Little Lumpy's Book of Blessings
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Welcome to the 2021 Great Lakes African American Writers Conference & Affiliated Events (GLAAWC pronounced “glossy”) landing page. GLAAWC has been in existence since 2018 and has an entry in the Cleveland Foundation’s Cleveland Book Week, which is anchored by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. We will post the dates of GLAAWC 2021 as soon as they are available.
In the meantime, we wish to announce our first ever GLAAWC Poetry Fellows, Kisha Nicole Foster of Cleveland and Vincent Folkes of Pittsburgh. Both are award-winning poets. Please take the time to read their bios.
In 2020, we hosted our third annual conference. It was virtual for the first time and we had a viewership of 5600 over the course of our three-day event. People tuned in from twenty states and four international locations. Click here if you would like to view GLAAWC 2020.
A surprising and happy development of GLAAWC 2020 was that our four top youth Spoken Word Performance participants were invited to represent Cleveland and Pittsburgh in the Los Angeles-based WACO Theater Company’s presentation of “I Got the Mic” in December 2020. For this and a multitude of things we are grateful! .
Godspeed,
The Reverend Dr. Leah Lewis
Executive Director, Little Lumpy’s Center
Executive Producer, GLAAWC
GLAAWC 2021 Poetry Fellows
Kisha Nicole Foster
is the recipient of the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. She is the author of Poems: 1999-2014 and Bloodwork. Foster is also in her fourth year as Regional Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a program of The Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, sponsored through The Ohio Arts Council. Foster crafted and commissioned poems for the Tamir Rice Foundation and their event “Arts, Activism, and Legacy” at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and “Giving Back: The Soul of Philanthropy Reframed and Exhibited” sponsored by The Soul of Philanthropy at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse. Foster holds a BA from Cleveland State University in English - Creative Writing.
Vincent Folkes
is a 19-year-old creative, entrepreneur, and college student studying Business Management. His passion lies in writing music and using his words to reveal and inspire. He has received writing awards for his poetry from Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc, Carnegie Mellon University, as well as being named the 2020 Youth Poet Laureate of Allegheny County. Vincent is currently working on building his presence as a music artist, as well as his fashion business, FOLKES the brand.
Available now on Amazon.com