Schooled on Poetry
Saturday, May 1 | 7 p.m.
Tickets will go on sale in early 2027.
Schooled on Poetry, a collaboration between CAPA, the Thurber House, The Ohio State University and poet-educator Peter Kahn is the culminating celebration of a year-long Spoken Word poetry project at Columbus Alternative High School, Eastmoor Academy High School, Pleasant View Middle School, and World Language Middle School. At the culminating event on May 1, 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 Vann Harris, and Mahogany L. Browne, 2022 Kennedy Center Next 50 Fellow, inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Lincoln Center and acclaimed 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/.
Mahogany L. Browne
Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator. Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator, as well as a 2022 Kennedy Center Next 50 Fellow, inaugural Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, a MacDowell Arts Advocacy Awardee, a NAACP Image Award nominee and a New York Emmy nominee for How to Build a City (All Arts). Browne has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Arts for Justice, Baldwin for the Arts, Hawthorden, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, UCross, and more.
Her acclaimed books include Vinyl Moon; Chlorine Sky (optioned by Steppenwolf Theatre); Black Girl Magic; and the frequently challenged works Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair, a national celebration of diverse children’s literature.
Browne’s poetry collection Chrome Valley, praised by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, won the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize; and she is the recipient of the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her most recent young adult novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Browne holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College and serves as the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Lincoln Center.
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
Vann Harris
Vann Harris is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. Previous awardees include a Pulitzer Prize winner and a state Poet Laureate. Vann is a Teaching Assistant for the Oak Park and River Forest High School’s renowned Spoken Word program, for which they were a slam team member.
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.
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