"...while they murder, we re-drum.."
  - Heru Shabaka-Ra

In the two years since Jazzmeia Horn bowed with her first album, the GRAMMY Award®-Nominated A Social Call, she’s been very busy performing on international tours as well as teaching masterclasses and workshops globally, honing her vocal skills to a finely tuned level while writing songs of personal relevance and social message, and perfecting a fearless approach to improvisation and performance in general.

  The convergence of this drive and development has resulted in what is sure to be hailed as one of the most courageous recordings of 2019—The Grammy Nominated and NAACP Image Award Winning Love and Liberation—filled with songs of daring musicality, emotional power, and messages of immediate relevance. Shortly after composing and arranging Love and Liberation, a book was in the making for Horn. Her first book Through My Eyes: The Jazzmeia Horn Approach focuses on sharing Jazzmeia's knowledge on using her voice as a female vocalist and artist in the male dominated Jazz industry. The first of its kind, the book teaches singers how to serve Jazz music along with the many roles of a good vocalist.

Blessed with a fitting name for her chosen path—it was Horn’s jazz-loving, piano-playing grandmother who chose “Jazzmeia”—the singer was born in Dallas in 1991, grew up in a tightly knit, church-going family filled with musical talent and started singing as a toddler. She attended Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, known for launching such musical greats as Roy Hargrove, Norah Jones, and Erykah Badu. Her education included steering herself to the mentors who would guide her passion for jazz, like Jon Hendricks, Abbey Lincoln, and Betty Carter.

In 2009, Horn moved to New York City to enroll in The New School’s Jazz and contemporary music program. In 2013, she entered and won a Newark-based contest named for an initial inspiration—the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Competition. In 2015, she won the Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition, the most coveted award a young jazz musician can hope to attain. Part of her prize was a contract with Concord Records, which led to A Social Call, now Love and Liberation.

Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013). Wisher performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, GOOD Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Contemporary Black Canvas, Radio Times, PoetryNOW, Ploughshares, and CBC Radio. A Pew Fellow & Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She has led workshops and curated events in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Free Library of Philadelphia, and U.S. Department of Arts & Culture. Wisher was the 2017-2018 CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is currently the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary.

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