Firm

MaKshya Tolbert is a poet, wood-firing potter, land steward, and researcher who recently made her way back to Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2024 New City Arts Guest Curator, a Fralin Museum of Art 2024 Writer’s Eye Fellow, a 2024-2026 Fireline Fellow (Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts), and serves as Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission.

MaKshya was a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow and New City Arts’ 2022-23 Research Residency Artist-in-Residence, which culminated in her first solo poetry installation, Shade is a place: relief is my form. Her debut collection, Shade is a place (Penguin Books, 2025) will be released in October 2025. She has received creative and scholarly fellowship support as a Fulbright Scholar (U.S.-Italy Commission) as well as from Community of Writers, Tin House, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and Roots.Wounds.Words, Inc. Her recent writing is featured in Emergence Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Artpapers, Gastronomica, Cake Zine, and Odd Apples. She has poetry and prose forthcoming from Nightboat Books, The Academy of American Poets, and Campfire Stories: Volume III.

She has spent the last decade providing funding, facilitation, technical assistance, and capacity building toward livable, community controlled food systems. MaKshya holds degrees from the University of Virginia (‘24), University of Gastronomic Sciences (‘21), and Stanford University (‘15). In her free time MaKshya is elsewhere, where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, "that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe."