Tifara Brown Bio

Tifara Brown Official Bio February 2024 Tifara Brown is a published writer, performance poet, oral historian, and activist with roots in Southern Georgia. She is a performance artist with over a decade of experience with a total audience of 40,000 in poetry publication, radio, and television, live spoken word performances, social media, literary teaching, workshop execution, art activism and community engagement. Tifara has built a personal brand on the advancement of Black American history, cultural preservation, and community relations. She began competing as a performance poet and saxophonist in middle school, winning regional and state awards and arranging jazz and spoken word composition pieces by the age of 12. She played saxophone in her family’s band, recording a saxophone album, radio, and television performances, and became a church pianist at age 15. She began writing original poetry in 2013 at the beginning of her undergraduate career at the University of Georgia. Tifara was selected to share a TEDx talk to an audience of 1,500 on the power of the spoken word as a tool for healing and historical preservation. Tifara was the inaugural fellow at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre in Accra, Ghana for the Women’s Institute. The KAIPTC is an international research institution commissioned by the Ghana Ministry of Defense where scholars from all over the world come to receive training in peace and security operations. Sponsored through a research grant from the Office of the President of the University of Georgia, Tifara spent three months in Accra executing gender policy projects, studying peacebuilding, and facilitating workshops for military staff. She also continued her study of oral storytelling and has implemented the skills learned from the griots of Ghana to shape her own approach to preserving history through the spoken and written word. In response to the flood of protests and organizing in 2020 through the George Floyd social movement, she wrote and self-published a poetry book entitled Honeysuckle: Poems and Stories from a Black Southerner on Juneteenth 2020. Honeysuckle is a memorial story to one of Tifara’s ancestors who fell as a victim of racial violence in the late 50s. She committed the initial profit from the book sales to support the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and received an interview feature on WALB News-10 to spread awareness of the reality of race relations in the Deep South. Tifara was one of the featured poets at the “Justice for Black Lives” Rally organized by the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement with an attendance of over 3,000 individuals honoring those lost to hate crimes. Honeysuckle has been used as an instrument for reconciliation, academic support for young people in South Georgia and a tool to tutor mothers and women transitioning out of the sex industry entrepreneurial skills and opportunities in writing. Tifara has a partnership through the Department of Foreign Affairs of the government of Ireland and Peaceful Schools International to conduct seminars promoting justice and conflict resolution for students in Northern Ireland. With grant support from the Reconciliation Fund, she is teaching students how to transcribe their own stories and organize reconciliatory conversations between opposing religious factions in the manner of the modern civil rights movement in the States. Tifara has trained young people in peacebuilding through storytelling with the goal of the reduction of violence in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Alternatives (NIA) restorative justice program and the Limestone United youth program based in the Star Neighborhood Centre in Belfast. Tifara is an upcoming Centrum artist-inresidence receiving a fellowship through the “In The Making” residency program at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. She has also been accepted as a 2024 Writing Fellow of the DEEP Center in Savannah, Georgia where she will be part of the Young Author Project teaching middle school students writing skills that will result in their becoming published authors after one semester.