Bing Davis

Now, in part one, Sierra took us into a world where poetry lives in neighborhoods and classrooms and the stories of elders and the imagination of young people and in the long, patient work of showing up and speaking up.

We talked about presence as a creative discipline, about poetry as a kind of civic infrastructure, and we heard Sierra's American libation, homage to an elder, her tribute to Dayton artist Willis Bing Davis.

In part two, those threads of memory and imagination travel a bit further.

We'll follow Sierra into The Belonging Project, where the stories shared by over 100 people have been harvested and are becoming theater.

And that work is grounded so deeply in creative process.

And when you have an opportunity to engage with the future, that's what I label those 9th through 12th graders, and to be gifted with such a precious opportunity to plant seeds, to sow their heritage and history, to use the Black History Program to insert pillars of our community who are living, folks like Dunbar, who have gone on, folks who are living like a Willis Bing Davis, like a Baba Larry Crowe, Mama New Zippo, like our Africana elders or neighborhoods and communities that have been staples, that they walk down like Edwin C. Moses and they're on his road, or James H. McGee.

So that would be Edwin Moses, the legendary Olympian, and Mr. McGee, longtime mayor of Dayton, right?

Yes.

American Libation.

Homage to an elder.

For Willis Bing Davis.

After there is a bomb in Gilead, West