By Bob Arnold
Nadia Alexis has joined Mississippi School of the Arts as Literary Arts Instructor for 2022-2023 school year.
Alexis comes from Oxford, Mississippi, where she is completing her PhD in English with a Creative Writing concentration at the University of Mississippi. A poet, photographer, educator and organizer, she was born in the Harlem section of New York City to Haitian immigrants. She holds a BA in Political Science from Union College, where she also studied French and focused on Africana Studies. At the University of Mississippi, she also earned her MFA in Creative Writing and taught Black literature and first-year writing courses.
During the summers, Alexis 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 served as a 2018-2019 curator of the Trobar Ric Poetry Reading Series based in Oxford, Mississippi.
Kweli Journal, Indiana Review, Mixtape, Mud Season Review, Shenandoah and Texas Review have published or will be publishing Alexis' poetry. On She Goes and BLACK STEW have published her prose and personal essay writing, and TORCH Literary Journal’s 2016 Spring/Summer issue, Fields Magazine, Forgotten Lands, Mixtape and Mfon have featured her photography.
Primarily a self-taught photographer, Alexis started that aspect of her arts career in 2014. Her "What Endures" series has been viewed at exhibitions in Havana, Cuba, Detroit and Harlem as well as the University of Mississippi Recently, she had her first solo exhibition at the Gammill Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi, which featured all of her "What Endures" works and others from a new series-in-progress -- "My Mother Says I Can Build a New Home form Clouds and I Believe Her." were on view from January 2022 to February 2022.
Alexis 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.
Alexis is currently working on her first full-length hybrid manuscript of poems and photographs, building bodies of photographic works and developing a young adult novel-in-verse.