Pamela Sneed is a poet and performer who has created a musical with text honoring legend Big Mama Thornton. With a world class band including Viva De Concini and Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks and more, Sneed covers Thornton’s greatest hits and gives tribute to the unsung blues singer who helped found the genre known as Rock and Roll.

Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and recommended by The New York Times alongside Barack Obama’s memoir. Additionally in 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s "More Life" exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, The Brooklyn Rail, THEM, BOMB and most recently Poetry Magazine. She has appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poets. 

Her visual work was featured at  Leslie Lohman Museum, The Ford Foundation, Kates-Ferris and currently at The Lumber Room in Portland. In 2022, she had a solo show at Laurel Gitlen Gallery. She won the 2021 Black Queer Art Mentorship Award. She  participated as a reader in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and was a narrator for Coco Fusco’s film, also in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. She has had keynotes at Yale University, Georgetown University and SAIC. She has won a BOFFO residency on Fire Island in August 2022. In March 2023, she premiered A Tribute To Big Mama Thorton which broke a record at the Armory for the earliest a performance ever sold out.

Photo credit: Nick Hallett