Koley Berry is a Hume Fogg High School senior who has been immersed in the arts for as long as she can remember. She plays violin and guitar, sings, writes, and loves reading. Her inspiration comes from listening to music on long walks and in conversation. Creating has always been a frequent activity of hers, whether through song, prose, or composition.
Koley Berry
Larkin Boyd
Larkin Boyd
Larkin Boyd is a sophomore at Harpeth Hall and a very curious person. She is the current caretaker of many (struggling) plants and is a co-founder of her school’s Creative Writing Club. In her spare time she likes to take walks, make tea, and create various crafts that most likely will never be finished. When not at home procrastinating homework by reading, writing, or drawing, she enjoys learning new instruments, playing video games, and making up new worlds.
Thalia Dills
Thalia Dills is a high school senior at Hume-Fogg and a lover of all things artistic. She herself is an artist in more ways than one — she enjoys making visual art, composing songs on her guitar, and almost every type of creative writing. She finds that often her inspiration comes from seeing other artists at work, and therefore she is always searching for more to perceive and create.
Thalia Dills
Kelly Ann Graff
Kelly Ann Graff
Kelly Ann Graff is an educator, writer, and interdisciplinary artist living and working in Nashville, TN. They view their work as community and ecological archive, documenting the values, practices, and environment of queer and trans artists in the south. Their fiber art has been included in group shows at Frist Art Museum, Elephant Gallery, COOP Gallery, ClearStory Arts, and Gallery X among others. Their writing has been featured in the Southern Festival of Books, Wussy, Bible Belt Queers, Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, BookPage, and various zines.
Jarred "JJ" Johnson
Jarred Johnson, AKA JJ, grew up in the karst landscape of south-central Kentucky. He got his MFA in fiction from UNC Wilmington. He writes about rural people and forgotten places. His writing has been in the Oxford American and Bat City Review. He recently moved to Nashville where he’s working on a novel about the metaverse and the end of coal mining.
Jarred "JJ" Johnson
Lane Scott Jones
Lane Scott Jones
Lane Scott Jones is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and speaker whose work has appeared in Longreads, Repeller, Good Grit, Nashville Scene, and in translation in Internazionale. Her writing has been awarded a 2025 ASJA Prize for First-Person Essay, selected as runner-up for the W.W. Norton Writers Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and supported by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She writes the Substack newsletter Second Rodeo. Learn more at lanescottjones.com.
DeAngelo McBride
DeAngelo McBride is a fifteen-year-old writer and musician from Muskegon, Michigan, who moved to Nashville and is currently attending the Nashville School of the Arts. His creative work spans immersive game design and emotionally resonant storytelling, earning him a quarterfinalists spot at the Nashville Film Festival for his screenplay Ballad of a Poor Man.
DeAngelo McBride
Hannah Rodriguez
Hannah Rodriguez
Hannah is a junior at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. She has a passion for the arts and creativity through writing, playing guitar, and drawing. When she is not in school, she enjoys spending time outside by participating in activities such as camping, backpacking, and hiking. She does indoor rock climbing almost every day and plays flag football in the spring. She likes to spend time with her family through card games and movies.
Rudrapriya Shanker
Rudrapriya is an Indian immigrant writer, somatic therapist and Tantrik priestess devoted to cyclical living, insurgent care and motherhood as a spiritual practice. Her poetry bridges ancient nondual wisdom with intimate personal truth, revealing the body as a site of expression-awakening. Rooted in her ancestral lineage of liberation, Rudrapriya’s words are embodied spells that restore the relationship between the daily and the divine, the self and the collective.
Rudrapriya Shanker
Elizabeth Upshur
Elizabeth Upshur
Elizabeth Upshur is an actress and storyteller raised in Tennessee. She is a contributing editor at The Seventh Wave and local Black owned company Blazon Publishing. She is a Fulbright alumna, Rock’n’Roll marathoner, forever Miss Tennessee Earth 2018, and bachatera. She is the founder of The Matinee Club, a virtual workshop for film buffs, screenwriters, and film writers. In her free time, she sketches and volunteers at the Nashville based food pantry The Store.
