AAPI Month & LGBTQ Pride Month Speaker: Jess X. Snow

We were delighted to welcome guest artist Jess X. Snow to yesterday's all-school assembly! Jess helped Walnut Hill shine a spotlight on Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month. We heard from Jess on the topic of "Art as a Portal to Care and Solidarity", and enjoyed images of their murals, as well as a preview of their upcoming film, Roots That Reach Toward the Sky. Jess left us with these words: "Do not underestimate the importance of artists in building the future we dream. We need artists and writers to visualize the future and pen its stories. We need musicians to help us feel the softness of that future in our bodies when the rest of us forget. We need teachers to remind us that this future has already begun manifesting itself, centuries ago, before we were born. And we need organizers to show us how to arrive at the future. We need you and that future."

Read more about Jess at jessxsnow.com, and in the bio below!

Jess X. Snow is a non-binary filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, poet. Spanning murals, narrative films, protest posters, and coming of age fiction—their body of work reimagines mental (un)wellness, intergenerational practices of care and kinship across cultures and species and queer migrant futures. They hold a BFA from RISD and recently received an MFA in writing/directing from NYU. Their short films, centering the desires, disobediences and dreams of flawed Chinese migrant queers have screened at 50+ festivals worldwide. Their picture books include We Always Had Wings, (Make Me a World / Randomhouse) forthcoming in Fall 2023 and The Ocean Calls, (Kokila/Penguin Kids), a Kirkus and Booklist best picture book of 2020. Their poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and published in The Indiana Review, Honey Literary, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Their murals which show monumental intergenerational kinships between Black Indigenous Asian and Latinx femmes have been featured in the NYT Magazine, the LA Times, the SF Chronicle and can be found on walls across the country.