Jamila Woods

Jamila Woods is a poet, singer, and multidisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago. Her critically acclaimed debut album HEAVN – an ode to Blackness, girlhood, and home – was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017. Her sophomore project, LEGACY! LEGACY!, features twelve tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced the creator’s life and work – including James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Frida Kahlo.

Her third album, Water Made Us (2023) is a genre-blending song cycle on love and the wisdom of surrender. The album’s sequence is cleverly designed to echo the different stages of a relationship: the early days of easy compromising, flirtatiousness, and fun; the careful negotiation through moments of conflict or hurt; the grieving of something lost; and the tender realization at the end of it all that the person who is gone never really leaves, but stays with you as you find yourself ready to try again, refreshed and reassured. The albums sprawling 17 tracks span from autotuned R&B on “Send A Dove”, to gentle acoustic folk rock on the heart wrenching “Wolfsheep”, to bubbly dream-pop on dance anthem “Boomerang.”

Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She has shared stages with Corinne Bailey Rae, Rafael Saadiq, Bonobo, Common, Chance the Rapper, Brittany Howard, Macklemore, and many others. In 2022 she served as artist-in-residence at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, teaching workshops on poetry, songwriting and live performance. An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix writes, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.”