Woven Nashville: An Evening of Music, Art, and Conversation is a creative experience hosted by Sunday Night Soul’s Jason Eskridge and East Side Storytellin’s Chuck Beard at the historic Frist Art Museum. This monthly event brings together unique pairings of extraordinary Nashville creators working in all kinds of media. Each specially curated show will pair musicians with painters, writers, comics, dancers, spoken-word artists, and more. Our goal is to provide a “mixtape” atmosphere, blending individual and collaborative performances and conversations designed to lift up the talented people who make Nashville so wonderful. Free to attend, Woven Nashville is an instant-classic treasure you will want to carry home with you.
About This Month’s Creators
Kaleah Wooten
Kaleah Wooten is a vocalist, songwriter, and producer from Huntsville, Alabama. Wooten moved to Tennessee in 2018 to attend MTSU, where she studied in the Recording Industry, Music, and Fashion Merchandising departments. After graduating in the summer of 2022, she began working as an analyst in the Works Registration department at Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI).
Wooten has been making strides in the music industry from a young age—her father is a Grammy Award–winning music producer and her mother has been a music teacher for over twenty years. Some of her vocal and production credits include Masego’s “Remembering Sundays” and “Ladies, Ladies, Ladies” from the Dreamville Records album Revenge of the Dreamers III. In addition to leading worship at her church, Wooten is currently continuing her journey with her original music and released her first single, “things to show you,” in October of last year.
Ciona Rouse
Poet, editor, and educator Ciona Rouse is the author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of Third Man Books (2017). Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oxford American, Wildness, Booth, The Account, Still, Talking River, Gabby Journal, Matter: a journal of political poetry and commentary and other publications. She has been featured on Poets.org’s Poem-A-Day and has work selected by Ada Limón for the podcast The Slowdown.
Recognizing the kindred nature of the arts, she often collaborates with other poets and artists. In 2017-2018, she served as a resident poet for the Nick Cave: FEAT exhibition at Frist Art Museum, culminating in a poem called “We,” which was named 2018’s “Best Poetry Performance” by Nashville Scene. Since 2021, she has been a guest co-curator for Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation at Frist Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.
Rouse has been a visiting writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and The University of the South Sewanee in Sewanee, Tenn., as well as on the faculty at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and The Tennessee Young Writers Workshop. Her poetry was featured on NPR Music in collaboration with musician and poet Adia Victoria and poet Caroline Randall Williams in August 2019. A graduate of Columbia College of South Carolina, Rouse currently lives in Nashville.
