Poets & the Spirit 

Join Manòn Voice, Korie Griggs, and Ajanaé Dawkins for a conversation moderated by Kelsey Johnson Lyons looking at how poetry explores spirituality, honors the ancestors and place, and allows space in our lives for wonder. The conversation will be preceded by a reading. 

Manòn Voice is a poet, spoken word artist, filmmaker, Hip Hop emcee, educator, and community builder whose work explores Black life, memory, land, belonging, and the possibilities of collective liberation. Across poetry, music, film, and teaching, her practice is rooted in storytelling as a means of remembering, witnessing, and imagining otherwise.

Manòn serves as Professor of Hip Hop Music, History, and Culture at Butler University, where she directs the IT WAS ALL A DREAM Hip Hop Ensemble. Her poetry has appeared in The Indianapolis Review, The Flying Island, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, The Indianapolis Anthology, Questions for a Resilient Future, and Aesthetics & Ethics: Toward a Moral Imagination, among others.Her forthcoming poetry collection, The Country of My People, continues her exploration of memory, inheritance, Black belonging, and the complicated meanings of home.

Her creative practice also extends into documentary filmmaking. Her film ROOT BLACK explores Afro-Diasporic agrarian heritage, Black farming traditions, and food sovereignty, while her forthcoming documentary, Barbara Boyd: On Top of the World, honors pioneering Indiana broadcast journalist Barbara Boyd and received both the Audience Choice Award and Grand Prize at PitchDox.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Manòn is a recipient of the Robert D. Beckmann Jr. Emerging Artist Fellowship and a 2024 Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship. She serves on the editorial board of the Center for Humans and Nature and is a 2025–2026 Farm Fellow with the organization. Across disciplines, her work asks what we inherit, what we remember, and what we might create when we imagine ourselves beyond survival.

Ajanaé Dawkins is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian raised between Metro Detroit and New Rochelle, NY. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation.  

Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and more. Her exhibition, "No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters," debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review prize. Excerpts of her docu-poetics film project, The BLOOD-FLEX Project are selections in Haus für Poesie Film Festival in Berlin and the Zuma International Film Festival in Abuja. Ajanaé is an Elizabeth George Grant Recipient and Writing Freedom Fellow. She was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist in Residence and Ohio State University’s 2024 UAS Community Artist in Residence. She is a fellow of Torch Literary, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. She cohosted the VS Podcast with Brittany Rogers at the Poetry Foundation. Ajanaé is the founder and editor-in-chief of OILY, a spiritual archival project. 

Korie Griggs is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, arts administrator, and grief practitioner whose work explores memory, ancestry, love, and transformation. Through poetry, visual art, and storytelling, she creates spaces for reflection, connection, and belonging. She is the author of Suffer Well: Poems for the Grieving and And So It Is; both are her invitation to embrace life's endings and beginnings with curiosity, reverence, and hope. 

Korie is co-owner of Each Other's Books, which you can support through https://bookshop.org/shop/eachothersbooks and their table at Proof!  

Kelsey Johnson Lyons is a wife, mom, daughter, sister, friend, educator, poet, and lifelong student. She is a company member of the Indianapolis Shakespeare Company. She enjoys reading, hiking, writing, and looking for quiet moments of beauty and joy.