIANT STEPS, her latest documentary short for PBS American Masters / Firelight Media, was nominated for a 2025 NAACP Image Award (Outstanding Documentary Film -Short Form).

Since the publication of her first book, Waiting Rooms (Common Ground Press), Michelle’s poetry and short fiction have frequently appeared in anthologies including Fast Talk, Full Volume, Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing, Full Moon On K Street, In Search Of Color Everywhere and Mouths of Rain.

Ms. Parkerson has served on the faculties of the University of Delaware, Northwestern University, Howard University and Temple University, as well as the Advisory Boards of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs and Mary’s House For Older Adults, Inc. 

Tiona Nekkia McClodden (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Her works have been shown at Kunsthalle Basel, the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art-Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); the New Museum (New York); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)–Berlin; MOCA (LA); MCA (Chicago), and MoMA PS1 (New York). Most recently, she is the recipient of the 2021-23 Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Bucksbaum Award for her work in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2019), among others. In 2017-18 she curated A Recollection. + Predicated. as a part of the multi-artist retrospective Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental at both the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia and The Kitchen in New York. 

Her writing has been featured on the Triple Canopy platform in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, ART 21 Magazine, and many other publications. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Tiona lives and works in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the Founder + Director of Philadelphia-based, Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought + artistic production.

Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis with their people.