Meet the Waterbearers
“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 | 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 | Gen1-3
Brianna Daniels | the Dancer
AIR sun & mercury, WATER moon, EARTH rising, FIRE mars & venus
Brianna meets at the water transmuting in the direction of joy and liberation beyond all circumstances through improvised and intentional inspiration, body, sound, metal, and space craft.
They be bringing my years of trained and intuitive movement, elements of the theater, and channeled insight to this space.
Her desire is to bring the precise and resonant light filled medicine of joy into this work. This world is loud. Brianna’s joy has been their medicine to bring the mess to a mumble when I'm ill equipped to mute it.
They aspire to bring and share that sweetness. Altering the altar.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
Mariah M. | they.them | @mariahm_ink | flow: 2019 | 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.
Mariah M. is a 2024 Roots.Wounds. Words Speculative Fiction fellow under River Solomon and a ‘24-25 Diaspora Solidarity Lab Community Fellow. They are also he inaugural Artist-in-Residence at The Beautiful Project (c/o 2023) and a ‘17 Emergent Poet Fellow of the National Poetry Foundation* and Crescendo Literary. M is also a Watering Hole Fellow (2017, 2019), a BIPOC workshop for writers based in the South. They are Blackqueer and fat all the time, and femme when they feel like it. Some of their written poetry can be found via voicemail poems (Summer 2022) and the Neighbor News Pan-African News Service (April 2022).
*M is one of the 2000+ writers who boycotted The Poetry Foundation due to their censorship of anti-genocide voices & lack of an anti-imperialist public stance. This boycott has since concluded as of March 2024
photo: Love Önwa Photography
“We are successful and crafty architects of Black art and community. We are wanderers. WE are wayfinders. We are sojourners. ”
Past Members
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 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 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.
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 very lit about co-creating inside this illustrious SaltWater Sojourn collar system. they hope that this experience brings deeper sonic awareness and bodearthly love for the beings that come through to share with us. 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.
photo: Love Önwa Photography
“May our way be illuminated by our common love for liberation and unapologetic Black creative expression”