Janice A. Lowe is a composer, poet and vocalizing pianist who creates music-text hybrids. In 2017, she opened the Cleveland INKubator fest with a performance by her band, Namaroon. She is the author of Leaving CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press) and the chapbook SWAM, a short play (Belladonna Series). Her poems have been published in Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, The Poetry Project Online, (Pre) Conceivable Bridges, American Poetry Review, Resist Much/Obey Little, Radiant Re-Sisters, The Hat, and In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers, and on a digital album with Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra. She participated in the Renga for Obama project, the Broadside Series at Center for Book Arts, Words and Music at Word Up Bookshop, and as a writer-in-residence with Melted Away’s American Dream installation at Transformer Station. Lowe composed the opera Dusky Alice as well as the musical Lil Budda (text by Stephanie L. Jones), which was presented at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference and in the National Alliance for Musical Theater Festival of New Works. She is also composer of the musicals Sit-In at the Five & Dime (words by Marjorie Duffield), Somewhere in Texas, and Langston & Zora (book & lyrics by Charles E. Drew, Jr.). She was commissioned to compose musical settings of the Millie-Christine poems from the Pulitzer Prize-awarded collection Olio by Tyehimba Jess, and has composed music for plays including Liza Jessie Peterson's Chiron’s Homegurl Healer Howls, Jenni Lamb’s 12th and Clairmount, and Nehassiau DeGannes’s Door of No Return. Lowe performs internationally and is currently recording the album Leaving CLE: Song Cycle-Songs of Nomadic Dispersal. A cofounder of both the Dark Room Collective and absolute theater co., she has taught multimedia composition at Rutgers University, sound art and writing in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, and poetry and performance at Purchase College. Lowe is a longtime mentor of youth creative writing and music programs in New York City. She earned an MFA in musical theater writing from New York University and has received residencies from the Dramatists Guild, New Harmony Project, Voice and Vision, the Millay Colony, and the Rockefeller Fund at Pocantico. Photo by Diana Yanez.
