All posts by Marsha Music

170 Jerdein Kirkland

Artists,

Born Detroit, 1952 / Lives in Oak Park, MI

Jerdein Kirkland has the swag of Detroit-raised women who work hard and play hard, fedora cocked ace-deuce. She is a reflection of her art: a single loc, wrapped with sequined beads, dips past her knees, loops back up, tucks into a back pocket. Her clothes and jewelry are similarly embellished, with bespangled trim suggestive of craft stores, urban boutiques and hair shows—apropos, for in fact, she spent years selling her jewelry, and is a long-time hairdresser. Her collage paintings (her “Baby Girl” series, not pictured here) sparkle with bling, reminiscent of assemblage artist David Philpot (the late husband of this writer, and the subject of Essay’d installment #50); her “outsider” presence in the arts is reminiscent of him, too.

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New writer – Marsha Music

Writers

Marsha Music is an acclaimed writer, poet, storyteller, and narrator, and is a cultural griot on life and history in Detroit. She was born in Detroit and raised in Highland Park; she has lived in these two cities all of her life. During her teens she was a student activist with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and later, a labor union president, followed by 30 years with the county courts. She has contributed to oral histories, literary anthologies, and films – including on HBO, PBS, Amazon Prime, Peacock and the History Channel. She was the recipient of a Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship in 2012, and was a 2015 Knight Arts Challenge awardee. She has performed her one-woman shows and poetry on many stages, including the Detroit Symphony and Detroit Opera – for which she wrote and performed the narration for the groundbreaking opera Twilight Gods. In 2019 she published her inaugural book, The Detroitist, and she is active in the arts.