01
Porch Fest
Friday, July 17 · 7:00 PM
2nd Ave × Garland · Carriage Town
Featuring Kirei
The series opens on a Carriage Town porch — Emmy Award–winning poet Kirei sets the tone for the summer.
Art that witnesses.
Words that reclaim.
The visual art, poetry, and writing of Dr. Crystallee Crain — a practice built on memory, resilience, and the slow, stubborn work of repair.
01 / Practice
Art that Serves
Visual work grounded in process, color, and the politics of attention — made to be lived with, not merely looked at.
02 / Community
Poetry that Reclaims
Unflinching poems of witness and recovery — naming what harms, and carving the space where joy and repair can return.
03 / Repair
Words that Heal
Books, essays, and scholarship on justice, gender, and liberation — writing that refuses erasure and insists on accountability.
The Work
Four rooms,
one practice.
Each thread of the studio — painting, poetry, publication, and print — speaks to the others. Enter wherever you're called.
01 · Visual Arts
Painted fields of color & rhythm.
Acrylic, mixed media, and found panels. Modular compositions keyed by hexagonal grids and circular formats — color as both structural logic and emotional register.
View the gallery →02 · Poetry Album
I Am She — a spoken-word album.
Listen to the poems. Witness, reclamation, and the disciplined volatility of a voice that refuses euphemism.
Listen now →03 · Books
The written body of work.
Poetry collections and scholarship on justice, gender, and liberation.
Amazon author page →04 · Shop
Prints, apparel & objects for daily living.
Bring the studio home. Signed prints in multiple sizes alongside curated pieces drawn directly from the originals.
Visit the store →Upcoming
The 2026 Book Tour
Curated Series
Six Corners, One Voice
#HerVoice · Flint, Michigan · Summer 2026
Six poets. Six corners. One unforgettable summer — Black women's voices carried straight into the heart of Flint. A curated spoken word series bringing poetry to Flint's summer festival stages, powered by the Greater Flint Arts Council and Legacy Lane Publishing.
This isn't just a poetry series — it's a reclamation. Black women were never meant to whisper, and we were never meant to wait for permission. When we take the corner and speak our truth out loud, we turn public space into liberated ground — and write Flint's future in our own words.— Dr. Crystallee Crain, curator
The six corners
Summer 2026 · July 17 – August 22
02
Jazz Fest
Sunday, August 2 · 8:40 PM
S. Saginaw × Second Ave · Downtown
Featuring Jo Ikigai
Spoken word meets rhythm downtown as Jo Ikigai brings purpose and celebration to the Jazz Fest stage.
03
Flint Drop Fest
Saturday, August 8 · 6:30 PM
First St × Brush Alley
Featuring Isis
The Self Love Empress takes the corner, turning a festival crowd into a space for self-love and reflection.
04
2nd Friday ArtWalk
Friday, August 14 · 8:00 PM
Kearsley St × Buckham Alley
Featuring AshleyCae
Art walks, words run. Dr. Wise Word makes a night of galleries a whole lot louder in Buckham Alley.
05
Back to the Bricks
Saturday, August 15 · 8:00 PM
Kearsley × Harrison St
Featuring Kathryn Smith
On the bricks, Poems by Kathie transforms pain into purpose at one of Flint's most beloved gatherings.
06
The Crim — Finale
Saturday, August 22 · 5:00 PM
Stockton St × 5th St
Featuring The full ensemble
The season closes in conversation: a community discussion led by Dr. Crystallee Crain with all six voices.
Studio 2026 · Oakland / Detroit
About the Visual Art
Color as structure.
Process as narrative.
Crystallee Crain is a contemporary visual artist and poet whose practice navigates the tension between order, improvisation, and emotional mapping. Working primarily in acrylic, mixed media, and found panels, crystallee constructs luminous fields of color and texture that oscillate between geometric rigor and painterly spontaneity. Her modular compositions — often keyed by hexagonal grids, circular formats, and repetitive motifs — are layered with poured pigments, palette-knife impasto, and scored gestures that reveal process as narrative.
Color functions both as structural logic and emotional register: saturated neons and warm ochres sit beside cool cyan and muted neutrals to create chromatic friction and harmony. Across intimate round works and larger angular canvases, crystallee's work privileges materiality and rhythm, inviting close looking while suggesting broader topographies of memory, resilience, and creative reclamation.
Her studio practice is process-driven — embracing chance effects of pouring and scraping alongside precise masking and hard-edge forms to produce work that is at once tactile, catalytic, and quietly determined.
About the Poetry
Witness. Reclamation.
A music of survival.
Crystallee Crain's poetry is unflinching work of witness and reclamation. Her poems take on the bodily and structural violences that shape women's lives — sexual assault, institutional betrayal, racialized exclusion — and yet they also chart the slow, stubborn and necessary recovery that follows. She places intimate scenes alongside broader social diagnosis, so the personal and political become indistinguishable in their urgency and consequence.
Her tone moves with disciplined volatility: tender and elegiac one moment, fierce and declarative the next. Crystallee's language refuses euphemism; it names perpetrators and systems, catalogues injury, and then turns toward survival with a voice that is both incandescent and exact. She combines lyrical intimacy with direct address — lines that scold, dare, and console — so that anger and compassion live in the same breath. The result is a rhetoric of accountability that still contains room for compassion and repair, refusing both sentimental erasure and impotent fury.
Crystallee's poems demand to be read aloud and felt: they insist on honesty and vigilance, on dismantling the structures that normalize harm, and on making space for joy and repair after trauma. The power of her words lies in their clarity and unvarnished bravery — a music of survival that confronts danger, names the witnesses who failed, and calibrates a fierce, hope-tinged insistence on being seen. Readers leave her work altered, called to witness and to action.
Stay connected
Step into the studio.
Commissions, readings, exhibitions, and collaborations — if the work speaks to you, so should we.
