New Orleans native Sunni Patterson is a poet, performer, workshop facilitator, certified spiritual life coach, and initiated priestess and interfaith minister. She began her career as a full-time high school teacher, and the work since has been that of a cultural worker and activist — using art, poetry, and praise, what she calls ancestral remembrance, to open dialogue and make room for healing.
Her voice has traveled: HBO's Def Poetry, BET's Lyric Cafe, the Panafest in Ghana, TEDWomen, and the United Nations. She has collaborated with Hannibal Lokumbe — singing lead vocals for his score “King and the Crescent City Moon” — and with Kalamu Ya Salaam, Sonia Sanchez, Wanda Coleman, Amiri Baraka, Mos Def, Eve Ensler, and The Last Poets, and she has been featured on Grammy-winning hip-hop albums.
Her debut print collection, We Know This Place, was published by the University of New Orleans Press in 2022. She is a 2020 and 2021 John O'Neal Cultural Arts Fellow, a resident artist for the City of New Orleans' Claiborne Corridor Cultural Initiative and for Junebug Productions, and a community health worker with the Ashe Cultural Arts Center's Community Spread program. With scientist Cherelle Blazer she co-founded Breath is Lyfe, where art, science, and culture meet to address climate change and environmental injustice — and since fall 2024 she has taught New Orleans African History and Culture and the History of New Orleans Voodoo through Loyola University's Office of Professional and Continuing Studies.
On October 3, she brings the word to the Blue Nile Balcony Room with The Next Level Band — poetry over a live band, in the room where Frenchmen Street listens.