Jamila Woods is a poet, songwriter, and performing artist from the South Side of Chicago.  Her first solo album, HEAVN was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017 to critical acclaim.  Her sophomore offering, LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019), features 12 tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced the creator’s life and work — including James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.

Jamila surrounds herself with things she loves, things like Lucille Clifton’s poetry, her grandmother’s handwriting or the late 90s alt-rock of Incubus. “I think of songs as physical spaces,” Jamila says, “Writing a song is like decorating your apartment with things that comfort you and represent who you are.” Songwriting–like poetry– is a process of personal excavation. She says, “Poetry became a way for me to stop hiding, to be the most honest version of myself through my writing.” Her work is the culmination of two decades’ worth of vocal training, creative remixing, interdisciplinary performance and her unique “collage” writing process. 

An internationally touring artist, Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She has shared stages with Corinne Bailey Rae, Rafael Saadiq, Bonobo, Common, Chance the Rapper, Brittany Howard, Macklemore, and many others.  Her most recent project, Water Made Us, was released by JagJaguwar Records in October 2023.

An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix writes in her review of HEAVN, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.” Jamila’s poetry has been published in POETRY, Poets.org, and The Offing, and was featured in the 2020 Library of America anthology “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song.” She has been awarded writing residencies at Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, BLKSPACE on Ryder Farm, and Civitella Ranieri.  In 2022 she served as artist-in-residence at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, teaching workshops on poetry, songwriting and live performance.