12/19/2025
🎉 🎆 🤯 🎇 🍾 drum machines please… Your NOPF headliner night awaits… only 18 Saturdays away!!! 1️⃣8️⃣❎🗓️ Mark your calendars for an evening guaranteed to be remarkable… smudge ya later alligators 🐊 ✌️
JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice.
JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!
Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, silence, and devotion. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. The artist’s body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents.
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lives and works as a nanny in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023, winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025) and The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (blush lit, 2025). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally.
📸 JE: Annie Forrest
📸 CB: Payton Barronian
