”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 — a poet, musician, and Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning television producer whose work moves fluidly across sound, story, and social history. An identical twin from Beautancus, a tiny pocket of eastern North Carolina, ammons has spent a lifetime navigating visibility, otherness, and self-definition — themes that sit at the core of her music and multidisciplinary practice.

Her 2024 album Spectacles, named one of the year’s best by Sound Opinions, is a bracing and electric meditation on being seen — and on choosing how to be seen. Co-produced with Phil Cook, the record blends incisive lyricism, propulsive grooves, and spoken-word intimacy, showcasing ammons’ range as songwriter, MC, bassist, producer, and poet. Spectacles features 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.

A deeply collaborative artist throughout her career, ammons has recorded with the soul-rock band The Dynamite Brothers and brought together artists as wide-ranging as The Indigo Girls, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Meshell Ndegeocello on a single album — 2016’s Language Barrier — reflecting her long-standing commitment to creative community across genre and generation.

Beyond music, ammons has built a distinguished career in film and television, serving as a producer on Emmy- and Peabody-winning PBS series and acclaimed documentary projects. She is also an award-winning poet and Cave Canem Fellow, with two published collections.

In 2025, ammons launched TENDING, a six-part audio documentary tracing Black farmers’ generational fight against the USDA — a project deeply personal to her as the granddaughter of a Black farmer. Whether onstage, on record, on the page, or wearing the producer’s hat, shirlette ammons creates work that is urgent and profoundly human.