A Florida State University graduate student has been selected for a competitive arts fellowship that will support the development of a project that maps archival photos, poetry and oral histories onto neighborhoods, highlighting their historical impacts.
Christell Victoria Roach, a creative writing doctoral candidate in the Department of English, has been named a fellow of YoungArts, the National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists. The fellowship includes a $30,000 grant that will allow Roach to further develop her project, an augmented-reality application called OTOWN, and streamline its software.
“By merging digital humanities with community-based research, this project reimagines historical neighborhoods as interactive digital museums,” Roach said. “This project transforms specific locations into exhibits through the app’s lens. I come from a community with a rich history, and I wanted to create a space for that community to tell its own story.”
“This project transforms specific locations into exhibits through the app’s lens. I come from a community with a rich history, and I wanted to create a space for that community to tell its own story.”
— Christell Victoria Roach, creative writing doctoral candidate
Each year, thousands of artists from across the U.S. apply for YoungArts’ competitive grants, scholarships and fellowships, which have supported scholars through mentorship and funding since 1981. In addition to the monetary grant, fellows also have access to studio space and public presentation opportunities. This award comes just over a decade after Roach earned a YoungArts writing award, and she is the only literary arts specialist in this year’s cohort of five YoungArts fellows.
“Earning a YoungArts fellowship is a significant accomplishment that highlights the strength of Christell’s voice and the impact of her literary work,” said Keith McCall, assistant director of the FSU Office of Graduate Fellowships and Awards. “It’s an honor to have a YoungArts fellow at FSU and a reflection of the exceptional talent within the creative writing program.”
OTOWN was inspired by Roach’s hometown of Overtown, a Miami neighborhood that was once considered the “Harlem of the South,” where African American celebrities, athletes and activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Sam Cooke performed, spoke and competed.
“Since they weren’t permitted to sleep in the hotels they performed in on South Beach, as it was during a segregated period, they went ‘over to the town’ to be celebrated and to rest,” Roach said. “In OTOWN, I take on the role of curator and narrator to create space for these stories that started long before me.”
Through the app, users move through the Overtown neighborhood, encountering location-specific stories: They’ll hear a poem on one corner, see a historic photograph on another, and listen to oral histories connected to the ground beneath their feet. While the project initially centered around Overtown, Roach has invented a model that can be used to preserve community histories in neighborhoods across the globe.
“I’m perfecting this work to present a replicable model for engagement with personal and shared histories,” Roach said. “Through collaboration with undergraduate research assistants, the project has already expanded to other historic towns in Florida, including Tallahassee, with an exhibit near FAMU’s campus titled, ‘South of Monroe.’”
Before coming to FSU in 2024, Roach earned multiple awards for her writing. In 2022, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work in collaboration with South Florida’s WLRN Public Media on the duet poem “The Breaths of Our Skin,” where Roach imagines and performs a poetic conversation between writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.
“Christell’s writing invites us to think seriously about homeland, legacy, record-keeping and truth,” said Christopher Okonkwo, one of Roach’s doctoral advisers and an associate professor in the FSU Department of English. “The questions she contemplates in her work transcend academia. They touch and connect us all while allowing us to rediscover our own history.”
Roach has been published widely, with recent work featured by organizations and in literary publications such as Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic and Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora.
“I’m doing the work I want people to learn about, and I’m creating a model that shows people how to engage their history,” Roach said. “I hope this work inspires others, and I hope foregrounding love, community, creativity and connection when engaging history creates a way of witness and testimony we once thought lost to time.”
To learn more about writing and research through the FSU Department of English, visit english.fsu.edu.