MaKshya Tolbert

MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) is a poet, wood-firing potter and land steward who recently made her way back to Virginia where her grandmother raised her. She is based in Charlottesville, where she writes about shade. She is the 2024 New City Arts Guest Curator, The Fralin Museum of Art Writer’s Eye Fellow, 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. She has received support as a Fulbright Scholar as well as from Community of Writers, Tin House, and Roots.Wounds.Words, Inc.

Tolbert’s work has been featured in Emergence Magazine, Artpapers, Gastronomica, Cake Zine, Odd Apples, and Queer Poem-a-Day and new work is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Nightboat Books, and Campfire Stories: Volume III. MaKshya holds degrees from the University of Virginia (‘24), University of Gastronomic Sciences (‘21), and Stanford University (‘15). She spent the last decade providing funding, facilitation, technical assistance, and capacity-building toward livable, community-controlled food systems. In her free time, she is elsewhere, where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, ‘that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.’