Michele Sons of southwest Virginia, L. Renée of Columbus, OH and the creative partnership of Nevada Tribble and Andre Hoyos of northeastern West Virginia have been selected for the 2022 New River Gorge Creative Residency at Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals.
Michele Sons
Michele Sons
Michele Sons is an exhibiting fine art landscape and portrait photographer originally from England and currently based in southwest Virginia. Her background in geography and environmental science, her taste for adventure, and her highly diverse and extensive travel experience uniquely position her to connect with landscapes across the world. Michele’s current work is locally-focused and based on a contemplative, quiet aesthetic coupled with a genuine reverence for the natural world. Fog, mist, and soft light are intrinsic elements present in many of her images. Her new project, Appalachian Dreams, is a fine art poster series developed, designed, and launched by Michele. In this series, she presents the sublime beauty of central and southern Appalachian landscapes, photographed in her signature style and brought to life in a series of fine quality, collectible posters inspired by the retro travel poster style. The Feminine Landscape is her acclaimed series of self-portraits that expressively depicts her experiences in dramatic landscapes from the Blue Ridge mountains to Death Valley, Bhutan, Antarctica, and beyond. In this work Michele creatively merges the landscape and portrait genres, with a result that is poetic, lyrical, and evocative. Michele’s clients include National Geographic and The Wilderness Society.
L. Renée | Photo by Jeffrey Albright, Archive Manager of The Peter Bullough Foundation
L. Renée
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her work, nominated for Best New Poetsand a Pushcart Prize, has been anthologized in Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak: Volume 6 and was selected as a2021 Rattle Poetry Award Finalist. She received the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Alumni Award, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, and second place for the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize from PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review. Her poems have been published in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the Minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She holds a MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University, where she was a Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Moore Fellow. L. Renée has received support from the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc., The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
Nevada Tribble and Andre Hoyos
Nevada Tribble & Andre Hoyos
Nevada Tribble is an artist based in Elkins, WV. She uses various papermaking and fiber art techniques in her work, expressing themes of community, hope, and change, grounded in an appreciation for the natural surroundings of Appalachia. Nevada’s work has been exhibited regionally in West Virginia and Maryland and was recently featured in the North American Hand Papermakers online exhibition, Materiality: Hand Papermaking in the Age of Isolation. Nevada was a 2020 recipient of the Tamarack Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. Nevada and her creative partner, Andre Hoyos, have been working together on a site-dependent body of work called Stream Studies, visiting different rivers and streams around West Virginia to make paper with the river water. The duo will use the residency as an opportunity to expand this work on location at the New River Gorge.
Since 2015 the New River Gorge Creative Residency has afforded writers and artists the unique opportunity to live and work at Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals in Fayetteville, WV.
The residency is designed to provide creatives with an opportunity to develop their skills while devoting uninterrupted time to a particular project. Additionally, the New River Gorge Creative Residency provides the opportunity to create an alternative narrative for West Virginia: to present a view of the state and its people that doesn’t follow the tired old stereotypes that are so prevalent in literature and art.
Learn more about past creatives:
2021 – Jessica Sands, Amy Pabst
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