We talk about…stuttering as a teacher, ”bending the clock” as a disability justice and a racial justice practice, sitting with the ethics of living on stolen land, engaging with the fraught archive of slavery, ”opening time” on the page, wrestling with questions of voice in the archive, the healing work of putting the archive of slavery in conversation with an archive of plants, collaborating with ensemble, singing hymns, Saidiya Hartman, m. nourbeSe philip, and much more. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jerome Ellis describes themself as a “blk disabled animal, stutterer, and artist.” They were born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants. Jerome lives in Tidewater, Virginia with their wife, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis. Jerome has been awarded a United States Artists Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and 2 MacDowell residency Fellowships. Ellis was in the 2024 Whitney Biennial as both a solo artist and as a member of the People Who Stutter Create collective. Jerome's debut album, The Clearing in 2021, which was accompanied by a book, is a score of stuttering and an act of resistance against performative fluency. Most recently, Jerome is the author of Aster of Ceremonies, a multi-layered book of poetry and music that came out in 2023 from Milkweed Editions. Aster of Ceremonies engages with the fraught archive of slavery by bringing the voices of ”runaway slaves” into conversation with an archive of plant life. It weaves together practices of history, ecology, and disability justice and claims stuttering as a portal into a liberatory relationship to time. 

www.jjjjjerome.com

@jjjjjeromeellis

Photo credit: Annie Forrest

SHOW NOTES

Jerome Ellis, “The Clearing: Music, Dysfluency, Blackness, and Time,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, 5, no. 2 (2020)

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

Craig Dworkin, “The Stutter of Form,” in M. Perloff and C. Dworkin, eds., The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Robin Coste Lewis, The Race in Erasure, Portland Arts & Lectures, (April 20, 2016) 

Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman in conversation with J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “The Black Outdoors,” Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, (September 23, 2016) 

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

Ashon T. Crawley, Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017)

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