Nice Work

Rock on, Amy O!

By Alex Chambers

Published April 3, 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT

A black and white photo of a women looking back over her left shoulder toward the camera. She has dark brown hair framing her face, and a slight smile, and a fuzzy fur collar. — Singer-songwriter and Girls Rock Bloomington founder Amy Oelsner

In 2019, singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner started Girls Rock Bloomington an after-school program and summer camp for girls and trans and nonbinary youth. We hear from some of the youth at Girls Rock Bloomington, and Alex Chambers talks with Amy about how she got started as a musician – hint – it involved working at a Girls Rock program. They also talk about how personal loss can lead to creative growth, what it means to be an adult, and about a band that started in Girls Rock Bloomington and recently released their first EP. They were 12 and 13 years old.

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Nice Work Story

Alex Chambers

Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.

See stories by Alex Chambers