Bringing Words To Life: Definition of an Artist

The Mission

Mary E. Weems, Ph.D. is a poet, playwright, author, performer, and imagination-intellect theorist. She is the former Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights (April 2007 – April 2009) and the first African American. Dr. Weems is the author and/or co-editor of eight books including Cleveland Poetry Scenes: A Panorama & Anthology (Bottom Dog Press, 2008), Poetry Power (Silvermoon Press, 2003), her educational text Public Education and the Imagination-Intellect: I Speak from the Wound in My Mouth (Peter Lang, 2003), Working Hard for the Money: America’s Working Poor in Stories, Poems, and Photos (Bottom Dog Press, 2002), and a book of poems An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles (Bottom Dog Press, 2008) a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award for poetry in 2009.

Weems has been widely published in journals including The African American Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Obsidian III, and xcp: Cultural Poetics. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady (SUNY Press) Boomer Girls (Iowa University Press), and Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of African American Poetry (SUNY Press)).

Weems won the Wick Chapbook Award for her collection white in 1996, and in 1997 her play Another Way to Dance won the Chilcote award for The Most Innovative Play by an Ohio Playwright. Her most recent chapbook Tampon Class (Pavement Saw Press) is in its second printing.

Her play Closure about the foreclosure crises told from the perspective of the objects left behind opened the season at Karamu, the oldest theater in the United States to showcase the work of African American playwrights, and her new work Truth Out which explores what happens when Sojourner Truth returns to the Unitarian Stone Church where she gave her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851, which is now the Department of Jobs and Family Services, just had a dramatic reading at the Cleveland Playhouse as part of its FusionFest.

Bringing Words to Life

Mary Weems is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Allied Studies at John Carroll University. She also works as a language-artist-scholar and Education consultant in middle school, and high school classrooms, university settings and other venues, through her business Bringing Words to Life, which she’s owned since 1996. Programming includes F.L.Y. (Finding Love in Yourself) a self-esteem program for girls and women, which she facilitated from 2004 to 2009 as part of Ohio University’s, Upward Bound Summer Institute. Weems also designs language arts, history and/or performance-based curricula to fit the specific needs of her clients.

Bringing Words To Life

the movement

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Definition of an Artist

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