Maria James-Thiaw

Count Each Breath coming soon, from Wild Ink Publishing!

A collection of poetry about chronic illness, pandemic and the Great Awokening of 2020

Maria James-Thiaw performs in Bridge {the Gap} cowritten with Sharia Benn

RAC is the home of the American Griot Project, which brings affordable arts programming to your community.

Maria James-Thiaw is an award-winning poet, performer, playwright, and educator.  Through innovative workshops and residencies, she brings the art of writing to life for students, whether they be novices or emerging artists.

Her publications include poetry and reviews in several literary journals such as New Letters, Cutthroat Journal of the Arts, One Trick Pony Review, and Black Magnolias, as well as a spoken word CD entitled FREEverse. Her poems have been featured in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, Come Shining: On Writing in A Dark Time, and other anthologies, and in the following collections:

• Windows to the Soul (Shippensburg University Press, 1999)
• Rising Waters (Shippensburg University Press, 2003)
• Talking “White” (postDada Press, 2013)
• Count Each Breath (Wild Ink Publishing, 2022)

As a performance poet, Maria gracefully bridges the gap between stage and page by delivering her well-crafted lyric poetry with the dramatic power of a seasoned spoken word artist.

In March, 2018 her choreopoem, Reclaiming My Time: An American Griot Project was sold out 6 times, touching audiences with her poetic interpretation of real women’s stories from the Jim Crow era. 

With Reclaiming My Time director Janet Bixler, Maria James-Thiaw has now infused her passion for writing and the arts with her 16+ years of teaching experience into a new venture: Reclaim Artist Collective, a soon-to-be nonprofit organization that will serve marginalized communities, emerging artists and schools with affordable theater and literary arts programming,  and creative workshops. In 2019 RAC teamed up with Sankofa African American Theatre Company to produce Bridge {The Gap} and in 2020 they released RMT 2.0, a digital version of the original Reclaiming My Time. 

Maria will bring a new choreopoem to the stage in 2023 – HairStory: Reclaiming Our Crown. Like her earlier choreopoems, she is using historiographic poetics – a method in which she collects oral histories and translates those stories into poetry.

For more information about RAC, visit www.ReclaimArtistCollective.org.

Cover art designed by Shannon High-Patterson.