What Does Revitalization Mean?

Brittany Delaney is a Spoken Word Artist/Arts Educator born and raised in Minnesota. She has been performing on the scene for 19 years after getting her start in Slam Poetry. Brittany has participated in Spoken Word groups such as The Minnesota Spoken Word Association, Quest for the Voice, Brave New Voices (HBO), Teens Rock the Mic, and various Slam organizations. She’s facilitated poetry workshops in K-12 schools and university-based establishments across the country and worked as a traveling Curriculum Consultant for the last eight years, promoting literacy, inclusion, and safe space learning environments through culturally responsive (and responsible) curriculum and practices. She is currently serving as the Executive Director for Black Table Arts Cooperative in Minneapolis, MN.

Keno Evol is a writer and arts organizer. He is the founder of the Black Table Arts cooperative, a pay what you can art co-op for black artists in Minnesota located in south minneapolis. He is currently pursuing a degree in Ethnic Studies. He is editor of A Garden Of Black Joy: Global Poetry From The Edges of Liberation And Living. His work hones in on the literary arts and the black radical tradition as curriculum for the future. Evol has been published in Split This Rock, Radius Lit and Vinyl. Evol has received the 2022 Minnesota Campus Compact Presidents Student Leadership Award from the Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship, the Verve Grant, the Beyond the Pure fellowship, The Emerging Writers Grant, and The Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for his work. His essays are available at MNArtists.com, through the Walker Art Center.

Shanai Matteson is a visual artist, writer, and cultural organizer. She lives in rural Palisade, Minnesota, where she grew-up. Shanai is currently working to help organize cultural and community space at Akiing / Welcome Water Protectors, a pipeline resistance camp established by Indigenous women during the movement to stop the Line 3 oil pipeline. As a non-native woman whose family settled less than a mile from Akiing, Shanai sees her activist work here as a kind of service and repair, and a way to encourage a just transition for Indigenous and rural communities in the deep north. As an artist, Shanai creates visual and literary work to honor the complex and interdependent nature of identity, action, material, and memory.

Gudrun Lock works with performance, sculpture, video, painting, and collaborative, socially engaged art practices. In 2019 and 2020 she received grants from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and in 2021 and 2022 from their Institute for Advanced Study to engage human and other-than-human partners in a long-term project focused on revitalizing the buffers of active rail land. Lock knows that trees, rocks, and rivers are part of a living metabolism whose transformative powers endure even amidst ongoing extraction, colonialisms, and unsatiated consumption. Born in California, and raised in Montreal, she has lived in Minneapolis for 24 years. Her work has been installed in galleries in the US and Canada, foreclosed homes, empty storefronts, the Atlantic Ocean, and a hole in her backyard.

Kathryn Savage is a hybrid writer whose debut lyric essay collection GROUNDGLASS is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, the Guardian, Poets & Writers, the Academy of American Poets, the Village Voice, and the Best Small Fictions of 2015, among others. Recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, she’s been awarded grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Millay Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. In 2018, she was awarded the O’Rourke Travel Fellowship and the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship from the University of Minnesota to research and write about volcanoes in Iceland. Savage teaches creative writing and composition at MCAD and at the University of Minnesota, where she is pursuing a second MFA in poetry.