Cultivating Your Voice: Pivoting Organizational Language and the Power of Poetics
Join award-winning authors, speakers, and poets Gloria Muñoz and Tony Keith Jr., PhD, for their tips on cultivating your voice, pivoting organizational language, and harnessing the power and hope of poetic language.
This mini master class panel will feature a themed conversation between Gloria Muñoz and Tony Keith Jr. on the power of language and how to harness it for good. Attendees will glean insights on solidifying their personal or organizational identity, how to pivot their mission in challenging times, and ways to move forward with hope. The panelists will draw from their extensive experience as award-winning artists and entrepreneurs. A brief audience question and answer session will follow the conversation between Gloria and Tony.
All registered participants will receive information about how to join the class on Zoom prior to the event. Register here!
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of This is the Year, Your Biome Has Found You, and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, and a part of Las Musas. She is proud to be St. Pete's first Latina poet laureate. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of South Florida. A proponent of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Gloria has worked alongside botanists, musicians, dancers, historians, classicists, visual artists, conservationists, and neuroscientists. Through Moonlit Música, a bilingual media company she co-founded, she writes narrative scripts and songs for children, adolescent, and adult programming. Notable clients include The New York Times, Comedy Central, hulu, Rebel Girls, Apple tv, Google, FX, and Hatch, for which she has developed beloved sleep story characters, including Mari Mariposa, a bilingual butterfly with a passion for community building.
Tony Keith Jr., PhD is an award-winning Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and Hip-Hop educational leader from Washington DC. Or, you can just call him an “Ed Emcee”. He is the author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet and Knucklehead (February 2025), both published by HarperCollins. A multi-year fellow of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Tony has featured performances at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington National Cathedral, Historic Lincoln Theatre, Bus Boys & Poets, and in schools and communities around the world including South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago and many more. His poem Black Man On Fire won first prize in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest and his performance of Code Switched is featured in the award-winning documentary series Talking Black in America and published in the book Centering Possibility in Black Education. Tony is co-author of the award-winning book Open Mic Night: Campus Programs that Champion College Student Voice and Engagement. He holds a BA in Communication Studies from University of Maryland College Park, an M.Ed. in College Student Affairs from Penn State University, and PhD in Education Leadership from George Mason University. Currently, Tony serves as founder and CEO of Ed Emcee Academy, is on the board of Directors at Shout Mouse Press, and teaches English Language Arts for adult learners at Academy of Hope in his DC hometown, where he resides with his husband, Harry Christian III.
This event is sponsored by Pande Lecture Management in honor of our new Substack publication, Shift the Mic. We’re seeking to draw attention to new voices and event ideas that explore identity, power, and possibility. Please reach out with any questions!