Brenton Zola

Brenton is a first-generation performance artist, writer, researcher and advocate. Informed by his experiences of childhood homelessness, global travel and a lineage of African spiritual leaders, his performance work has been featured at the United Nations, MoMA, Norman Rockwell Museum, College of Extraordinary Experiences and many others, while his poem “Multiplicity” is one of the official poems of the City of Denver. Brenton has published writing in Newsweek, INC, American Theater and WBUR Boston and is the winner of the 2025 Marianne Russo Award for a Novel-in-Progress at the Key West Literary Seminar, a 2025 Periplus Fellow, Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence, and fiction fellow at The Word. He is also a photographer.

At Woodward, he will be working on his historical fiction novel.