What are the past Waterbearers up to?
“We are alchemists of blackqueer possibility. We are intention guides, truth-tellers, healers, liberators, time-travelers, ancestors, and celestials. ”
Honora Ankong | she.they | @honooraa (fka Twitter) @yungwestafricanpoet (IG) | flow: 2024 ebb: 2025 | Gen3
Honora Ankong | the Wanderer
Honora Ankong is a poet, writer, and educator from Buea, Cameroon, currently residing in North Carolina. She is the author of the chapbook, our gods are hungry for elegies (Glass Poetry Press, 2022), a 2023 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, and she has received fellowships and residencies with The Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, and Goodyear Arts. They have published poetry in various literary magazines such as Poetry Daily, Foglifter, Cream City Review, Lolwe, and others. She currently works as a Lecturer in the English Department at UNC Greensboro.
Photo: Love Önwa Photography
Brianna Daniels | they.she.be | @blackasthecosmos @cosmosisstones | @spaceistheplace (IG) | flow: 2020 ebb: 2025 | Gen1-3
Brianna Daniels | the Dancer
AIR sun & mercury, WATER moon, EARTH rising, FIRE mars & venus
Brianna continues altering the altar as Black as the Cosmos, based in Charlotte but curating the vibes all throughout Triangle. Keep up with all of their offerings at their Instagrams linked above.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
Mariah M. | they.them | @m_lightsower | flow: 2019 ebb: 2025| Gen1-3
Mariah M. |
the LightSower
With Aquarius and Capricorn stelliums, Mariah meeting at the water feels like visiting an old friend and she welcome the wet sand ’tween their toes. Mariah has been a siren, calling out to their selves, past and future, and listening for the echoes of others, of their kinfolk. They moves through on this plane as a worldbuilder with abolition and community care at their center. M is a LightSower, ready to write, sing, light, ache and art on these Sojourns. Maybe it’s time to sink into the depths. Maybe inundation is required for transformation. One’s light can make life happen anywhere.
M. has continued growing in their vocation as LightSower with SISTORIES, previously as their Guest Curator of Programs (‘25) and Program Director/mentor for the Luminary Editorial Incubator for Black Feminist Writers and host of closing ceremonies of the LEI program, Fluid By Nature, and most recently as advisor to the Bombara-Morrison Council, a board of writers and cultureworkers intimately familiar with SISTORIES programs that will support the organization through their strategic plan. They occasionally publish their thoughts on caring for each other through societal collapse on their Substack, Selfish Mars Musings. Read at mlightsower.substack.com.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
“We are successful and crafty architects of Black art and community. We are wanderers. WE are wayfinders. We are sojourners. ”
Germane James | she.her | @gigi_jamez (IG) | Guest Sojourner | ebb/flow: Spring 2024 | Gen3
Germane James | the Dreamer
Germane James is a creative leader, curator, and producer who lives in Durham, NC and thrives in Yucatán Mexico. With her sun in Pisces, moon in Virgo and ascendent in Cancer, Germane feels most at home admiring invitingly cool, crystal waters or curled up daydreaming about her next travel adventure.
As a liminal member of Saltwater Sojourn, Germane is excited to flourish in the revolutionary, idealistic and collaborative energies that are being fostered and supported. She offers support in actualizing each other’s dreams through her toolbox of strategic hacks, fundraising expertise and curatorial instinct that promotes social change and creative exchange.
kiki nicole | they.them | @reallycolored | @thewellorganizedcreative (IG) | flow: 2020 / ebb: 2023 | Gen1 & 2
kiki nicole | the Weaver
kiki nicole is a writer and artist navigating neurodivergence, disability, and worldweaving in Charlotte, NC. They are a Pisces Sun/Scorpio Rising/Aries Moon with Venus and Mercury in Aquarius. In the sidereal birth chart, they are an Aquarius Sun/Libra Rising. That being said, Kiki thrives in the experimental, with a penchant for forging deep connections, grounding in self retreat, theorizing reality tv show drama, and curating beauty. As a member of Saltwater Sojourn, they hope to cultivate relationships with other Black Trans and Queer artists of the Carolinas to forge a creative lineage of myth-making, risk-taking, and support, regardless of location. A recipient of fellowships from The Watering Hole and Winter Tangerine, their chapbook manuscript has become a finalist for prizes at Platypus Press, Diode Editions, Cave Canem, and [PANK]. They are working on a studio residency with Charlotte’s Goodyear Arts and a publishing fellowship with Graywolf Press.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
Destiny Hemphill | she.her | @witharosegoldsoul (IG) | flow: 2019, ebb: 2021 | Gen1
Destiny Hemphill | the Retriever
Destiny Hemphill is a poet and ritualworker living with chronic pain in living on the unceded territory of the Eno-Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation (Durham, NC), and who has made homes in Tennessee, Texas, and Arkansas. A Scorpio Sun, Pisces Moon, Sagittarius Rising and lifepath 4, she bears grieftending, grounding, creative structure-making, and full-cheeked smiles as gifts to Saltwater Sojourn. She’s honored to co-create a gathering ground for collective communion, unsettling, and cleansing with Saltwater Sojourn. A recipient of fellowships from Tin House, Callalloo, and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, her chapbook Oracle: a Cosmology (Honeysuckle Press, 2018) was a finalist for the inaugural Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Prize.
Destiny continues in their role of Retriever as a profession of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, supporting students in reaching back for their on truths on their creative writing journeys.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
adé Oni | they.themme/she.her | @afrosurrealistresearchbureau | @thisheretree (IG) | flow: 2020, ebb: 2021 | Gen1
adé oni | the Earthworm
adé Oni is a gender-fluid U.S-born Yoruba child of Nigerian immigrants. adé is an afrosurrealist and multimedia eco-healing artist shapeshifting with the universe through sound, erotic breathwork, herbalism, nature writing, visual, movement, and fiber arts, queer farming and land stewardship, birth x death companionship, and presence. they are committed to wielding their creative energy towards the cultivation of resilient, communal economies, radical somatic healing and afroindigenous cultural recovery. adé is currently growing up on occupied 5 Band (Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Eno, Tutelo) Saponi Nation lands, some of which is known as Durham, NC.
adé continues in actualization as earthworm via dièdiè textile studio, bringing their craft practices “from seed to cloth and beyond” in addition to sonic spellings via their thisheretree page on IG.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
“May our way be illuminated by our common love for liberation and unapologetic Black creative expression”