Norfolk artist who explores stuttering, Blackness and history awarded $50,000 grant and fellowship
Jerome Ellis stutters the most when he says his own name. So he’s given himself the moniker “JJJJJerome Ellis.”
The poet, composer and writer sings, plays the saxophone and flute, and researches Blackness, speech, divinity and nature, and how they intersect for his work.
Ellis, a Virginia Beach native who lives in Norfolk, is one of 63 people selected for the 2022 United States Artists fellowship program. For Ellis, that means an unrestricted $50,000 grant to further his work.
The news was announced Wednesday. Since 2006, the Chicago-based arts group has given $36 million to artists across disciplines including architecture and design, media, music, theater and performance.
Artists are anonymously nominated by a group of arts professionals and then invited to apply. More than 500 did, a spokesperson said.
“I am so grateful to the person who nominated me, and to everyone who labored to offer me this opportunity,” Ellis wrote in an email. He also thanked his parents John and Pauline, and brother, Kelvin.
The grant, he said, will help cover living expenses and a car while he works on two poetry manuscripts and an album. He also has concerts planned for the U.S. and Europe this spring and summer. Some of the concerts are part of a tour for his recent album and book “The Clearing.” The concerts will be a mix of his singing, performing and reciting poetry.
Ellis first got into the arts as a student at the Old Donation Center, a school for gifted students in Virginia Beach now known as Brickell Academy. He was part of Odyssey of the Mind, an improvisational problem-solving group.
“I don’t remember why I first joined, but it was probably because I had fun doing it, and it made me feel safe and free, which is still true about my relationship to art,” he said. “I think being an artist is one of my callings. My family and friends and communities have encouraged me to follow that calling.”
He played violin in elementary school and learned to play the saxophone from instructors Ken Poe and Alex Myers. Ellis later went to Princess Anne High School, where he played tenor saxophone in a wind ensemble and the Speed of Sound Jazz band under director John Boyd. Ellis graduated in 2007.
“My gratitude to these three teachers is unending,” Ellis said.
He now teaches music in person and online at Yale University.
One of his projects, “On Fugitive Speech,” uses 18th- and 19th-century advertisements for enslaved people, including an Aug. 24, 1751, advertisement from King William County.
He also said he was inspired by poet M. NourbeSe Philip, who did similar reconstruction poetry with a legal case from the 18th century: A ship was on its way to the Caribbean and more than 100 enslaved people were thrown overboard, said Ellis, who was born to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants.
“The practice of the daily engagement with the advertisements is an ancestral practice, especially when I deal with ads from Jamaica, where there is a small but a very real possibility that one of the runaways described is a blood relation of mine,” he said in a November 2020 virtual discussion with the Yale School of Art.
Ellis said historians such as Eugene Genovese have often deemed stutters among enslaved people as signs of fear or anxiety, but it’s not always so cut and dry. Genovese wrote about enslaved people who stuttered in his book, “Roll, Jordan, Roll.”
“Stuttering is, in my experience, never transparent, never clear, not even to myself,” Ellis said during his virtual discussion. “I think it’s a further form of power. It resists prediction, it resists legibility and it resists control.”
Saleen Martin, 757-446-2027, saleen.martin@pilotonline.com
