special guest
Please welcome to the stage Jamila Woods!
We are excited to welcome alum Jamila Woods as the SoundBites 2025 guest artist! Jamila Woods is a musician, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago. Her most recent album, “Water Made Us,” is a genre-blending song cycle on love and the wisdom of surrender. Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 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."
Jamila will perform a solo set accompanied by Peter CottonTale, in addition to singing alongside Voice of Chicago. Jamila was a part of Uniting Voices (formerly Chicago Children’s Choir) for 2 years, including one year in the Beverly Neighborhood Choir Program and one year in Concert Choir. Peter CottonTale is a Grammy-winning composer and producer from Chicago who produced “Together,” an uplifting song that featured Uniting Voices alongside Chance the Rapper and Cynthia Erivo.