Thomas Kneeland in Residence April 2024

We are pleased to announce Thomas Kneeland as our April 2024 Speculative Play and Just Futurities resident scholar.  

Kneeland’s project employs poetry (and adjacent mediums) to explore the ways in which poetry can be a formidable tool for occupying, preserving, and amplifying the cultural narratives of Black and Brown communities to make for a better future. Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman, he uses poetry to reimagine and retell the story of Afrocuban lineage in his own family, drawing from the African Diaspora. During the residency, he plans to dig deeper into artworks—paintings, songs, sculptures, poems, stories—that highlight his origins.

About Thomas Kneeland

Thomas Kneeland (he/him) is a poet, educator, community leader, and visual artist. He is author of the chapbook We Be Walkin’ Blackly in the Deep (Marian University), and was awarded as one of ten 2022 Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize finalists for the African continent. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Elevation Review. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, INverse Poetry Archives, Rigorous Magazine, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University. 

Speculative Play and Just Futurities is made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. SPJF is a collaboration between the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Center for Africana Studies and Culture, and the Ray Bradbury Center. Learn more about the program here.