RESIDENT ARTISTS
AND SCHOLARS
BRANDY BARKER
Parneshia Jones
Parneshia Jones is an editor and writer living in Chicago. The author of the poetry collection Vessel (2015), she has published poems in a range of literary journals and anthologies, including The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), Poetry Speaks Who I Am (2010), and She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems (2011), edited by Caroline Kennedy. Jones’s poems have been featured on Chicago Public Radio, and she is a member of Affrilachian Poets, a collective of black poets from Appalachia. The recipient of a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, a Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and an Aquarius Press Legacy Award, Jones has received commissions from Art for Humanity in South Africa and Shorefront Legacy in Chicago. She serves on the boards of Cave Canem, the Guild Complex, and other arts organizations.
Brandy Barker is a practiced arts leader with a dynamic career spanning both academia and the creative industry. As Chief Creative Officer and Assistant Vice President for Placemaking at the University of West Georgia, her ability to integrate diverse elements to create a unified whole has led to engaging work in communications, marketing, and the arts. In addition to her involvement in the arts, she is a certified yoga instructor.
SUSANNAH MINTZ
Susannah B. Mintz is Professor of English at Skidmore College. Her most recent books are Hypochondria: In Sickness and In Story (2026) and the memoir Love Affair in the Garden of Milton: Poetry, Loss, and the Meaning of Unbelief (2021), which won the 2023 Memoir Book prize for Literature and Grief. Her essays have appeared in Five Points, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also received notable mentions from Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. A scholar of disability studies, she is the author of several monographs and co-editor of three critical volumes on disability and life writing.
Nathan Rees
Nathan Rees is an art historian whose research focuses on the intersections of art, colonization, and religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century West. He has published, presented, and curated exhibitions on monuments to Western settlement, representations of Native Peoples, and the theology of visuality. His monograph Mormon Visual Culture and the American West was published by Routledge in 2021.
JONATHON SMITH
Jonathon Smith holds a B.A. in music performance from Lander University, an M.M. in musicology from the University of Tennessee, and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois. He served as University carillonneur for Lander University and was the first graduate student Chimesmaster for the University of Illinois’ Altgeld Chimes organization. Jonathon is a multi-instrumentalist with experience playing a wide range of musical styles, from the Irish harp and Bulgarian kaval, to classical flute and pipe organ. He is currently lecturer of musicology at the University of Illinois.
Jeffrey Thomson
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of multiple books, including most recently Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory (2022) and Half/Life: New and Selected Poems (2019), both from Alice James Books. He also published the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks (poems), The Complete Poems of Catullus, as well as having edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.