J'Otis Powell!

UPTOWN Research Department OPWLL@AOL.COM 612.821.9123 J. Otis Powell! works as a poet (writer), media producer, performance artist, producer and curator of performance events, arts administrator, an educator & a consultant. Recent productions include: PEOPLE POWERED RADIO: Twenty-five Years of Fresh Air, a radio documentary for KFAI. WELKIN RENDEZVOUS, a radio production featuring community ritual as programming. ART & SPIRITUAL MATTERS, performance and radio documentary. His poetry has been published in two books of his own work: THEOLOGY (Traffic Street Press) & My Tongue Has No Bone (Porter Publishing), and numerous anthologies and magazines including: ache Magazine, RUMINATOR Review, DrumVoices, Siren, Futures Magazine, The Drumming Between Us, Collage, Hungry Mind Review, A Definitive Guild To the Twin Cities, A View from the Loft, Colors Magazine, The Artist´s Voice, the Star Tribune, Insight News, Air Check, Public Art Review, Art Paper, The North Coast Review, Performance Twin Cities, the Arts Midwest Jazzletter, Twin Cities Jazznotes, Powderhorn Writer´s Festival Broadside Project, The Critical Stageand Critical Conditions. A new collection of poems entitled: EMANCIPATION STORIES: POEMS WRITTEN IN THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM is currently seeking a publisher. His current work includes an autobiographical prose book of creative nonfiction with a working title of INTERSECTIONS: CONFLUENCE IN A POETIC LIFE, and a collaboration with photographer Bill Cottman titled FOUR WOMEN. Awards & Accomplishments J. Otis has been the recipient a Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, two Jerome Mid Career Artists Grants 1996 & 1999 and a year 2000-2001 Intermedia Arts Interdisciplinary McKnight Fellowship. He was a founding producer on the award winning Write On Radio!, the Twin Cities literary connection, at KFAI-FM in Minneapolis, he also worked as Communities´ Liaison & Program Director for Interdisciplinary Collaborations at The Loft Literary Center, the nation's most comprehensive independent literary organization. Also among the awards and honors that Powell! has received for his work are: Silver Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You 1985 from the Pensacola Press Club, Gold Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You 1986 Pensacola Press Club, listed in WHO's Who in Black America 1987, A Juneteenth Poetry Award in 1995, selected as a presenter in the Good Thunder Series at Mankato State 1995, selected as a Visiting Scholar for University Center Rochester 1998 & A Special Merit Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters as a producer of Write On Radio! 1998. His words have also been recorded, to date, on three CDs: THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution, Words Will Heal The Wound, an anthologies produced for National Poetry Month and THIS CAT IS OUT, in association with The New Day Blues Band. J. Otis publishes in mid air as well through performances with ensembles such as STIGMATISM World Ensemble, AfrikaÕs Ensemble, Revolutionary Hearts, SIRIUS B, OGU, NOW!, tHE eDGE eNSEMBLE, The New Day Blues Band, IMP ORK, Tribo, and DRUMMING WORDS/SPOKEN HEARTS. As a producer: Creator, writer and producer of Sketches of You, a weekly arts television magazine and writer, narrator and associate producer of MAKING A STEP, an on the road documentary of the Mighty Clouds of Joy, both for WSRE-TV in Pensacola, FL. J. Otis worked as researcher and segment producer for RESEARCH JOURNAL, a TV series, at Rarig Center for the University of Minnesota. He conceived, wrote and produced a performance arts show titled THE GODS MUST BE PIMPS, in a series for Intermedia Arts. Other stage productions include Holy Ghosts Dance, at Red Eye, SEAMLESS, at the Southern Theater,THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution, a CD recording and a performance arts event at Studio 6A in Hennepin Center for the Arts & at the Knitting Factory in New York City and STIGMATISM at Intermedia Arts. EMANCIPATION STORIES: Poetry, Music & Images of Precise Resistance was curated and produced by J. Otis Powell! for the stage of the Historic Paramount Theater in St. Cloud Minnesota. For the centennial celebration of the birth of Langston Hughes, J. Otis was instrumental in staging two events, SIMPLY LANGSTON at the University of Minnesota and LOTTA LANGSTON at the Babylon International Gallery. In recognition of KFAI´s 25th anniversary he chaired a committee that produced PEOPLE POWERED RADIO: Twenty-five Years Of Fresh Air. Education J. Otis Powell! is a poet & philosopher working in an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentric lore and culture. His work has been greatly informed by an oral tradition in literature, music and the Black Arts Movement. He was trained from early childhood as an actor and worked for two decades in black and conventional theater, film and television. J. Otis received his undergraduate degree in television production from Alabama A&M University, a historic black college, where he minored in philosophy. His theater skills have been translated into performance art and his talent with philosophy influences whatever art he creates. Powell! later studied creative writing with Gloria Anzudua and performance poetry with Quincy Troupe. Trained in Open Space Technology (OST) by Harrison Owen at a conference conducted at the University of St. Catherine. J. Otis is an alumni of The Institute for the Renewal of Community Leadership, a program of St. Thomas University.

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