Jazz Poetry 2025: Nicole Mitchell Quintet, Chen Chen, Cameron Lovejoy, Roya Marsh, Ajibola Tolase

City of Asylum’s iconic Jazz Poetry Month festival continues this week with a set of acclaimed poets and musicians! Each Jazz Poetry program begins with a full set from a live jazz band, followed by a collaboration with local and international poets. In these collaborations, poets share their work alongside the musicians, the two art forms melding to create that signature Jazz Poetry improvisational style that offers something exciting, new, and unique with each individual performance. 

Keeping the celebratory energy going, the second night of Jazz Poetry Month welcomes Nicole Mitchell, the former Director of Jazz Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, playing tribute to a selection of Pittsburgh Greats, including Geri Allen, George Benson, and Erroll Garner. Nicole and her quintet are accompanied by poets Chen Chen, whose debut collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was longlisted for the National Book Award; Cameron Lovejoy, a printer and poet who operates the slow press Tilted House; Roya Marsh, author of the poetry collection dayliGht, which was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and Ajibola Tolase, a Nigerian poet & essayist, whose collection 2000 Blacks won the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Featured Musicians:

Nicole Mitchell: flute & compositions

Anqwenique Kinsel: vocals

Irene Monteverde: piano

Jeff Grubbs: bass

James Johnson III: drums

About the Band:

Nicole Mitchell is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, and composer. Emerging from Chicago’s creative music community in the 90s, she was the first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Nicole’s music celebrates contemporary African American culture with a creative process informed by literature, narrative, and a special interest in science fiction. For over 20 years, Nicole has utilized her art to create alternative worlds that “bridge the familiar with the unknown” with her Black Earth Ensemble. Encompassing philosophy and a strong debt to the writings of Octavia E. Butler, her music invites intercultural collaboration. As a soloist, bandleader and improviser, she has repeatedly performed throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. With an impressive 15 year run (2010–2024) as “Top Flutist of the Year” by both Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association, she is celebrated for her development of a unique improvisational language on the flute. Mitchell is a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of several awards, including the Doris Duke Artist Award, the United States Artist Award, the Herb Alpert Award, and more. Nicole is currently a Professor of Music at the University of Virginia. At home in North Carolina, she enjoys being a mother and grandmother.

About the Poets:

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018–2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

Cameron Lovejoy is a printer and poet who operates Tilted House, a slow press that publishes books of poetry under letterpress machines. In 2025, Eulalia published his translation of Argentina’s Olivia Milberg’s dos dedos de agua. Different things appear in Annulet, DIAGRAM, Ghost Proposal, and others. He lives and prints in New Orleans.

Roya Marsh is a Bronx, New York native and a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection dayliGht, which was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. The former Poet-in-Residence at Urban Word NYC, Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, and Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and published in Poetry, The Village Voice, Nylon, Huffington Post, and in the collection The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic.

Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He graduated from the creative writing MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His chapbook, Koola Lobitos, was published as a part of the New Generation African Poets Series edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani in 2021. His writing has appeared in LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and has received a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He is the 2023–2024 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University. He is the author of 2000 Blacks, winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is open for dinner from 5–10 pm. Please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.