Persimmon Creek Residency holds five-year reunion event in Arrow Rock

This summer, the Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency returns to the Village of Arrow Rock, Missouri, for a special reunion event celebrating and reflecting upon five years of creative residencies.

Join us Saturday, June 21 at 6:00 pm at Arrow Rock’s Historic Christian Church (711 Main Street) for a relaxed, reflective public conversation about the residency program, the creative process, and the historic African-American communities of Arrow Rock, Saline County, and Central Missouri. Guests will include returning residents X.C. Atkins, Glenn North, Brian Palmer and Sonie Joi Thompson-Ruffin, as well as members of the Persimmon Creek advisory board and the Arrow Rock community. The event is free and open to the public.

Also on June 21, stop by Arrow Rock’s Historic Brown’s Chapel (710 High Street) as we celebrate the work of former resident and renowned Columbia painter Byron Smith, who sadly passed away last summer. A selection of Byron’s paintings will be available to view from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm thanks to the generous efforts of his friends and family, among them Greig Thompson of the State Historical Society of Missouri. The show is also free and open to the public.

Established in 2021, the Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency is designed to bring emerging and established writers, artists, and musicians to live and work in historic Arrow Rock, located in Saline County, Missouri. The residency program was created by an advisory board of private citizens, including current and former inhabitants of Arrow Rock, Marshall, Columbia, and Kansas City. In addition to hosting creative residents and supporting their work, the program hopes to introduce the Village of Arrow Rock to a wider national creative audience; recognize the historic presence of African American lives in Arrow Rock; and enrich present-day awareness of this one-time vibrant community. Currently, the program is funded by a grant from the Arrow Rock Improvement Committee and gifts from private donors. In addition, the residency’s advisory board works with the nonprofit Experience Arrow Rock to ensure future funding and resources.

Returning residents’ bios are included below. For questions or more information, please contact program director Nancy Blossom at persimmoncreekresidency@gmail.com

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X.C. ATKINS is the author of Grace Street Alley and Other Stories (Makeout Creek Books) and The Desperado Days (Trnsfr Books). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Paper Darts, BULL, Akashic Books’ Richmond Noir, Tusculum Review and elsewhere. In 2020, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2021, he was selected for the inaugural Persimmons Creek Writers and Artists Residency. An alumnus of Virginia Commonwealth University, he lives in Los Angeles.

GLENN NORTH is currently the Director of Inclusive Learning & Creative Impact at the Museum of Kansas City. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Glenn is the author of City of Song, a collection of poems inspired by Kansas City’s rich jazz tradition and the triumphs and tragedies of the African American experience. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a Callaloo creative writing fellow, and a recipient of the Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award. His work has appeared in the Langston Hughes Review, Caper Literary Journal, Platte Valley Review, New Letters, KC Studio, Cave Canem Anthology XII, The African American Review, and American Studies Journal. Glenn’s ekphrastic and visual poems have appeared in art exhibitions at the American Jazz Museum, the Leedy-Volkos Art Center, the Bunker Center for the Arts, the Portfolio Gallery (St. Louis), the Greenlease Gallery, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He collaborated with legendary jazz musician Bobby Watson on the critically acclaimed recording project Check Cashing Day, and he recently hosted the podcast A Frame of Mind for the Nelson-Atkins. 

BRIAN PALMER lives in Virginia, where for his focus — as an image maker, journalist, citizen, and descendant of enslaved people — has been illuminating what his collaborator and wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, calls “the afterlife of Jim Crow.” Brian and Erin see this legacy of systemic racism and privilege in the continued funding of Confederate monuments and sites across the South, even as the Black Lives Matter Movement complicates and enriches the collective American narrative; and in the persistent neglect and underfunding of African American sites of memory. Since the end of 2014, Brian and Erin have been part of the volunteer effort to reclaim East End Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground in Henrico County, Virginia.

Palmer’s work — writing, photography, audio, and video — has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and on Buzzfeed, PBS, the BBC, and Reveal. Before going freelance in 2002, he served in a number of staff positions — Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report; staff writer at Fortune; and on-air correspondent at CNN. He began his career in the late 1980s as a fact-checker for the Village Voice.

With colleagues Seth Wessler and Esther Kaplan, Palmer received the Peabody Award, National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, and Online Journalism Award for “Monumental Lies,” a 2018 Reveal radio story about public funding for Confederate sites. He is a founding member of the Friends of East End Cemetery, an organization devoted to the reclamation of a historic African American burial ground under threat from multiple forces. He’s also among the founders of the Descendants Council of relatives of African Americans laid to rest in segregated burial grounds in greater Richmond and concerned citizens from the broader Black community. In 2008, he received a Ford Foundation Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom grant to complete a television-length documentary about his three trips to Iraq to document the actions of a US Marine combat unit, 1st Battalion/2d Regiment.

Palmer is a member of the board of directors of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where he earned his MFA in 1990. He serves as SVA’s representative to Writing with Light (wwlight.org), an initiative he started with theorist Fred Ritchin in 2022 in response to the incursion of generative artificial intelligence into the realm of nonfiction or straight photography. From August 2021 to June 2023, he served as the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

SONIÉ JOI THOMPSON-RUFFIN is a renowned contemporary fabric artist, fabric designer, author, lecturer and independent curator. Sonié has conducted workshops and lectures on African American quilting, and she has been invited to exhibit her extraordinary textile artwork at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the White House Rotunda, the David C. Driskell Art Center, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Bethesda Medical Center, the Spencer Museum, the Leedy Voulkos Art Center, the Holter Museum of Art, Miami Basel, the Kansas City Museum, the New England Quilt Museum, the Mulvane Museum, KCAI Crossroads Gallery, the Portfolio Gallery, the Epstein Art Gallery, the Carter / Kemper Art Center, the UMKC African American Culture House, Bates College, Harvard University, Iowa State University, Lincoln University, Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, and a host of quilt guilds, galleries, and museums in the United States, Africa and Europe.

Sonie’s artwork is held in museum, gallery, corporate and private collections in the United States, Africa, and Europe. She is the author of The Soulful Art of African American Quilts and Opening Day: 14 Quilts Celebrating the Life and Times of Negro Leagues Baseball. She is also the designer of fabric collections Drums of Afrika, Jumping the Broom and My African Village. Her artwork has appeared in KC Art Studio, the Kansas City Star, the Washington Post and New Letters Magazine.

BYRON SMITH (1960-2024) was born in Columbia, Missouri. He attended the University of Missouri – Columbia, where he pursued drawing, painting and printmaking within the Fine Arts Department. From 1992 to 1996, he co-owned Columbia’s Mythmaker Gallery. He was a longtime member of the Orr Street Artist Guild, where he occupied a studio.

As a painter, Smith worked in oil, watercolor and casein. He was best known for his landscapes of the Missouri River Valley. Smith also studied anatomical drawing and enjoyed working from the human figure when not in the landscape. Additionally, inspired by his interest in local and regional Missouri history, Smith collected works on paper and prints.

Smith’s paintings appear in multiple collections, among them the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia; The Museum of Art and Archeology at the University of Missouri; the Walters Gallery of the Boone County History & Culture Center; the Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art at Central Methodist University; the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia; and numerous private collections.

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The Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency is inspired by the long-time presence of the historic African American community in Arrow Rock. The cottage in which participants reside stands in the footprint of the parsonage for Brown’s Chapel, founded in 1869 and home to the community’s Freewill Baptist Church. “As a native Saline Countian with direct ties to Black descendants of Arrow Rock and nearby Pennytown, I am profoundly proud of the work that has been and is currently being done to shine a positive light on contributions and impact African Americans had on this area,” says advisory board member Clarence Smith, of Kansas City. “Persimmon Creek reinforces my desire and need to embrace the importance of teaching, preserving, and celebrating African American history. In the current climate where omitting and distorting history is being commanded, the work so many of us are doing with Persimmon Creek is of extreme importance.”

The Persimmon Creek Residency takes its name from the 1938 children’s novel Persimmon Creek, written by Marshall author and native Nellie Page Carter. Designed for young readers across races, the book tells the story of two Black children who visit their grandmother in a settlement near Arrow Rock. It was the first of Carter’s four novels, and the author based her work on three years of research in Arrow Rock. As a result, Persimmon Creek offers a rare glimpse into the village’s historic African American community, and it reflects important Black landmarks, including Brown’s Chapel, Brown Lodge, the Black schoolhouse, and Whittie’s Over East restaurant and dance hall.

For questions or more information, please visit our FAQ page or email us via persimmoncreekresidency@gmail.com

Handbill graphic by Dan Auman