Mississippi School of the Arts is excited to announce the appointment of Nadia Alexis as the new Literary Arts Instructor for 2022-2023. Nadia comes to us from Oxford, Mississippi, where she has been an instructor at the University of Mississippi.
Nadia Alexis is a poet, photographer, educator and organizer who was born in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants and currently based in Oxford, Mississippi. She holds a BA in Political Science from Union College where she also studied Africana Studies and French. Summer of 2022, she will complete her Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Mississippi, where she also earned her MFA in Creative Writing and teaches Black literature and first-year writing courses.
Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Kweli Journal, Indiana Review, MQR: Mixtape, Mud Season Review, Shenandoah, Texas Review, and elsewhere. Her prose and personal essay writing has been published at On She Goes and BLACK STEW. She was the featured visual artist in TORCH Literary Journal’s 2016 Spring/Summer issue and has additional photographic works published in fields magazine, Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, and Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora featuring over 100 women photographers of African descent from around the world. She has received award nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net Anthology, and the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in photography. She has received poetry fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole, and has been mentored by Carrie Mae Weems in an independent scholars fellowship program. In 2019, she received an honorable mention prize in poetry of the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Award for College Writers and in 2020 was named a semifinalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest.
She served as a 2018-2019 curator of the Trobar Ric Poetry Reading Series, an independent reading series based in Oxford, MS. Each summer, she serves on the creative writing faculty of the McMullan Young Writers Workshop at Millsaps College where she teaches poetry and also teaches poetry in the summer youth camps at the University of Mississippi’s Pre-College Program. She is currently at work on her first full-length hybrid manuscript of poems and photographs, while also building bodies of photographic works, and working on a young adult novel-in-verse. She is primarily a self-taught photographer who has been making photographs since 2014. In April 2019, her What Endures series was exhibited in the month-long 2019 Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba as part of the multidisciplinary group exhibition titled The Spirit That Resides. Her work was also on view in Detroit in the multidisciplinary group exhibition Beyond Space in from Fall 2019 to Winter 2020, and at the Motel Art Show in Oxford, MS in Fall 2019. From March 2019 to March 2021, works from her What Endures series were on view in the J.D. Williams Library of the University of Mississippi, and in June 2021 photographs in that series were on view in the On Protest and Mourning virtual exhibition at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Harlem. Recently, she had her first solo exhibition at the Gammill Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi where all works What Endures as well as works from her new series-in-progress titled My mother says I can build a new home from clouds & I believe her were on view from January 2022 to February 2022.
To learn more about Nadia, visit her website: https://www.nadiaalexis.com