Schooled on Poetry
Saturday, May 2 | 7 p.m.
Tickets FREE for students and educators!
Schooled on Poetry, a collaboration between CAPA, the Thurber House, The Ohio State University, The Columbus Foundation and poet-educator Peter Kahn is the culminating celebration of a year-long Spoken Word poetry project at Columbus Africentric Early College High School, Licking Heights Middle School, Wedgewood Middle School, and United Middle Main Street. At the culminating event on May 2, there will be intra-school group pieces and individual original poems by slam champs from each school. Students will be joined by Columbus poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Steven Waddell and Cynthia Amoah, visiting poet/rapper Jalen Sharp, and Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner, former MacArthur Fellow and bestselling author.
We hope to showcase the power of poetry to the Columbus community in a diverse way so that writers of all ages and backgrounds can see poetry as a meaningful and accessible form of expression.
To learn more about Peter Kahn and the intra-school project, visit https://www.poet-educatorpeterkahn.org/.
Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson, a National Book Award-winner and MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow, is one of the nation’s most acclaimed authors writing for children, adolescents, and adults.
Weaving together lyrical language and powerful imagery to create rich and emotional stories, her work explores complex intersections asking the bigger questions about what it means to truly belong and what is the work needed to make us all feel like we do. With more than two dozen award-winning books to her credit, her bestsellers include Red at the Bone, the National Book Award-winning Brown Girl Dreaming, and the New York Times best-selling picture books, The Day You Begin and Each Kindness, among many others.
Among her many accolades, Woodson served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, received the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and was the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018-2019. In 2020, she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the most prestigious international award recognizing authors and illustrators of children’s literature, and then later that year named a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow.
A recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, Woodson is the founder of the Baldwin for the Arts in New York State, an artist residency program providing a safe and nurturing space for Artists of The Global Majority. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry and was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019 and the book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Photo credit: Megan Leigh Barnard
Cynthia Amoah
Cynthia Amoah is a Ghanaian-American poet, national speaker, and teaching artist. She received her MFA from The New School where she was cited for Excellence in Poetry and has been featured on three TEDx stages, The Lincoln Theatre, as well as the United Nations Information Center in Accra, among many. Her writing and performances often concern the foraging questions that have to do with identity and belonging, with displacement, migration and uprootedness. Cynthia’s chapbook ‘Handrails’ was published by Akashic Books in Fall 2021. She currently resides in Columbus, OH with her family where she facilitates workshops in poetry, positive-thinking, confidence-building, and using our voice as an instrument for strength and social change. For more information and inquiries, please visit www.cynthiaamoah.com.
Steven Byron Waddell
Steven Byron Waddell is an educator and award winning poet from Chicago IL, he began writing poetry as a way to cope with his depression and refined his skills under the mentorship of poets such as Peter Kahn, Avery R Young, and Daniel Borzutzky. Steven has been featured in the Academy of American Poets for his work Then/Now which describes the legacy of policing and slavery in America. Steven has worked with students at the high school and collegiate level through his work supporting Schooled On Poetry as well as helping establish the Columbus State Community College Annual Poetry Slam. Steven is currently working on his first collection of poems entitled “Do It Myself” which is a poetic autobiography.
Jalen Sharp
Jalen Sharp, aka Jsteezzy, is a poet/rapper originally from the South Side of Chicago, but currently resides in Oak Park. Jalen participated in spoken word club for 4 years, slam team/writers team for 3 years, and Rooted & Radical (formerly known as Louder Than a Bomb) for 2 years. After high school, he then worked as a youth ambassador for Young Chicago Authors. As Jsteezzy, he’s performed across various Chicago venues like the Book Club, Subterranean, & Oaktober Fest. He’s also the host of Chicago’s most intimate open mic Respect the Mic.
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