Welcoming Our Summer 2026 Incubator Artist: Oliver Rose

The Summer Incubator is one of the ways we share our space, tools, and media lab each season. We lean entirely into emergent strategy, letting the space shape itself organically around the creative and cultural pockets that find a home here, bridging the gap between live, physical practices and digital/print tools. This means doing the slow, relational work of weaving into our existing local ecosystem rather than building a silo, honoring the groundwork that’s already being done in our community.

This residency lineage was started by Leo Kang (leokang.com) in the spring of 2025. Oliver steps into an ongoing community continuum here, joining past incubator and interspace residency artists like Jada Simone (anotefromjada.wordpress.com), Jennilie Brewster (jenniliebrewster.com), and the collaboration between Leeny Sack and Ollie Rocker leenysack.com, wskg.org/locally-sourced-features/2026-01-30/artpocalypse-macre.

This summer, Oliver is bringing their project, Poetry from a Fall Flower, to life in the studio. An Ithaca transplant, musician, performer, and full-time carpenter, they write almost every single day. oliverrosepoetry.my.canva.site

Their focus for the residency is building, producing, and distributing a physical poetry zine. They are explicitly exploring the structural tension of how to navigate long-form poetry within a traditionally short-form, rapid-fire medium. Rooted in self-directed independence, Oliver’s work uses a Queer lens—in identity, sexuality, and personhood—as an active way to navigate the world outside of standard storytelling molds.

Oliver isn’t looking to work in isolation. They are using their time here to start a recurring meetup for local poets to write and share work together. Later this summer, they will also host a community roundtable at MACRE to demystify the zine-making process and talk about how format changes the way we write.

In their own words:

Oliver Rose is an Ithaca transplant from middle Massachusetts. They spend their day life as a carpenter and dog dad with a spouse and partner that are both adored. In the evening you can find them at K-House singing Noah Kahan or sipping a latte at Nocturnal Cafe.

Oliver’s work is centered around their experiences. Each poem is a reflection of a feeling or moment and is little edited or altered. Their intention of work is to help others feel less alone in their feelings, whether it be joy, sadness or all the in between. As a Queer person, Oliver’s work is written with the perspective and understanding of Queerness at its heart. Queer in identity, sexuality and of personhood. This Queer perspective is the through-line of Poetry from a Fall Flower.

We are very excited to have Oliver both anchoring and sharing the space with us for the season and beyond. Stay tuned for dates on the upcoming poets’ meetups and their zine roundtable as the summer moves forward!