bio:
upfromsumdirt is a Louisville artist currently residing in Lexington, Ky with his partner and their way too many books for their small house.
an autodidactic, “brothadirt”, aka Ronald Davis, is an award-winning artist (Kentucky’s Al Smith 2010 Award for Visual Art; the 2010 African American Art Exhibition at Actors Theatre of Louisville) and has galleried in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee, and participated in curator Tewodross Melchishua’s traveling art exhibit entitled MCs, MICS, AND METAPHORS; his work has also been featured on the covers of African American Review and Tidal Basin Review and he has created book cover designs for Crystal E. Wilkinson (The Birds Of Opulence and the reissue covers for Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street), Dr. Adam J. Banks (Digital Griot), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (The Glory Gets), Keith Gilyard (The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy), The Workhorse Lexington Poetry Month Anthology (2017 and 2018), Makalani Bandele (Hell-Fightin’), Bernard Clay (English Lit), as well as for his own chapbook collections (Caul & Response, Argus House Press 2015 and Tangerine Tubman: A Long-Playing Poem, Left-Handed JuJu Press 2016). upfromsumdirt’s art or poetry has been featured online at Connotations Press, About Place Journal, New Southerner, Accents Radio, and Nat Creole Magazine.
sumdirt’s latest chapbook, Chiaroscuro Vitae, was recently published by Radical Paper Press in 2019.
he’s currently editing and culling over 800 pages of raw poems into as many manuscripts as physically possible so that he (the natural hermit & curmudgeon that he is) can one day retire, if not in the Congo or Brazil, then some small holler in the foothills of Kentucky…
…to raise goats? or some other stupid shit like that.
only a handful copies of Chiaroscuro Vitae remain and are available for a mere $8 (shipping included) made payable through Paypal – but please contact me first regarding availability …
and now,
” THE ARTIST’S STATEMENT “
I MAKE SHIT UP.
please, save your clapping until the end of the show. thank you.
and now, without further ado, i present to you all this detail of a poem alerting you to my presence as a literary artiste:
*curtsies*
much love,
brothadirt
upfromsumdirt 