Featuring TONI LOVE & SABRIAYA SHIPLEY (She/They)

Toni Love 
Tonita Austin, also known as “Toni Love,” is a gifted poet, singer, activist and writer born in West Philadelphia. While attending Columbia University, Tonita was a student of Amiri Baraka and performed in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” as the Lady in Orange. Her writing is influenced by both experiences. She is a contributor to the anthology The Black Body and featured poet in the 2018 and 2020 Winter/Fall edition of the Philadelphia Arts and Urban Literary magazine.  The Mad Poets Society named her Mad Poet of the Year 2023. The Restoration EP is her first published recording; Toni’s Room is her first published book. 

Sabriaya Shipley (She/They) 

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Sabriaya is a Philadelphia-based poet, educator, and community ethnographer determined to study, receive, and cultivate nontraditional performance/ art spaces centered around the expressive freedom of Black & Brown youth. Named a 2019 A+ Educator by Philadelphia Family Magazine and a 2021 Black Lives Matter Philly Educator /Fellow, Sabriaya holds a BA in Theatre from Temple University with concentrations in poetry as performance and poetic ethnography and a MA in Social Justice and Community Organizing from Prescott College. Sabriaya has collaborated as an educator, artist, and artistic advisor with several community based organizations and art spaces such as Theatre Exile,  Power Street Theatre, the Painted Bride Art Center, the Colored Girls Museum, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Young Playwrights and others They are a co-founder of Griot Girls, a youth writing collective for young Black girls. A recipient of the 2021-2022 Philadelphia Foundation and Forman Art's Initiative Art Works grant, Sabriaya is a citizen artist determined to represent the intersections of their community.