Cynthia Amoah
Creative Writing, Poetry & Spoken Word
Cynthia Amoah is a spoken word artist, educator, and mentor originally from Ghana. Since the onset of her career, Cynthia’s dynamic voice has captured diverse audiences and her authentic stage presence has left them inspired after every performance. Her literary pieces often highlight the forgotten stories of the world, while transcending the oftentimes marginalized groups she delineates in her work. Her writing and performances also concern the foraging questions that have to do with identity and belonging, with displacement, migration and uprootedness.
Cynthia completed her MFA at The New School and has been featured on the stages of TEDxDrewUniversity, TEDxOhioStateUniversity, and the United Nations Information Center in Accra, among many.…
Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld
Integrated Arts Experiences
Born and raised in New York City, Mimi Brodsky Chenfeld has been teaching people of all ages and backgrounds for her whole teaching life—through programs such as Headstart and Upward Bound—from early childhood programs to senior communities, from prisons to hospitals, elementary schools, high schools, and higher education institutions. She has presented programs in creative education in 45 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Great Britain. She has written numerous poems, stories, articles, and books. Her children’s novel, The House At 12 Rose Street, was adapted for a TV special and nominated for an Emmy.…
Omopé Carter-Daboiku
Wordsmith & Storyteller
An Appalachian of mixed ancestry, Omope Carter Daboiku hails from the Ohio River town of Ironton. She migrated to Cincinnati in 1972 and to Dayton in 2012. A cultural geographer and award-winning teller of tales, Omope became affiliated with the Ohio Arts Council in 1990 and the Cincinnati Arts Association at its inception in 1997 and has performed and led story circles across the U.S. and abroad. In 1993, she spoke at the Art of Survival (Nuremberg, Germany), addressing quilting as a cottage industry used by African American women to support families.…
Jennifer Hambrick
Poetry
Poet Jennifer Hambrick is the multi-Pushcart Prize- and Best of the Net-nominated author of the free verse poetry collection In the High Weeds, winner of the 2020 Stevens Manuscript Award of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies; the acclaimed haibun collection Joyride (Red Moon Press); and the free verse poetry collection Unscathed (NightBallet Press). Jennifer also won the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Press Poetry Prize and First Place in the 2018 Haibun Award Competition of the Haiku Society of America; was featured by former U.S.…
Nancy Kangas
Poetry
Nancy Kangas is a poet and teaching artist based in Columbus. She has poetry in books and journals, including Rattle (Poetry Prize Finalist), East Bay Review (Pushcart Prize nomination), and Cap City Poets. Her work springs from play and experiment and a desire to collaborate. In the early 1980s in San Francisco she launched Nancy’s Magazine, a collection of comics, literature, and advice. Helping kids create their own magazines was the theme of her first workshop (Thurber House); others focused on upcycling clothing paired with expressive writing (Wexner Center for the Arts) and responding to visual art in poetry (Columbus Museum of Art).…
Sierra Leone
Entrepreneur, Poet, Wholistic Urban Creative Arts & Theatre
Poet, producer, activist, educator, and entrepreneur Sierra Leone captivates audiences with her unassuming ingenuity, profound insight, and comedic sense of “knowing.”
A Governor’s Award winner and writer, Sierra is the president and artistic director of OFP Theatre and Production Company. For more than a decade, Ohio has benefited from Sierra’s vision of creative urban arts as a powerful artistic medium to bring communities together across racial, cultural, ideological, and economic divides. Her project “The Signature: A Poetic Medley Show” presents a hybrid of urban poetry, music, dance, and visual arts from local, regional, and international talent.…
Ray McNiece
Theatre, Performance Poetry & Storytelling
Ray McNiece is the author of eight books of poems and monologues, most recently Breath Burns Away, New Haiku. He has created two solo theatre works: Dis – Voices From a Shelter and Us? Talking Across America; two music/poetry collaborations: “Mouth Music” and “A Rust bowl Hootenanny;” and an autobiography on stage: The Lives of A Poet. The Orlando Sentinel reporting on Ray’s solo show at the Fringe Festival called him “a modern day descendant of Woody Guthrie. He has a way with words and a wry sense of humor.” In a review of Us?…
Suzanne Ondrus
Creative Writing, Poetry
Suzanne Ondrus’ work explores cultures, identity, history, gender issues, racism, and women’s sexuality. Her first book, Passion Seeds, won the 2013 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women, and its contest judge, Richard Harteis, in an introduction to the book writes: “These poems speak to both what we want to keep invisible, such as shame and racism and speak to what we want visible, desire and love. … Ondrus taps into both the dream world and reality so that the invisible becomes visible and audible.”
Suzanne was the 2013 Reed Magazine Markham Poetry Prize winner, a 2017 UNESCO World Book Capital featured poet in Guinea, Conakry, and a 2018-2020 Fulbright Scholar to Burkina Faso, West Africa.…
Rikki Santer
Creative Writing, Poetry, & Film Studies
Rikki Santer has worked as a journalist, magazine and book editor, co-founder and managing editor of an alternative city newspaper in Cleveland, poet-in-the schools, high school teacher of English and film studies, and director of a student writing center. Currently she is serving as a vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association, education consultant for Film Columbus, member of the performing poetry troupe, Concrete Wink, and she holds an Ohio Department of Education Lead Professional Educator teaching license as well as National Board teacher certification.
She earned a MA degree in journalism from Kent State University and a MFA degree in creative writing from The Ohio State University.…
Fariha Tayyab
Creative Writing & Documentary Photography
Fariha Tayyab is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from Houston. As a writer and photographer, she often identifies as a storyteller who uses her creative writing and documentary photography to create and share narratives with others.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, Fariha pursued a teaching license and has been practicing both her art and teaching for more than a decade. She has worked with elementary and high school students of all backgrounds in three states and three countries. In her early teaching years, she set up an E.S.L.…
