Poet and digital storyteller anchoring memory to historic spaces. Her work appears in Poetry, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
ABOUT
Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated poet and performer from Miami. As a descendant of its Black pioneers, she writes about the Blues, the Caribbean diaspora, and many different types of love—embracing the Southern Gothic to the tropics. She is a 2025-2026 YoungArts Fellow working on her digital humanities storytelling project, OTOWN. Christell was a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is pursuing her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at Florida State University. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami after graduating from Emory University with a bachelor of arts Degree in creative writing and African American studies. Her recent work has been published in The Atlantic, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry, Obsidian Literary Journal, Scalawag, The Miami Rail, and elsewhere. She has completed her debut poetry collection and is working on a multimedia, interactive installation in her hometown as she essays, archives, and builds memory maps across the South.
She has spent the past decade writing
in archives, as she maps a cultural healing practice through storytelling.
“Her words and how she puts them together is very musical, and she’s a natural performer.”
Jen Karetnick
“The beautiful thing about immersing yourself into someone’s life through research is that you get to examine and reflect upon your own life experiences... it’s breathtaking to see how quickly she has learned how to do that and convey ideas with such clarity and authenticity.”
Dr. Pellom McDaniels III
"Christell is doing [the art] and the research that allows her to create the kind of singular experience that gets to the universal... She's very special."
Dr. Jericho Brown
