Sierra Leone Believes Poetry

Is Essential Civic Infrastructure

In this episode we meet Sierra Leone—a poet, educator, activist, and cultural organizer who reminds us that a poem is far more than words on a page. It can become a gathering place, a healing practice, and a way for a community to remember who it is.

In this conversation, we explore three central ideas:

1. Presence is a creative discipline. Art begins with showing up, listening deeply, and making space for what has not yet found words.
2. Poetry can become civic infrastructure. A poem can live in a school, gallery, theatre, public square, or gathering of neighbors—not only on the printed page.
3. Belonging is something we make together. Through performance, mentorship, and shared cultural memory, unfamiliar people and art forms can become part of the same nourishing gumbo.

Listen for Sierra’s journey from “healing producer” to “creative catalyst” to “culture keeper”—and for her conviction that the artist’s responsibility is not simply to speak, but to build spaces in which a community can hear and learn from itself.

Notable Mentions

People

• Sierra Leone — Dayton poet, producer, educator, activist, and interdisciplinary artist; the Kettering Foundation’s inaugural artist-in-residence and Dayton’s first living poet laureate.[JD1]
• Sonia Sanchez — Poet, educator, and Black Arts Movement figure whose advice about making time to write opens the conversation.
• Gwendolyn Brooks — Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago poet, mentor, and civic literary leader.
• Amiri Baraka — Poet, playwright, activist, and central theorist of the Black Arts Movement.
• Haki R. Madhubuti — Poet, educator, Black Arts Movement architect, and founder of Third World Press.
• Robert Frost — Canonical American poet invoked while discussing narrow public ideas about poetry.
• Terrance Hayes — Poet cited by Sierra in explaining that a writer makes space for a poem instead of deciding it beforehand.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar — Dayton-born poet whose life and work remain central to the city’s cultural identity. He was posthumously recognized as Dayton’s first poet laureate.
• Willis “Bing” Davis — Dayton artist, educator, activist, and curator honored in Sierra’s poem.
• Kweku Larry Crowe — Dayton oral historian, visual artist, and community activist.
• Mama Nozipo Glenn — South African-born human-rights advocate and longtime Dayton community elder.
• Edwin C. Moses — Dayton-born Olympic hurdler and namesake of a prominent city boulevard.
• James H. McGee — Civil-rights attorney who became Dayton’s first Black mayor, and namesake of a prominent city boulevard.
• Faheem Curtis-Khidr — Historian and professor whose public scholarship addresses equity and Black history in Dayton.
• Martin Luther King Jr. — Civil-rights leader whose 1964 Dayton address inspired the Visual Voices project.
• Colin Kaepernick — Athlete and activist invoked in Sierra’s poem as a contemporary image of kneeling in protest.
• Joni Doherty — Charles F. Kettering Foundation senior program officer for Democracy and the Arts.

Organizations and venues

• Center for the Study of Art and Community — Producer of ART IS CHANGE and a research and storytelling organization focused on arts-based community development.
• The Charles F. Kettering Foundation — The Charles F. Kettering Foundation, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide by fostering citizen engagement, promoting
• government accountability, and countering authoritarianism.
• Democracy and the Arts — The Kettering Foundation’s focus area for integrating the
• power of the arts into democratic life locally, nationally, and globally.
• Home of Urban Creative Arts — Dayton organization co-founded by Sierra to advance education, performance, healing, and community change.
• Third World Press Foundation — Chicago-based African-centered publisher founded by Haki R. Madhubuti.
• Dayton Early College Academy High — The school known as DECA High, where Sierra leads student-designed arts and Black History Month work.
• University of Dayton Theatre, Dance and Performance Technology — University program that helps DECA students prepare original work for the stage.
• Roger Glass Center for the Arts — University of Dayton arts center where a DECA production was presented.
• Levitt Pavilion Dayton — An outdoor nonprofit music venue described as Dayton’s “downtown living room.” The Levitt seeks to build community and social interaction among people of all ages and backgrounds through offering free concerts.
• Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center — Performing-arts complex that housed Signature performances in its Mathile Theatre.
• The Loft Theatre — Downtown Dayton theatre and longtime home of Sierra’s Signature series.
• EbonNia Gallery and Black Palette Art Gallery — West Dayton galleries that hosted Visual Voices and its poetry programming.

Projects, events, and movements

• Black Arts Movement — The artistic and political movement Sierra identifies as a foundation of her practice.
• Black Writers Retreat — Third World Press gathering devoted to craft, audience, and cultural responsibility.
• DECA High Black History Month Production — Annual student-led program combining Black history with original poetry, theatre, movement, and visual art.
• Signature Levitt Music and Arts Camp — Free intensive camp in which Dayton teenagers create and mount a public performance in one week.
• Visual Voices — Exhibition, ekphrastic-poetry project, and dance performance created by Kettering’s Democracy and the Arts program in partnership with local visual artists, poets, and dancers. It was inspired by King’s 1964 Dayton speech.
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1964 Dayton Address — King’s address about race relations, nonviolence, love, and unfinished equality was given at a city-wide freedom rally at the University of Dayton fieldhouse.

Works and publications

• “Sympathy” — Paul Laurance Dunbar’s poem containing the image of the caged bird beating its wing.
• “Music Heals on Fifth and Main” — Sierra’s commissioned poem about Levitt Pavilion and its shared civic space.
• “American Libation: Homage to an Elder” — Sierra’s ekphrastic tribute to Willis “Bing” Davis and a work that he created, performed during the interview.
• “There Is a Balm in Gilead, West Dayton” — Davis’s artwork that became the visual source for Sierra’s poem. For a free pdf of the exhibition catalog, email [email protected]
• Visual Voices: Storytelling Through Poetry — An anthology published by the Kettering Foundation’s Democracy and the Arts program that features seven Ohio poets responding to the exhibition’s artworks. For a free pdf of the publication, email [email protected]
• “There Is a Balm in Gilead” — Traditional African American spiritual echoed in the title of Davis’s artwork.

Peoples, places, and cultural references

• Osage Nation — Indigenous nation named in Sierra’s Dayton land acknowledgment.
• Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — Federally recognized Myaamia nation whose ancestral homelands include western Ohio.
• Shawnee people — Indigenous people with deep historical ties to Ohio.
• Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone — Ohlone language community acknowledged by the host in locating Alameda.
• Confederated Villages of Lisjan — Ohlone community whose ancestral territory includes the East Bay.
• Sankofa— An Akan principle often translated as “go back and fetch it”: learning from or retrieving what is valuable from the past in order to move forward.
• Griot — A West African oral historian, storyteller and musician whose traditional role includes preserving and transmitting history, genealogy, and community memory.
• Shango and Ase (Àṣẹ) — Shango is the Yoruba orisha associated with thunder and lightning and a deified legendary king of Oyo. Ase (Àṣẹ) is a broader Yoruba concept of creative or generative power — the force or capacity through which words, actions, people and sacred objects can bring things into being or make things happen.
• Dayton and West Dayton — The city and historically Black west-side communities that become living characters in Sierra’s work.

[JD1]The first poet laureate was Paul Laurence Dunbar, but it was given posthumously.

Sierra Leone

This is an AI generated transcript that has been lightly edited by a human for clarity.

This episode is part of a special Art in Action series produced in partnership with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation's Democracy and the Arts program. In these episodes, we'll be speaking with artists, cultural organizers, and arts leaders who are navigating and challenging current efforts to limit free creative expression and free speech. Together, we'll explore what freedom of expression means in practice, not as an abstract right, but as a lived responsibility at the heart of democratic life.

In this episode, the first of two conversations with Sierra Leone, she reminds us that a poem is far more than words on a page. It can be a gathering space, a healing practice, or a way for a community to listen and reflect and learn from itself, which is highly appropriate given that Sierra is both the first poet laureate of the City of Dayton and the Kettering Foundation's inaugural artist in residence for its Democracy and the Arts Initiative. She's also the executive director and co-founder of the Home of Urban Creative Arts and founder of Signature Education Solutions, which uses poetry, theater, storytelling, and creative learning to strengthen communities, particularly among young people.

In this episode, we'll explore how presence can be a creative discipline, how poetry does become civic infrastructure and how belonging is something we can create together through performance, mentorship, and shared cultural memory. We join our conversation as Sierra reflects on the challenges a poet faces finding the space and time they need to make work in twenty-first century America.

Part One: Presence

[00:03:01] Bill Cleveland: I usually get up at 4:00 a.m. That's my time. It's like visiting another planet you know?

Bill Cleveland Well, I'm going to say these days, presence is an act of courage and discipline, I believe, because there are so many things that are pulling us away from thinking deeply and being in touch with the, the natural world, and our fellow humans in a way that is thoughtful. That really is a challenge these days.

Sierra Leone: Yeah, and I hate to even categorize it as something as major as uncommon. But the rhythm of deciding you're going to take your time, you're going to be with the work. I must say, it’s — some days it doesn't feel right. It feels as if “Oh my goodness, you should not be with the work in this way.” You should somehow figure out a way to be on the front line of something for someone and with others. But in order to have something generative for people to respond to and be with.

Bill Cleveland I don't think you can have a front line without a foundation.

Sierra Leone: Oh, come on.

[00:04:37] Sierra Leone: I am not from that ant tribe that can just show up and build the world in a day.

[00:04:50] Sierra Leone: Yes, I am, here in the middle, in the Midwest, and we gather here in Dayton, Ohio, on occupied and the seized territory of the Osage, Miami, and Shawnee people. This is a place where we know why the caged bird beats his wing and the cornerstone of innovation. Dayton, Ohio, the land of funk, that's pioneered the way for many.

[00:05:54] Sierra Leone: When I first started the work of producing more than writing poetry, but producing and presenting poets and poetry to the greater community, I was called a healing producer. But that grew into being, being a creative catalyst in the community, and now I'm hopefully extending that into becoming one day a culture keeper. So that's sort of the lineage of name for me.

[00:06:53] Sierra Leone: My practice has always been centered in care. I think being the oldest, it's just natural. But, but a, a practice of care. And so I find myself when I'm talking to folks sharing my ideas or work, just grounding the work first and listening and helping them to understand that I'm here first as a listener and a creative and as a person who wants to understand the human condition from a shared perspective. And I try to take that shared perspective of the human condition, and I try to couple it with story.

And so one way I connect with people is through the story of an event, the story of a poem, the story of history. And with that connection then begin to really move at the speed of trust, to ensure that there is some mission alignment, some intention alignment, and just why. Understanding their why and explaining my why on a particular process or project in community. And from there, I'm able to go in any direction if we're talking about just writing in general or plays or production or what does it mean to be a civic servant in community, or how will we bridge or close a gap together. But just always making sure I'm coming at it with the understanding that I'm not leaning on whatever has brought me to this point, accolade-wise, connection, and what I've done in the past. I'm present with whoever I'm with, to ensure that I hear their need and to ensure that they are processing what it is that I would like to contribute to that particular experience.

[00:10:16] Bill Cleveland: Yes. A lot of people imagine, the part of the poet that you described, which was, burning the midnight oil, right? Alone in a quiet room. But your work, your career looks quite different, almost the opposite. You're organizing folks. You're building institutions. You're creating spaces where other people can share their stories and their voices. How did you come to see poetry as community infrastructure rather than simply just a solitary personal expression?

It was the foundation of what I believed in because my first really intense artistic experience was at the Betty Shabazz Retreat Center in upstate New York with Third World Press and every single poet you could imagine who was in that work. Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, the list just goes on and on, with artists. And so — but that infrastructure for me, it taught me that the poem does not have to live on the page, and it also taught me that I can be the poem. I can poetically be present because people are sometimes uncomfortable. They don't understand what the poem is always attempting to do, or not connected with, the work. But if I can show you how poetry is in conversation with how we choose to live together, basic need, if I can show you how these words can help you to see aspects of community that you just were not willing to experience because it felt like it was something that belonged in a book and to Robert Frost. Right?

[00:12:47] Sierra Leone: For some. So that for me, it has built so much infrastructure around learning, what my local poets have done in community, what national artists have done through movements like the Black Arts Movement, and then using experiences in every genre of art to design what my company labeled as the signature of Poetic Medley, which was a show that allowed all of the arts to either collide or find a synergetic connection. In every show for a decade, we figured it out, where you had the fine artist and the folk artist and the spoken word poet seated in the same space with community folks who were lawyers, doctors, may even be a person living in a shelter or a college student, or just someone in community wanting connection. Meeting at a particular venue, the Loft Theater or the Mathile Theater in the Schuster Center, and meeting there once a month, to grapple with whatever was happening in the world. And that just became, my, my roux, my gumbo, my soup, my, my everything that warmed my spirit and also put bones on the infrastructure of my journey and how I would use poetry to date.

[00:15:08] Sierra Leone: That does ring true in it being the voice of the community, and it is also helping people to become comfortable with the unknown, and how are they willing to, engage the unknown? Because that's our practice as artists. You take a commission, you take a fellowship, and the work is not for me to, as I've heard Terrance Hayes say many times in his work, "It's not, it's not for me to decide what the poem is going to be. It's for me to create the space for the poem."

And so in that relationship with community and that voice being familiar, we're familiar, but we're all at a different part of the journey, right? We're all at a different point in the process and so that is what makes it unknown, and we're continuously connecting and reconnecting and reorganizing and repositioning this very thing that we say we know. And it looks familiar so often, when we're talking about community work, when we're talking about the need of serving a space like our downtown living room, what we would call the Levitt, a space like that.

We didn't know that we needed a free music venue. And the impact that it would have on community where you have folks who may be unhoused, sitting with an elder and, you know, children running about and other types of human beings sharing space together. So you just don't know what you need. And so writing that commission poem, "Healing on 5th and Main," it was a way to serve community, but without fully understanding what the poem would need to be for them, but allowing it to flow through me.

Part Two: Nurturing the Souls of Young Folk

[00:17:40] Sierra Leone: Yes.

[00:17:49] Sierra Leone: I think two things I can lean on is that they only care about the work, not about who you were and who you are. The work, whatever that assignment is. And two, annually for the last five years now, I've had an opportunity to curate a Black history program annually with a school, Decker High School, that does not have an arts program. And I operate as a resident coming in to do this major program annually with the students, and it's designed by them. We partner with the University of Dayton's theater department to ensure that the students have all of the nuts and bolts and tools and are prepared to take stage. And their resilience toward the work, the ability to not know how to exactly achieve their vision and goal for that year and being willing to work a process.

And that work is grounded so deeply in creative process. And when you have an opportunity to engage with the future — that’s what I label those 9th through 12th graders. And to be gifted with such a precious opportunity to plant seeds, to sow their heritage and history, to use the Black history program to insert pillars of our community who are living, folks like Dunbar who have gone on, folks who are living like a Willis Bing Davis, like a Baba Larry Crowe, Mama Nuzipo, like our Africana elders, or neighborhoods and communities that have been staples that they walk down like a Edwin C. Moses — and they're on his road — or James H. McGee.

[00:20:03] Sierra Leone: Yes. These folks, their children's children are here. You can talk with them. You can speak with them. You can learn about their lives and legacy. And so we have that connection. And so I take that moment that I have with young people to sow into them and teach them different styles of poetry, to introduce them to archivists and historians like Karen Brame and Faheem Curtis- Khidir. They come in and tell their stories, and then it empowers students to want to take a deeper dive into their own lived experiences. And so for me, that, that gift to be an example and to be center stage in their world for that bit of time is priceless.

[00:20:55] Sierra Leone: It's in February every year during Black History Month. And last year it was mounted at the Roger Glass Center, a beautiful new venue on the campus of the University of Dayton. And so that's just one of the programs. The other program is the summer camp that we host in partnership with the Levitt Pavilion, and it leans and lends itself directly to “What does it mean to belong?” because it was started during the pandemic. It was started at the time — at a time in our direct community when we did not have many resources available for young people because we were all navigating what it meant to shift the way we delivered services and engaged with other humans, during the pandemic.

And so my partner and I, Robert Owens, we decided to mount a summer camp, an urban summer camp outdoors where the students would engage with 30 other students that they did not know at the top of the week on a Monday, go through a creative process with artists, creatives, local folks who could impact students through entrepreneurs, business, those in theater, all of that would come together for this week, and they would meet at the top of the week, and on Saturday they mount a show. And so it is such an intense process, and it's done outside. And so we're dealing with the elements as well. And those two experiences that have been going on for the past five years have placed me and so many other artists in a position to positively impact students and to teach and show them what it means to belong.

[00:23:23] Sierra Leone: And that's very true. We see the students throughout the year. That's one thing that working here at the foundation – I mean, it has supported me beyond measure – is understanding the meaning and what it actually looks like to deepen relationships, to build that infrastructure, to build the ability to return to and engage and look at it, look at whatever work it is, from a multitude of perspectives and just take a much deeper dive into partnership. And I have just appreciated that so much, the opportunity to slow down, to revisit, to tweak, to fail, or what I would call learn, and do the work again. You just can't, you can't ask for more than that.

[00:25:04] Sierra Leone: Yes. And this piece, "There is a Balm in Gilead, West Dayton," it really explores inner alchemy in his, in Baba Bing's work. He's using his hands, his heart, spirit, as the guiding forces of the ancestors, as instruments to create this balm, to heal the west side of Dayton, to heal a part of the city that has faced insurmountable challenges, over the years. And so this balm, B-A-L-M, is symbolic of a living antidote. And so this particular work did come from, Visual Voices, where we were taking our first steps through ekphrastic poetry. How you can take one medium, may it be a piece of visual art, a movie, a dance, and respond to it through poetry.

American Libation

Homage to an Elder

For Willis “Bing” Davis

you are Sankofa returned, standing

on the shoulders of ancestors

on the edge of textile love integrated with urban mask-making

storytelling in multi-colored chalk.

Griot, is that jazz in your fingertips?

fingers, swinging like church robes on Sunday morning.

prayer, protest, praise,

rooted like baobab trees

oak and ivy

“Jump back, honey

jump back.”

you; balm of Gilead on the Westside of Dayton 

venerating scared and lamented souls

Calling their names, grounding your sacrifice

with Nkondi nails, chanting Ase offerings.

call their names

you, reincarnate of mighty Shango traditions carrying burdens

turned sculpture carvings, turned wet red clay rituals,

into ancient patterns blended-sketched-decoded

turned dance, ancestral spirits 

symmetrically shape-shifting history

Who do you say that I am?

you are a living artifact

legacy, building legacy

kneeled with King and Kaepernick

Affrilachian, "A blessing to be Black," handmade—

layers of beaded memory woven together by magic of woman,

amber brown eternity, turned wife, lover, turned EboNia.

warm crimson waves of wept paint gripping brushes,

blending, Diamond Avenue grit with strokes of west side born-in-the-blood

hog bottom resilience

your siblings said “Bing, pull from within,

pull from within”

there is a whole lot of Balm in Gilead West Dayton

you, the teacher, you the student, you the man.

Thank you.

[00:28:47] Sierra Leone: Yes. I didn't want him to cry, but he did. He had tears in his eyes, and I was like, "Oh." He was just like — it was so heartfelt for him that day, and that was a special day. You know, it was the top of February 2025 and, people needed to hear something. They needed words. You know, the world could always use a poem.

ART IS CHANGE is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. We'd like to thank the Charles F. Kettering Foundation for partnering with us for this Art in Action series. Please know that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They're not the views and opinions of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The foundation's partnership with us for this podcast is not an endorsement of its content. If you're interested in learning more about the foundation and its Democracy and the Arts program, please visit kettering.org or go to the link in our show notes, which also includes links to the many people, places, events, and publications mentioned in this episode.

Thanks also to the ART IS CHANGE team. Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart, and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of Luke 235. So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.