Exciting news for Persimmon Creek as Brian Palmer and Byron Smith are announced as the newest residents in 2024. Learn more here!
The Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency is pleased to announce Brian Palmer and Byron Smith as its Summer 2024 creative residents. Palmer and Smith will each visit the historic Village of Arrow Rock, Missouri, in June 2024 for an independent, two-week stay, during which they will engage creative and academic work; learn about the history of the village and its vibrant African American community; and interact with present-day Arrow Rock inhabitants. In addition, Palmer and Smith will discuss their creative work and careers during an evening of free, public presentations in Arrow Rock on Saturday, June 22, 2024.

Brian Palmer lives in Richmond, Virginia, where for ten years 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.” Since 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 as Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report; staff writer at Fortune; and on-air correspondent at CNN. With colleagues Seth Wessler and Esther Kaplan, he 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.

Byron Smith was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1960. 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 has been a member of the North Village Art District’s Grindstone Printmaking Shop, and he is currently a member of the Orr Street Artist Guild, where he occupies a studio. His 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. As a painter, Smith works in oil, watercolor and casein. He is best known for his landscapes of the Missouri River Valley. He also studies anatomical drawing and enjoys working from the human figure. Inspired by his interest in local and regional Missouri history, he collects works on paper and prints.
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 the historic Village of Arrow Rock. The program was created by an advisory board of private citizens, including current and former inhabitants of Arrow Rock, Marshall, Columbia, and Kansas City, Missouri. 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.
Past residents have included novelist, memoirist and scholar Karla FC Holloway of Wake Forest, North Carolina; writer, scholar and folkorist David Todd Lawrence of St. Paul, Minnesota; writer and fiber artist Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin of Kansas City, Missouri; poet, memoirist, and scholar Hermine Pinson of Williamsburg, Virginia; poet, activist, and educator Glenn North of Kansas City, Missouri; and fiction writer, memoirist, and zine creator X.C. Atkins of Los Angeles, California. Holloway says of the Persimmon Creek Residency, “I must admit it feels like a magical interlude, until I look at the chapters — yes, plural! — I drafted while there. As much as it offers a community of engaging, interested readers and auditors, it will leave with you an inspired locale, a gathering of friends, and the unyielding sense of how and why art matters.”
The Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency is largely inspired by the long-time presence of the historic African American community in Arrow Rock. The cottage in which participants stay stands in the footprint of the parsonage for the historic 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.”
For additional information about the Persimmon Creek Writers and Artists Residency and its 2024 residents, please visit our website at www.persimmoncreek.org or stop by our Instagram page.
Questions? Please contact Program Director Nancy Blossom: persimmoncreekresidency@gmail.com
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