4:30 pm | Tinkham Veale University Center Senior Classroom
At this event, James Beard Award winning Wampanoag Chef Sherry Pocknett will be in conversation with artist M. Carmen Lane, founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership. They will discuss Indigenous foodways and storytelling through practice, experimentation, and learning using the lens of the Baker-Nord Institute’s fall programming theme of “encounters.” This theme explores how encounters challenge assumptions, generate new meanings, and transform individuals and societies.
This event is co-sponsored by , an artist-led incubator and exhibition space for socially engaged Indigenous artists and artists of color.
Registration requested. Register .
About the Speakers:
Sherry Pocknett is a Mashpee Wampanoag chef and caterer. She was the owner of the Sly Fox Den Too restaurant in Charlestown, Rhode Island. In 2023, Pocknett received the James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Northeast. She is the first Indigenous woman to be honored by the James Beard Foundation.
Pocknett, born and raised in Mashpee to the Wampanoag tribe, embodies a rich heritage of Indigenous cuisine and New England cooking. Her parents, Bernadine and Edward Pocknett, instilled in her a deep love for food and education, passing down traditions of hunting, fishing, and foraging. From an early age, Chef Sherry cultivated her culinary skills, launching Sly Fox Den catering business, where she shared traditional Wampanoag food up and down the East Coast. Committed to cultural preservation, she initiated youth cultural classes, engaging over 100 kids in hands-on l learning. As demand soared, Sly Fox Den became a hub for Indigenous food and education, catering to schools, powwows, universities, and museums.
Click to watch a cooking video by Sherry Pocknett.
Click to read the WSHU article about Sherry Pocknett.
Click to read the Bon Appétit article about Sherry Pocknett.
M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer and facilitator living in Cleveland, Ohio. Lane’s work ranges from experiential educator to diversity practitioner to organizational systems consultant to experimental artist—all of it integrates ancestry, legacy, and spirituality; pursues expansion, experimentation, and play. Lane is founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, leadership development, Indigenous arts and culture and the Akhsótha Gallery located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Lane’s work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including the Yellow Medicine Review, Red Ink Magazine, Anomaly, and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two Spirit Literatures. Lane’s first collection of poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (2015). Lane has exhibited work during the FRONT 2018 triennial group show A Color Removed at SPACES Gallery, EFA Project Space’s Spring 2019 exhibition In The Presence of Absence, The Riffe Gallery’s SHIFT exhibition and the group exhibition CONVERGE at the Artist Archives of the Western Reserve. Lane was a 2018 Creative Fusion artist-in-residence; a recipient of the 2019 Room In The House artist residency at the historic Karamu theatre and a 2020 artist-in-residence at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. In 2020, Lane was awarded a Joyce Award with ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership.
Lane attended Earlham College receiving their BA in Women’s Studies with a focus in feminist art history, theory & criticism and later earned their MS in Organization Development & Change from American University. Lane was a recipient of both the AU/NTL Segal-Seashore Fellowship and Hal Kellner Award. Lane is an Amanda Fouther scholar/member of NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science and Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 2016, they became a birth/postpartum and end-of-life doula. In 2022, they were an artist-in-residence at the Everglades National Park as the recipient of the inaugural Indigenous Artist Fellowship and Artist2Artist Fellow through the Art Matters Foundation.
Click to visit M. Carmen Lane's website.