MaKshya Tolbert
Artist-in-Residence
MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) is a poet, cook, and artist who just found her way back to Virginia. Her recent poems and essays have been published in Interim, Narrative Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Art Papers, The Night Heron Barks, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, For the Culture, Earth in Color, Odd Apples, Queer Poem-a-Day, RHINO Poetry, and Earth in Color. MaKshya is currently based on unceded Monacan and Manahoac land in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a second-year MFA student at the University of Virginia. MaKshya serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission and is a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow. In her free time, she is elsewhere— what Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'
MaKshya will spend her Spring 2023 New City Arts Research Residency writing and embodying a long poem anchored in shade, shared livability, and black ecological loneliness as entangled beneath Charlottesville’s rapidly changing urban tree canopy. Meanwhile, MaKshya will self-apprentice to coiling clay, shaping tree trunks in the wake of imminent and intimate climate transition – past, present, and unfolding.
Instagram: @processdaily
Bio courtesy of the artist.
