Because of Black Music IAM Festival 2023

Wiley’s love of jazz and arranging led him to fuse his jazz sounds with funk. Ever the soulful live musician, Howard has built a strong reputation for presenting jazz shows ‘that you can dance to’. On experiencing Wiley in a live setting, journalist Drew Foxman writes, “…he befitted a dignified presence by displaying his deep reverence for the musicians with whom he was collaborating, unmasking the persona of an unassuming leader. This is a musician who understands his sound, not only in an ensemble, but in the history of music. This humility, though, translates into downright explosiveness on the bandstand.”

Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice ... His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”

Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco. 

Justin Carter Walton, known professionally as Jwalt is a Grammy considered - Charting Recording Artist, Songwriter, Poet, and published Author from Oakland California, currently signed to Create Music Group. Jwalt began writing poetry at 8 years old, later finding his passion for hip-hop when he was 11 years old. Since then, Jwalt has shared stages with world renowned artist such as Nas, Wu-Tang, T-pain, Metro Boomin, Common, G-Eazy, Sheila E, E-40, Too short, Saweetie, Black thought, Talib Kweli, Jerimih, Dave East, Kamaiyah, and Daveed Diggs. In January of 2019, Jwalt was also a featured performer at the Fox Theater in Oakland Ca, celebrating Stephen Curry’s 10th year in Oakland. He has also been recognized as Oakland’s Next hip-hop star by the SF Gate. Jwalt’s hit song “The Kid” was picked up by ESPN in 2019, along with his first single of 2021 “The Taking” being featured on NBA countdown appearing on worldwide television. In 2018, Jwalt was featured on the “Best of Thizzler Cypher” gaining attention and recognition for his punchlines and lyrical ability. At 15 years old, Jwalt made his national debut on Sway in the Morning "Doomsday cypher" becoming the youngest MC to ever be a part of the Cypher on Sirius XM.

Describing vocalist/composer Amie Cota (born, Amy LaCour), American Songwriter Magazine writes: “Her husky, soulful vocals, as full-bodied as a fine wine, ache with a heartbreak fusion of fortitude and vulnerability, bringing to mind other great singers to whose league she belongs.” Amie has toured both nationally and abroad and has independently released 4 albums including the multi-grant awarded project Any Place But Here, a song cycle for voice and string quartet setting mid-20th century African American poetry to song and telling the story of the Great Migration. The work premiered at the Oakland Museum of California in 2016. This year, Amie will present her latest song cycle, Water.Bodies.Land. The performance, created in collaboration with Bay Area choreographer Sarah Crowell (Destiny Arts Center) debuts at San Francisco’s SOMArts on July 14 & 15, 2023. For more information, please visit: https://www.amiecota.com

Joyce Lee has over thirteen years experience of curating culture in eight countries. Lee has been a paid speaker/performer in places such as (but not limited to) Facebook Headquarters, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Google Headquarters. Lee has also recently founded JL Soul Camp in Sonoma County, California. Soul Camp is an annual intentional community that employs creativity as healing for/between Black and First nation womyn/non-males. Lee is a professional storyteller on WNYC’s/NPR’s Snap Judgment since 2009, mentors young women (Girls Taking Action), and volunteers for the Minnesota Prison Writing Program as well as the Twin Cities Book Festival (2022). Lee is a 2023 MFA graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University with a 4.0 gpa. 

Bay-area born and bred, jazz and gospel trained, and internationally respected, Valerie Troutt is a musical collagist, borrowing from ancestral centuries of sound, channeling spirits, and delivering the stories of our love, loss, and lives. There’s a light in this unapologetically unconventional artist/teacher/activist for whom art and activism are intertwined. Within this spiritual and social justice-driven performer is a lifelong hunger for craft, for connection, for cultural narratives and an indefatigable thirst to serve as an agape griot to a waiting and hurting people. The Sound of Peace, her long-awaited, full-length debut comes after a critically acclaimed EP and several wizening years culminating in Valerie Troutt’s acceptance of her own original artistic difference in a world of commercial carbon copies.