Episode Details

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 e