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? Talking Across America, the Star-Phoenix said, “His thoughtful writing combines with perfectly timed delivery to create a powerful wordscape that owes as much to jazz as drama.”

He has worked for both the Ohio Arts Council Arts in Education programs as well as doing presentations and workshops for The Center for Arts-Inspired Learning. He was consultant and curriculum development artist for WordForward in Singapore and for the nationally touring Poetry Alive. He is an adjunct professor at John Carroll University. Ray was recently certified on the Young Audiences National Teaching Artist Roster. Highlights of past tours include a keynote shared with Robert Bly at the First Coast Writer’s Conference and a featured reading at the opening of City Light’s Italia in Florence with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ray toured Russia with Yevgeny Yevtushenko where he appeared on Good Morning, Russia and performed at the Moscow Polytech, the Russian Poets’ Hall of Fame.

He has received numerous awards for his writing and performance, most recently a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and a residency from Cuyahoga Partnership for Arts and Culture/Arts Collinwood to facilitate an oral history of Collinwood, his ancestral neighborhood where he currently resides. Ray was selected as Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate, a two-year post, in 2020 and was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Additionally, Ray was recently awarded an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate grant for his “Poem for Cleveland” project that paired youth and young adults with elders to create poems about Cleveland.

Availability

Upon request

RECENT PROJECTS: 10-Minute Play Fest, Ruffing Montessori, (Cleveland Hts. – grades 4-6) 8-week residency including workshops on writing and performing resulting in 6  10-minute plays (2 for each grade level) for a final performance.Students presented play proposals and used improv exercises to develop plot, scenes, and dialogue for selected ideas.

Environmental Poetry Residency, Ruffing Montessori (grades 4-6) 8-week residency featuring workshops with prompts exploring human impact on climate, including haiku hikes and natural phenomenon and metaphor workshops culminating with a presentation of group and solo poems.

Spring Poetry Performance (Andrews Osborne Academy) TeachArtsOhio residency with workshops in songwriting, performance, and poetry for grades K-12. Students performed for Grandparents Day and Choir performances including two original songs written by the students.

Video courtesy of the teaching artist from Arts Cleveland on Vimeo.