Christell Victoria Roach
Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated poet and performer from Miami. As a descendant of the city’s Black pioneers, she writes about the Blues, the Caribbean diaspora, and many different types of love—embracing and expanding the Southern Gothic to the tropics.
Roach attended Emory University, where she was editor-in-chief of Black Star Magazine and the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She graduated with a BA in creative writing and African American studies. She went on to earn her MFA in creative writing at the University of Miami. A 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is now pursuing her Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at Florida State University.
Roach’s recent work has been published with The Atlantic, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry, Obsidian Literary Journal, Scalawag, The Miami Rail, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Her foundational influences across fiction and poetry include Natasha Trethewey, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Terrance Hayes, and Kevin Young.
As a 2025–2026 YoungArts Fellow, Roach is working on her project OTOWN, a descendant-led digital humanities platform that maps archival photographs, poetry, oral history, and community memory onto historically Black landscapes through location-based augmented reality installations.
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More Christell Victoria Roach
Video: Roach performs her poem "A Tradition of Bluesing" at the Noise Pop Festival