Where do poetry and democracy intersect?

In part two of our conversation with Dayton poet laureate, educator, activist, culture keeper, and Kettering Foundation Democracy and the Arts resident artist Sierra Leone, we follow the threads of memory and imagination from a gallery of story quilts in Hamilton, Ohio, to the Legacy Sites of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.

Along the way, Sierra reads American Libation III: Weaving an Amendment for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, her response to Carolyn Crump's quilt Lovely One. She takes us inside The Belonging Project, where the stories of more than 100 Dayton residents are being harvested and turned into theater. And she shares a new poem born of a week with fellow Democracy Defenders led by Kimberlé Crenshaw in partnership with, a poem about how ideas persist and how thorns of memory grow from the womb of subjugation.

If you've ever wondered what poetry has to do with the work of self-government, or how a life of civic leadership actually begins, this one's for you.

In this episode we explore:

• Poetry asks. Democracy asks too. A poem doesn't go looking for answers. It leaves something behind for others to grapple with, and each generation has to decide what democracy will be.
• The petals that fall to the ground. Every society chooses which stories rise to the surface. Poets pick up the parts that fall and put some wind under them.
• Belonging becomes theater. Verbatim stories from returning citizens, bankers, fathers, teachers, and teens become a stage for the hard conversations communities need to have.

Notable Mentions

People

• Sierra Leone: Dayton's first Poet Laureate, playwright, educator, and Kettering Foundation artist-in-residence.
• Willis "Bing" Davis: Dayton artist and educator, founder of EbonNia Gallery, honored in Sierra's American Libation: Homage to an Elder (part one).
• Ketanji Brown Jackson: Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 2022, the first Black woman to serve on the Court.
• Carolyn Crump: Houston-based quilt and multimedia artist whose quilt Ketanji Brown Jackson: Lovely One inspired Sierra's poem.
• Dr. Carolyn L. Mazloomi: Quilt artist, historian, curator, NEA National Heritage Fellow, and founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network.
• John Coltrane: Jazz saxophonist and composer. Sierra's poem closes on "a love supreme."
• Angela Siner: University of Toledo faculty member in Africana Studies and Sierra's mentor, who told her, "Choose your approach."
• Joni Doherty: Senior Program Officer for Democracy and the Arts at the Kettering Foundation. She invited Sierra to accompany her to Montgomery as a guest of the Foundation.
• Bryan Stevenson: Public-interest lawyer, author of Just Mercy, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw: Legal scholar who was instrumental in developing the concepts of critical race theory and "intersectionality" and co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
• Augusto Boal: Brazilian theater artist and activist, creator of the Theatre of the Oppressed.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar: Dayton-born poet and novelist, one of the first Black American writers to gain national renown.
• Lucille Clifton: National Book Award–winning poet known for spare, luminous poems of family and resilience.
• Terrance Hayes: National Book Award–winning poet and MacArthur Fellow, author of Watch Your Language.
• Jericho Brown: Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (The Tradition) and co-editor of How We Do It.
• Nikki Giovanni: Poet, essayist, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement (1943–2024).
• Sonia Sanchez: Poet, activist, Black Arts Movement pioneer, and Philadelphia's first poet laureate.
• Maya Angelou: Poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
• Robert Hayden: Poet and the first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
• Gwendolyn Brooks: The first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and a lifelong chronicler of Chicago's Bronzeville.

Organizations & Institutions

• Center for the Study of Art and Community: Producer of Art is Change, building art-and-community partnerships since 1992.
• Charles F. Kettering Foundation: Democracy and the Arts: Foundation program exploring how the arts strengthen democratic life, and partner on the Art in Action series.
• Fitton Center for Creative Arts: Community arts center in Hamilton, Ohio, which organized the Soul of Black Folks: 250 Years of Creativity, Innovation and Leadership exhibition. The Fitton partnered with the Kettering Foundation to develop the Voices of Black Folks program.
• Women of Color Quilters Network: International network of Black quilt artists founded by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi.
• The Human Race Theatre Company: Dayton professional theater and one of the partners on The Belonging Project.
• AmeriCorps Seniors: National service program for volunteers 55 and older, among the groups heard in The Belonging Project listening sessions.
• University of Dayton: Imagining Community Symposium: October 2026 symposium on civic hope and belonging, where The Belonging Project will be presented.
• Equal Justice Initiative: Montgomery-based human rights organization founded by Bryan Stevenson.
• African American Policy Forum: Think tank co-founded and led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. They host the annual Democracy Defenders Summit, which in 2026 involved a partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative.
• U.S. Sentencing Commission: Federal agency that sets sentencing guidelines. Justice Jackson served as its vice chair.
• University of Toledo: Where Sierra studied and met her mentor, Angela Siner.

Books, Films & Recordings

• Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson: Justice Jackson's 2024 memoir, part of Sierra's research for her poem.
• Ketanji Brown Jackson: Lovely One by Carolyn Crump: Portrait quilt in The Soul of Black Folks exhibition at the Fitton Center.
• A Love Supreme by John Coltrane: Coltrane's 1965 spiritual jazz suite, echoed in the last line of Sierra's poem.
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois: Du Bois's 1903 classic, echoed in Sierra's line "stitch threads of light into the souls of Black folk."
• The Belonging Project: Sierra's verbatim-theater play built from Dayton listening sessions, commissioned by the Kettering Foundation.
• Watch Your Language by Terrance Hayes: Hayes's visual and literary map of his poetic genealogy.
• How We Do It edited by Jericho Brown & Darlene Taylor: Anthology of Black writers on craft, practice, and skill.
• Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal: Boal's foundational book on participatory theater for social change.
• Proverbs 4:7: "With all thy getting get understanding." This is the proverb Sierra adds at the close.

Historical Events & Movements

• Voices of the Soul of Black Folks: August 2026 Fitton Center program pairing seven poets with quilts from The Soul of Black Folks: 250 Years of Creativity, Innovation and Leadership.
• Democracy Defenders Summit: Legacy, Literacy & Liberation: The third annual AAPF/EJI residency in Montgomery, July 27–31, 2026.
• The Legacy Sites: EJI's Legacy Museum, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.
• The Atlantic Slave Trade: The centuries-long trade in enslaved Africans, which Portugal pioneered in the 1400s.
• The Middle Passage: The forced Atlantic crossing of enslaved Africans, evoked in Sierra's "middle passage prayer."
• Ubuntu: African philosophy of shared humanity ("I am because we are"), and Sierra's "ubuntu armor."
• Theatre of the Oppressed: Boal's participatory theater movement, the grounding for The Belonging Project's audience dialogue.
• Verbatim / Documentary Theatre: Theater built from real people's own words, the method behind The Belonging Project.
• Bronzeville, Chicago: Historic Black Metropolis on Chicago's South Side and Gwendolyn Brooks's home ground.

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Sierra Leone, Part 2
Sierra Leone Believes Poetry Is Essential Civic Infrastructure

This transcript was generated by AI and lightly edited by a human.

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art Is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders.

My name is Bill Cleveland. 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.

Now, in part one, Sierra took us into a world where poetry lives in neighborhoods and classrooms, in the stories of elders, in the imagination of young people, and in the long, patient work of showing up and speaking up. We talked about presence as a creative discipline, about poetry as a kind of civic infrastructure, and we heard Sierra's American Libation: Homage to an Elder, her tribute to Dayton artist Willis "Bing" Davis.

In part two, those threads of memory and imagination travel a bit further. We'll follow Sierra into The Belonging Project, where the stories shared by over 100 people have been harvested and are becoming theater. We'll travel with her to Montgomery, Alabama, and Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, where an encounter with the deep and terrible legacy of enslavement has sparked her inevitable poetic response. And we'll ask a question that has run beneath this entire conversation: Where do the poetic path and the democracy turnpike cross and join?

But before all that, we'll visit the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, Ohio, where Sierra joined six other poets in responding to an exhibition of quilts, one of which was a portrait of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called Lovely One.

Part 3: Quilted Stories

So, Sierra, how did this quilt-inspired project come about, and what was it about Carolyn Crump's Ketanji Brown Jackson quilt that called out to you?

We held the reading in an art gallery space where a group of the quilts were exhibited. I believe 32 quilts and 30 quilters participated in the exhibition, so the quilts are throughout the entire building. And it was so perfect to hold the event inside the gallery space. And the seven of us poets, we responded to seven quilts. And then the foundation put together an anthology booklet. I responded with another American Libation piece. I chose to respond to—

Sierra Leone 00:04:30 Yes, this piece is "American Libation III: Weaving an Amendment for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson."

I / who believe in visible freedom / who awaken

resting warriors / on the other side / I / who sit

at the feet of elders / and venerate the vestige

of unraveling repurposed fabric / sew a story /

grandmother / knots into layers of protection /

embroider blessings of liberty / cut out shapes

of tooth-edge symbols of rebellion / sew

into the sacredness / from cloth made of blood

and soil / wrapped in a lineage of love / memory

keeper / gathering narrow loom strips of dark

stained sorrow / mend bleeding hearts / harken

the hands of traditions / textile rhythms / of earth /

water / breath of life / stitch threads of light /

into the souls of Black folk / crying out

from the seams of twoness / I / who believe

in freedom / speak their names / offer libation /

clothe myself in ubuntu armor / and middle passage

prayers / take strains of hair and sisterlock

codified redemption / drape chest / waist / and ankles

in cowrie shell courage / crossing seas of separation /

daughter of seventh son / with sun flowered

hazelnut eyes / born of dirt and duty

whose second sight / birthed a love supreme.


Thank you.

Sierra Leone 00:07:18 Yes, I did a lot of research, and read her autobiography, Lovely One, and spent time with other articles that Justice Brown Jackson had written. But it was her humanness—

Sierra Leone 00:07:45 —and then her parents in Florida, where they were able to grow and develop as teachers and educators in the face of oppression—just building that world and the support for her to grow her love and appreciation for theater and drama, and to be on the debate team, and be accepted into one of the world's best institutions. And her struggles of having family members who faced run-ins with the law, her work on a sentencing commission.

I thought that was so interesting because when I worked on my first master's degree, my thesis work was on prosecutorial power and mandatory minimum sentencing. And her doing the work around legislation to shape how we engage folks who are struggling with disabilities.

And then getting opportunity after opportunity to grow into the human who would have one of the hardest jobs on planet Earth.

Sierra Leone 00:08:42 And I felt a response to that was needed more than what we all can research and read and learn about her in a very short period of time.

You know, every society gets to decide what stories rise to the surface, and often what part of what story rises to the surface. And I believe it is the job of the poets often to take the parts that seem to fall to the ground and raise them up, those petals of the flower, and get a little wind under them and, and celebrate them.

And also, remind us that the headline that we all get excited about would, would not be possible with that rich foundation. All the lived wisdom rises up from that story. My ideal person on the Supreme Court has a life that teaches them how the human story meets the law. That is where the Supreme Court has to do its work.

Bill Cleveland 00:09:53 Yep, have that.

Bill Cleveland 00:10:02 Yes.

Bill Cleveland 00:10:09 For someone who's listening, who is affected and cares deeply about their community the way you do, and aspires to be a, a civic leader in the manner that I think you have become, what would you tell them are the first steps that they need to be thinking about when they enter into the kind of a life path that you have taken?

Bill Cleveland 00:11:16 So it must first be an internal driving force.

Bill Cleveland 00:11:25 Right.

And when you do that, as we tell young people, you will revisit it in college, potentially through a term paper, through a community service project, and it will begin to sprout. Those tendrils will begin to grow. And as they grow, you're able to decide, and to hopefully have the people around you who can support you in practicing and developing innate discernment to know what direction to move in.

And so for me, it wasn't just, "I'm going to wake up and be civically engaged." You know, I was born into an extremely large family, 14-plus aunts and uncles. I was born into a democratic society where I went to high school with 12 of my first cousins. So I needed to negotiate and navigate, and it came naturally, and doing the work of ensuring that we were all seen and heard and headed in the same direction before we decided to collaborate on possibly going to the park or sharing three bikes and there were nine of us there, or one pair of skates, or food, or whatever it was.

My grandmother did a great job of ensuring that we understood how democracy worked on a micro level, starting first with family. And from that, it grew into cares and concerns, because I grew up in a world on the west side of Toledo, Ohio, and the west side of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And so in both of those spaces, I learned what was missing, the blight, the challenges, and I wanted to confront those things.

And so my first career path was through the work of criminology and criminal justice, and getting degrees in that work, and then studying human behavior in graduate school, and understanding what was underneath, what I was living and seeing, and taking what my mentors told me. Professor and anthropologist Angela Siner at the University of Toledo telling me, "Choose your approach.

"If it's going to be through poetry, do it through poetry. Choose your angle. You can't fight every battle on every front. Find your strengths, find your allies, find those who want to do the work with you. And in the spaces where you're not excellent, please identify those who are, and you'll have partners.

"You'll have people you can go back to, to help shape the work. And as you grow and evolve with each iteration, the work that you have done will build the perfect foundation for whatever is to come next in your career. Stay practical, stay centered in intention, and do not be afraid to get mentors, be a mentee.

"And those mentors, they do not have to be alive. You can go to the library—

Sierra Leone 00:15:21 "—plenty of mentors there."

Sierra Leone 00:15:30 Ask a question at every turn. And, and when you're in spaces with human beings like Bill Cleveland, question them.

Part 4. Poetry, Democracy, & Belonging

Sierra Leone 00:16:11 First and foremost, I would say the question makes me think of how the work is just never done. Poetry is, for me, it is always proposing a question. It's not looking for answers. And I think in advocacy, the thing that makes it different for me is that we're looking for fairness and equality and looking to see how the systems and those in charge of those systems are working to benefit the will of the common man, and how are we choosing to live together in that work.

And I see pretty much a poem as a way to express a feeling, a, a thought, a belief, or desires. How am I taking imagination, which I think is what the Constitution or the Bill of Rights [does], it feels imagined sometimes, when it's not being utilized in practice in a way that it needs to be on the ground.

Sierra Leone 00:17:21 It feels to me that poetry and democracy shares the same spirit. The spirit of "I'm going to take this snapshot in this moment in time," because that's what you are, most times, responding to: a moment, a scene, a picture—and noticing that so deeply that you leave something for others to grapple with, to confront, and to make better. And it seems that is the work of what we're doing with democracy over and over again. Each generation is defining for itself: What is it? What will it be? What will we leave?

Sierra Leone 00:18:14 What is next? And for the poem, for me, I feel, embodying what the poem is . . . many days I am asking that question a lot: What is next? Am I prepared? And am I leaving this space better than I found it?

Sierra Leone 00:18:39 Yes, always listening. And so one way, to close, that work is being done is through The Belonging Project. Yes, The Belonging Project is a project where the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the Human Race Theatre Company came together, and we interviewed and held listening sessions with about 130 local citizens. We held these sessions to explore how our citizens are experiencing belonging, or exclusion, or being othered.

We did listening session with returning citizens and AmeriCorps Seniors, on to fatherhood groups, bankers, all sorts of people, every type of organization and community that you could imagine: churches, teachers, high school students. They all have contributed to this process. And it was through these sessions that I, as the playwright on the project, utilized, I would say, 80, 90% of verbatim theater, and took those conversations and turned them into a series of vignettes in the form of a radio play or staged reading. They will most likely stay in that form so that they can travel quickly. But this is a series that confronts, through story, through local citizens, at work, with family, social dynamics, unexpected upsets, and it takes their lived experience, and we wrote a show with it.

Sierra Leone 00:20:52 Yes, it'll be mounted this fall at the University of Dayton's upcoming Imagining Community conference. And this work is grounded in Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed work, and just really navigating those different forms to allow the audience the opportunity to be a part of the show. In this work, the series of vignettes are presented, and then the second act of the work is this conversation and dialogue that happens with the community, and asking: “What is it that they experienced? What are they taking away? What can we apply and utilize to help us navigate current circumstances that some may be facing?” And so we use the series as a way to begin or complete very difficult conversations that must and need to be had.

Sierra Leone 00:22:22 Oh, yes. We would like to put it in public domain in 2027, to ensure that anyone that would want to access it can.

Part Five: Democracy Defenders

It was put together by Kimberlé Crenshaw and her organization. And so this is just one of the poems that was born out of that experience, and having an opportunity to see history, Black history in America, from the 1400s, through understanding the role of the Portuguese, on through an introduction to the Europeans, and on into the world of slavery and into the Americas.

And so having such a visceral, visual, and auditory experience, it left me with the way that ideas are persistent, and how we are currently living in the ideas of our forefathers, good or bad, indifferent, however. So this is what came forth for me.

Perennial Persistent

thorns of memory/ grew from the womb of

subjugation / like osmotic thirst / after inhaling

fresh baked sweets / made by my favorite aunt /

on a summer night filled with firefly

catching / green garden hose drinking and

spraying / each other and the rosebush nearby /

sometimes / I would brush against the plush

petals / prickle pointy pain / pleasant with floral

perfumed woody stems of freedom / grounded in

damp dirt / awakening memories that belong to

yesterday / sometimes / I confuse the elongated

nodes / with the scent of wild raspberries / leaves

sawed /down into botanical primer / solid

buckeye brown thorns grew /

like seeds picked from cotton bolls /

by red-tinted fingertips / worn and washed / in

the innocence of an idea.

Sierra Leone 00:25:47 And so those, those, those buckeye brown thorns that grew like seeds picked from cotton bulbs by red-tinted fingertips worn and washed in the innocence of an idea. And that idea is that slavery was correct.

Bill Cleveland 00:26:25 Well, and the thing is, Sierra, I think all of us wish that it was true that when you learn something, it sticks, but I think we know that's not true. You have to learn it over and over, and I think that's what poets are for, is to speak, and reflect, and listen, and reflect, and repeat, but always in a way that resonates with the moment that we're in.

Sierra Leone 00:27:42 Yeah, visiting Dunbar's work does that for me here locally. Being with poets like Lucille Clifton. There is a work that's right here, Terrance Hayes, I love it. It's called Watch Your Language. He takes you through his map of his poetic genealogy. He shapes his entire poetic genealogy.

For me, I love this anthology, How We Do It, edited by Jericho Brown [and Darlene Taylor]. There are so many contemporary poets that I'm learning to love and appreciate, the opportunity to spend, to be quoted by that Black Eyed Pea, Nikki Giovanni, or to shake loose of my skin like Sonia Sanchez, to rise above it all like Maya Angelou.

To sit on a cold day and read Robert Hayden's work. To sit there, for me to be in Chicago hanging out on Bronzeville, loving Gwendolyn Brooks and, and the way that she loved her city. There are just so many young poets that I'm appreciating, the way that they are handling the craft, and locally, my poetic peers who, who are not surrendering, who are not turning—who are allowing the rhythm of spoken word to, to have a relationship with the fine art and the literary art of the page.

I'm learning every day and learning to not be scared that I am the poet that I am, and there's nothing wrong with that. And you can get better if you choose to just learn something about others. And so you are so right in everything that you've shared here, and it is so beyond whatever time period we're visiting, but how will we bring it to the here and now? And how is it showing up in the here and now? And once we know that it's here, what in the hell are we going to do about it?

Sierra Leone 00:29:52 Hey. In addition to that proverb—get understanding.

Sierra Leone 00:30:13 Enjoy. Bye-bye.

And thank you, listeners, for tuning in. Before we leave, here's a few things rising up for me from the second half of our conversation with Sierra Leone. First of all, poetry is a force to be reckoned with. It can be a way of paying and drawing attention, of asking hard questions, of making a powerful point, and making room for voices and stories that might otherwise go unheard. And as Sierra reminded us, the work of the poet and practicing democracy are never really finished.

Now, if you haven't heard part one of our conversation, I hope you go back and listen. It's a deep dive into Sierra's journey as a poet, educator, activist, and culture keeper, and into the stories and experiences that have shaped the work we've explored today. Thanks again for tuning in.

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 Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.