April is National Poetry Month and UVA Library is pleased to announce that poet MaKshya Tolbert, the inaugural Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence, will deliver a talk on place-based poetics and creative process on April 18. Tolbert was one of five winners of the 2024 National Poetry Series competition; her first collection, “Shade is a place,” will be released by Penguin Books in October.
The Shannon Library Artist in Residence Award is given to one practicing artist working in any medium who is local to Central Virginia. The Art in Library Spaces committee selected Tolbert for the award based on a recommendation from the Charlottesville-based New City Arts Initiative, where Tolbert completed a residency in 2023.
“Our project requires artists to be in community, and we love that MaKshya’s work is shaped by her interest in language and weaving historical and literary connections into artistic installations,” said Meg Kennedy, the Library’s Curator of Material Culture and co-chair of the Art in Library Spaces committee. “Her simultaneous focus on poetry, expression, artistic installations — all with an emphasis on the vestiges of Virginia’s history of enslavement — produces work that is deeply relevant to our contemporary communities and the legacies we’ve inherited.”
A 2024 graduate of UVA’s M.F.A. program in poetry, Tolbert was raised by her grandmother in Arlington, Virginia, received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, and studied gastronomy in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. “I lived away from Virginia for as long as I could and have been thinking a lot since I began making my way back about how afraid I was to have a life here,” Tolbert said. “I came back to Virginia with a lot of sorrow and fear about my familial past and also about our shared slave tradition past.”
Tolbert said she wanted to “cultivate a renewed sense of place” when she returned to her home state. “I came back here trying to build a more sincere intimacy with myself, my family, my poetics, the South,” she said. She rented an apartment in North Downtown Charlottesville and looked for ways to reanimate some sense of place. “I wanted to do something close to home and be that lady who gets to really live in a neighborhood and have a full life,” she said.
Tolbert began attending Charlottesville City Council meetings and, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, joined the Tree Commission, which advises the city on the planting, preservation, and removal of public, city-owned trees in Charlottesville. She became captivated by the willow oak trees that shade the Downtown Mall (and their stresses) and observed the arborists perform pruning and removal work to keep the trees healthy. “To watch them reclaim the integrity of those forms, and to make space to only thin out that which can no longer provide shade and not be hazardous — for me, it was space clearing. I liked the clarity of the work,” she said. Tolbert led “shade walks” from east to west on the Downtown Mall, inviting others to observe the tree canopy and how it contributes to communal well-being. Her near-daily observations of the trees and the shade and the relief they provide anchor the poems in “Shade is a place.”
“I have always been drawn to plants,” said Tolbert, who has a certificate in ecological horticulture from UC Santa Cruz. “The first poems I ever wrote as a kid were about a plant that I named Hope.” Tolbert’s “Shade is a place” poetry project allowed her to look closely at the city’s tree canopy as well as her own inner life (and the connections between the two). “My work is informed by the forester, the contractors, the arborists, commissioners — people who have never spoken to me about poetry,” she said. “I had my horticultural degree, and I gardened and farmed when I was at Stanford, but being part of a forestry and arborist community is new. To want that in the South, in the wake of so much forced forestry … I’m really committed to the possibility that life can happen in the aftermath of slavery, or a city’s violent history. There is a deep capacity for life and recreation and intimacy and stewardship to happen.”
Tolbert has brought that spirit of stewardship to the Library, where, as part of her residency, she has full access to the Library’s collections and technical support. She has been working on a new, two-wall art installation that will be displayed in Shannon Library from July–December 2025 (in the northwest corner of the third floor). The installation will be an articulation of new research she is doing in Special Collections on the self-emancipation of enslaved people in the 19th century (Harriet Jacobs, in particular), as well as investigations of the landscape at Monticello. “Monticello continues to pull me in for reasons I don’t fully understand,” she said. “I'm just recognizing how much awe and enthusiasm happens when I'm in the midst of Black inner life and a few different successions of forest. … I’m thinking about how recording the weather and measuring trees and having a sense of erosion and wind and the atmospheric conditions of time and place up there lend themselves to my own easefulness and sense of inquiry. If I try to walk the paths that were for leisure and solitude that Jefferson carved out for himself, would I be willing to let myself also live in that kind of recreational time? I’m using my landscape design opportunities to teach me: What is it like to do some master planning, some ecological design, but on yourself?”
Tolbert has given the installation a temporary title for now: “AN ATMOSPHERE AKIN TO FREEDOM / way over there inside me.” The work produced during this residency will be on loan to Shannon Library during the exhibition period and will be returned to Tolbert when the exhibition ends.
“MaKshya prompts inquiry, peers in and around obstacles, and encourages others to see things through her unique lens,” Kennedy said.
Tolbert’s artist talk is on Friday, April 18, from 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. in Shannon Seminar Room 330. The talk is free and open to the public.