Kresge Arts in Detroit and WDET have partnered to present a virtual artist salon series featuring the 2021 Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Awardees. This nine part series includes never before seen video presentations by awarded metro Detroit artists and writers followed by a public Q+A and conversation moderated by Emmy award winning journalist with BridgeDetroit, Orlando P. Bailey.

Ann Eskridge’s passion for African American history explores, through fiction, playwriting, and screenwriting, the Underground Railroad; all-Black towns in Oklahoma; and the Pekin Theater, the first Black musical theater. Eskridge was a broadcast journalist before becoming a freelance writer and teacher. She has dabbled in politics, working for a Republican lieutenant governor and a Democratic Detroit city council president. She also helped develop the mass media program at Golightly Career and Technical Center, and worked as a speechwriter. Throughout all these career moves, she wrote.

Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. Her poems have been published by Wayne State Literary Review, Columbia Journal, Glass Poetry, Sugar House Review, and others. De La O co-founded the Estuary Collective with three other Black femme poets and together they offer free programming and a safe space for emerging writers of color online. She is a poetry editor for Kissing Dynamite Poetry, has toured the country performing with the Moth Mainstage, and writes BROWN STUDY, a monthly poetry column at THE POETRY QUESTION.

Rochelle Marrett is a Jamaican fiction writer whose work seeks to be both an ode to her country and a critical examination of certain socio-political sentiments. Her writing also strives to articulate the everyday complexities of Black immigrant life in a compelling and unsettling manner that disrupts long-held assumptions. Marrett was recently named a MacDowell Fellow and a 2021 Pen America Emerging Voices Fellow. In 2019, she was a Room Project Fellow in Detroit. Her work has been long-listed for the 2021 Disquiet Fiction Prize, received residency support from Tin House, and workshop support from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, among others. Marrett holds a BA in English from The College of Wooster, where she graduated with honors. Currently, she resides in metro Detroit with her husband and daughter and is at work on her debut novel.