”One of the best records I’ve heard this year, for sure.”
— Sound Opinions, NPR

”ammons' sonic presence is bold and she is beautifully far away from normal …”
— American Pancake

“On the collaborative new album, Spectacles, intensely personal experiences anchor explorations of similar experiences of ammons’ Black and queer peers.”
— INDY Week

shirlette ammons is a Black queer southern truth teller, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning TV producer, poet, and musician. She is also an identical twin who hails from a tiny, wonderfully-named pocket of eastern North Carolina earth called Beautancus.

Given this wild set of identifiers, the thought of being someone else’s “spectacle” is not some theoretical consideration for ammons; she has been “othered” her entire life. Her 2024 album, Spectacles, named by Sound Opinions as one of the year’s best, is co-produced with Phil Cook, and is a captivating and electric 11-track examination of the duality between being objectified by the proverbial, patriarchal white gaze and cultivating attention when rocking stages. The record is a poignant expression of her own multitudes (as songwriter, MC, bassist, producer, and poet) rendered by a modern wellspring of Black Southern brilliance and her wider creative community featuring contributions from musicians, filmmakers, and writers including genre-and-gender-defying performance artist Mykki Blanco, MacArthur-winning poet Fred Moten, Nigerian writer and chef Tunde Wey, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, radical feminist writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and “the Beyoncé of yoga” Jessamyn Stanley, as well as her twin sister Shorlette Ammons and niece, Anansi Stephens. ammons has always been a highly collaborative musician, whether making a record with the likes of soul-rock band The Dynamite Brothers or pairing The Indigo Girls, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Meshell Ndegeocello on the same LP, 2016’s Language Barrier.

ammons is also accomplished in film and television, serving as a producer on the acclaimed documentary, May the Lord Watch: The Little Brother Story, as well as a producer on Emmy and Peabody award-winning series A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South, both of which aired on PBS. ammons is the 2016 recipient of Black Public Media’s Pitch Black Prize, which awarded funding towards completion of The Hook, a documentary short that explores Black maritime history through the plight of chef Ricky Moore. She served as producer on The Seeds We Keep (Oxford American) and Stay Prayed Up, which debuted at Telluride Film Festival in September 2021. In addition, she is an award-winning poet and a Cave Canem Fellow whose body of work includes two collections of poetry, Matching Skin and Stumphole: Anthology of Backwoods Blood.

In October 2025 ammons launched her new podcast, TENDING, a six-part audio docuseries that chronicles Black farmers' generations-long fight against the USDA through the lens of Pigford vs. Glickman, once the largest class action civil rights lawsuit in US history. ammons produced the series in collaboration with Southern Foodways Alliance and The Gravy Podcast Network. This is a personally meaningful project for ammons, as she's the granddaughter of a Black farmer from eastern North Carolina.