Meet the artists
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Award winning soprano Rose Kearin is a native of Houston, TX. She is an active recitalist, performer, and teacher, and soloist for Texas Master Chorale and Music Chez Moi. Rose was awarded second prize in the Lyra International Art Song Competition in 2022. She is a returning artist with Finger Lakes Opera in Rochester, New York, and her recital schedule takes her to New York, Arkansas, and throughout Texas. As a Young Artist, Rose has sung with Opera in the Ozarks, Finger Lakes Opera, Singing is Sicily, and The Art Song Preservation Society of New York, among other companies. Rose was recently seen in Houston’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s production of The Pirates of Penzance. Her other roles include Eleonora (Prima la Musica, e poi le parole), Micaela (Carmen), La Contessa d’Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), Violante/Sandrina (La Finta Giardiniera) and Flaminia (Il Mondo della Luna). In addition to teaching and performing, Rose recently accepted the role of Media & Young Artists Manager with Finger Lakes Opera. She has her BM from Oberlin Conservatory and MM from The Eastman School of Music.
Maggie Hinchliffe is a pianist and educator. She is a Staff Collaborative Pianist at Stephen F. Austin State University in vocal and instrumental areas. Maggie has prepared opera performances of The Bartered Bride with SFA School of Music, The Rake’s Progress with Lakes Area Music Festival, and Il Trovatore, Le Nozze di Figaro, La Bohème, and L’enfant et les sortilèges with Boulder Opera Company. An advocate for new music and interdisciplinary art, Maggie has commissioned composers and poets with support from the Puffin Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, Stagetime, Composers Guild of New Jersey, and the Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research. Along with duo partners, Maggie has toured Texas, Arkansas, New York, and New Jersey, and recently won 2nd place at the Central Texas SongSLAM competition. Maggie is a recipient of the Virginia Allison Collaborative Piano Award from the National Federation of Music Clubs. She received her MM from the Eastman School of Music and BM from Vanderbilt University.
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Ben Morris is a composer and jazz pianist whose work tells unconventional stories and crosses genre boundaries. His projects include music for chamber groups and large ensembles, operas, theater and film scores, and multimedia works. He recently lived in Oslo on a Fulbright Grant and received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant to study the influence of folk music on Norwegian jazz. Ben’s 2022 debut album, Pocket Guides, takes elements from Norwegian folk music, jazz, and chamber music. The music on Pocket Guides garnered Ben two Downbeat Awards, two ASCAP Herb Alpert Awards and a Morton Gould Award, a commission from New York Youth Symphony’s First Music, and an invitation to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival. A versatile film, theatre, and opera composer, Ben scored the documentary films American River, which premiered at Montclair Film, and Saving the Great Swamp. Ben is a frequent collaborator of librettist Laura Fuentes; his operas with Laura have been commissioned by the Washington National Opera American Opera Initiative, Boulder Opera, and Glimmerglass Festival. Ben is an Assistant Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University and studied composition at University of Colorado Boulder, Rice University, and University of Miami.
Mark Sanders is a Nebraska native, though he has called Nacogdoches home for the past 17 years; he and his wife operate a small farm devoted to horses and big breed dogs. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, he has published poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism in journals in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand. He has authored six volumes of poetry; the most recent of these are Landscapes, with Horses (2018) and In a Good Time (2019). Both books received Nebraska Book Awards, and Landscapes was the 2019 recipient of the Western Heritage Award. In 2024, Homecoming Parade: Memoir was published by Wayne State College Press; and, he is currently working on a new book of poems, a new and selected tentatively called The Messiah Horse: Poems 1988-2025.
Throughout his body of work, composer Theo Chandler explores music’s profound and mysterious capacity to convey sensations, images, and personal experience. His recent compositions have become increasingly more personal and vulnerable, motivated by a passion for creating emotional and spiritual openings for his audience. Chandler’s aesthetic, which interweaves inventive orchestral effects with rich melodic lines, has been recognized for its “stunning, musically sophisticated combination of simplicity and complexity suffused with deep emotion.” (Paper City Magazine) Chandler is a recipient of the Barlow Endowment General Commission, Copland House Residency Award, SCI/ASCAP Graduate Commission, American Prize for Vocal Chamber Music, Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Graduate Music Award from the Presser Foundation. He has received commissions from the Kinetic String Orchestra, Musiqa, New York Youth Symphony First Music Program, Tanglewood Music Center, Utah Arts Festival, and others. Chandler has held residencies across the United States and internationally, including Copland House, Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop, Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, Mizzou International Composers Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and I-Park. Chandler received composition degrees from Rice University (DMA 2021), The Juilliard School (MM 2017), and Oberlin Conservatory (BM 2015).
Martin Blessinger is a Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Texas Christian University. He holds a DM in Music Composition from Florida State University and undergraduate and master's degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Blessinger's works have been performed worldwide. His orchestration of Jessica Grace Wing's score for the off-Broadway musical Lost won Best Music in the 2003 New York City Fringe Festival and received a revival performance by the Arizona Onstage Theater Company. He has won awards from the Diana Barnhart American Song Competition, the Eppes String Quartet Competition, the Illinois Wesleyan University Young Composers Competition, the NACUSA Young Composers Competition, and ASCAP. Blessinger served as guest composer for the Talis Testival & Academy in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and has been a featured composer on the Cliburn Foundation concert series, the Basically Beethoven concert series, and with the Texas New Music Ensemble. He was invited to the Modern Music Festival/International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days Festival in Beijing, China and was named the 2020 Texas Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composer. In 2024-2025, Blessinger will work with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art as a Gentling Fellow. Blessinger’s music is published by Reed Music, C. Alan Publications, and ALRY (Nourse Wind) Publications, and can be heard on Albany Records.
karla k. morton has sixteen books, and is a Foreword Book Award Winner, Indie Book Award Winner, National Wrangler Award Winner, and Spur Award Winner. Her “The National Parks: A Century of Grace” with fellow Poet Laureate and co-writer Alan “Bones” Birkelbach is the only poetry book written in-situ from all 62 National Parks. Morton and Birkelbach give a percentage of royalties from this book back to the Parks. Her forthcoming book/CD “Santa Fe Trail: Chasing the Big West” (Madville Publishing – April 2025) is a collaboration with poems by morton and Birkelbach, art by Bob Boze Bell, and a CD of nine of the poems put to music by international singer/songwriter Michael Martin Murphey. Morton’s work has been published by such journals as American Life in Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Southern Review, Atlanta Review, Arkansas Review, Comstock Review and New Ohio Review. She is the 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate, and a nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.