Carlton Turner understands that when you can't feed yourself the imagination is the first thing to go And if you can't "see" a different future you can't make change. Sipp Culture is about feeding both the body and the mind's eye.

BIO

Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, researcher, and co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). Sipp Culture uses food and story to support rural community development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi where his family has been for eight generations. He currently serves on the board of First Peoples Fund, Imagining America, Project South and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. Carlton is a member of the We Shall Overcome Fund Advisory Committee at the Highlander Center for Research and Education and is the former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS and is a founding partner of the Intercultural Leadership Institute.

Carlton is a current Interdisciplinary Research Fellow with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA100. He is also a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and former Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts.

Carlton Turner is also co-founder and co-artistic director, along with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction). M.U.G.A.B.E.E. is a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling. His current work is River Sols, a new play being developed in collaboration with Pangea World Theater that explores race, identity, class, faith, and difference across African American and South Asian communities through embodiment of a river.

He is also a member of the Rural Wealth Lab at RUPRI (Rural Policy Research Institute) and an advisor to the Kresge Foundation’s FreshLo Initiative. In 2018, Carlton was awarded the Sidney Yates Award for Advocacy in the Performing Arts by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Carlton has also received the M. Edgar Rosenblum award for outstanding contribution to Ensemble Theater (2011) and the Otto René Castillo Awards for Political Theatre (2015).

Notable Mentions

SIPP Culture: The Mississippi Center for Cultural Production is an approach and resource for cultivating thriving communities. Based in the rural South, “Sipp Culture” is honoring the history and building the future of our own community of Utica, MS. 

Sipp Culture supports community development from the ground up through cultural production focused on self-determination and agency designed by us and for us. We believe that history, culture, and food affirm our individual and collective humanity. So, we are strengthening our local food system, advancing health equity, and supporting rural artistic voices – while activating the power of story – all to promote the legacy and vision of our hometown.

Octavia Butler: OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was the author of several award-winning novels including PARABLE OF THE SOWER (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the...