Humans

• Alaina Ferris (author)
• Daphne Taylor (artist)

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While Listening

While Listening is a series of poems, each written while listening to a single song. How does sound influence text? How is language in conversation with the soundscapes we navigate in daily life?

About the Contributor(s)

Alaina Ferris is an interdisciplinary composer, poet, and performer who specializes in choral works, opera, and contemporary theater. As an active pianist and Celtic harpist, her music is inspired by a love of Renaissance chorales and her former work as a music therapist. She is one half of the indie-folk duo, Physical Kids, alongside Matt Schlatter.

She is an awardee of the New Music USA 2022 Creator Development Fund; a summer 2022 artist resident at Cité International des Arts in Paris; was a 2019-2021 Composer Fellow at The American Opera Project; a co-winner of the 2019/2020 Brooklyn Youth Chorus Composer Competition; and selected as a 2019 National Sawdust Summerlab Musician.

Alaina’s work has been presented at HERE, SoHo Rep, Barnard College/Columbia University, Abrons Arts Center, The Connelly Theater, and St. Ann’s Warehouse. She has worked with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, artists César Alvarez, Coco Karol, Sxip Shirey, Ellen Winter, Amanda Palmer, Jason Webley, Steve Earle, Anne Waldman, Eliza Bent, Mia Rovegno, William Burke, Joshua William Gelb, Mac Wellman, Tyler Gilmore (Blank For.ms.), and more.

Her poetry chapbook, While Listening, was released by The Operating System in 2016. Her manuscript, To Be Awake Means to Will was a 2015 Finalist for the National Poetry Series and a 2018 Finalist for Fence Modern Poets.

She is the founder of The Music Room, a membership space (a guild!) for composers and music teachers who are dedicated to the art of practicing music, located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Alaina was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada and later moved to Boulder County, Colorado. She earned her B.A. in Music and Creative Writing from the University of Denver and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University.

Daphne Taylor was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family with historic roots reaching over two hundred years. As an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design, she studied ceramics and developed her love of craft traditions. While working on her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania, she continued her lifelong discipline of drawing, which to this day, influences stitching patterns in her quilt work. Her close association with the Quaker traditions is a strong influence in her life and work. The curious and profound silence of a Quaker meeting can be felt in the patient, meditative lines of her quilts. Her compositions also frame challenging relationships of colors and other formal tensions, suggesting that there is never an easy or obvious blueprint to her quilts. Like the complex silence felt in a Quaker meeting, the world within Taylor’s quilts is hardly a straightforward place. Taylor taught for over thirty years in New York City and now lives in rural Maine.

Cover Art: Quilt Drawing #18 by Daphne Taylor, 2014
Series Designed, Edited and Curated by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson