Join MaKshya Tolbert, Spring 2023 Artist-in-Residence, for a poem-tour of the trees along the Downtown Mall. Shade Walks will be offered each Tuesday and Friday in July and August*, beginning July 7 and ending August 25. Sign up for a walk here.
On a Shade Walk, you will get to know Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall and the trees that live there more intimately. Together, share shade, discover histories of the space, and imagine how careful ecological attention can contribute to the wellbeing of our community.
*Walks are planned rain or shine, but if for any environmental reasons, the scheduled walk would not offer relief, we will be in touch with an opportunity to reschedule.
During her residency, MaKshya is 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. MaKshya is self-apprenticing to coiling clay, shaping tree trunks in the wake of imminent and intimate climate transition—past, present, and unfolding.
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 third-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.'
The 2022-2023 New City Arts Research Residency is made possible with support from The Genan Foundation and the Batten Family Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation. MaKshya’s residency project is additionally supported by Lead to Life.