The Spot 2.0

shirlette ammons is a Black quee r southern truth teller, an Emmy and Peabody

award-winning TV producer, poet, and musician. She is also an identical twin who

hails from a tiny, wonderfully-named pocket of eastern North Carolina earth called

Beautancus.

Given this wild set of identifiers, the thought of being someone else’s “spectacle” is

not some theoretical consideration for shirlette; she has been “othered” her entire

life. Her new album Spectacles, named by Sound Opinions as one of the year’s

best so far, is co-produced with Phil Cook, is a captivating and electric 11-track

examination of the duality between being objectified by the proverbial, patriarchal,

white gaze and cultivating attention when rocking stages. The record is a poignant

expression of her own multitudes (here as songwriter, MC, bassist, producer &

poet) rendered by a modern wellspring of Black Southern brilliance and her wider

creative community featuring contributions from musicians, filmmakers and writers

including genre-and-gender-defying performance artist Mykki Blanco,

MacArthur-winning poet Fred Moten, Nigerian writer and chef Tunde Wey,

Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, and radical feminist writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs,

“the Beyoncé of yoga” Jessamyn Stanley, as well as her twin sister Shorlette

Ammons and niece, Anansi Stephens. Ammons has always been a highly

collaborative musician, whether making a record with the likes of soul-rock band

The Dynamite Brothers or pairing The Indigo Girls, Hiss Golden Messenger

and Meshell Ndegocello on the same LP, 2016’s Language Barrier.

shirlette is also an accomplished in film and television, serving as a producer on

the acclaimed documentary, MAY THE LORD WATCH: THE LITTLE BROTHER

STORY as well as a producer on Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series A

CHEF’S LIFE and SOMEWHERE SOUTH, both of which aired on PBS. shirlette is

the 2016 recipient of Black Public Media’s Pitch Black Prize which awarded

funding towards completion of the THE HOOK, a documentary short that explores

Black maritime history through the plight of chef Ricky Moore. She also served as

producer on THE SEEDS WE KEEP (Oxford American) and STAY PRAYED UP,

which debuted at Telluride Film Festival in September 2021. She is also an

award-winning poet and a Cave Canem Fellow whose body of work includes two

collections of poetry.

Friday, March 27th, 2026

Doors 7:30pm | Starts 8:00pm