Donney Rose is a Baton Rouge native, New Orleans-based performance poet, teaching artist, and advocacy journalist. With over two decades on stages and in classrooms, Donney guides others in their creative journeys and brings nuanced perspectives through spoken word and other creative outlets. He’s a past John F. Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award recipient in Literary Arts, and a member of the 2025–2026 Artist At Work (AAW) cohort.

For this edition of Sundays @ 4, Donney will be reading/performing pieces from his forthcoming memoir and documentary, Specimen, a hybrid collection that interrogates the history, weight, and resilience of the Black male body in the American South examining how chronic illness, masculinity, and inherited trauma converge inside a body that is both culturally surveilled and biologically unstable.