Meet Our Grantee-Partner: WordPlay Cincy

Mission: WordPlay sparks storytelling through creative expression and arts in healing with Cincinnati’s young people to cultivate belonging, celebrate our strengths and empower the community in its pursuit of social justice.

WordPlay Cincy was founded in 2012 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to create opportunities for children, teens, and young adults to fulfill their potential through creative expression. The organization partners with schools and community organizations in Greater Cincinnati to foster storytelling and engagement while uplifting the strengths of their community and participants. WordPlay Cincy’s free programs encourage young people to pursue self-growth and artistic mastery by discovering, honoring, and sharing their voices.

Poetry is at the core of WordPlay Cincy’s programs. All WordPlay Cincy staff are practicing poets, teaching artists are working poets and community-based artists, and the board of directors includes Cincinnati Poet Laureate, Manuel Iris. The mural on the exterior of its Creative Hub is an ode to BIPOC poets created by WordPlay Cincy students and artists. 

Ninety-percent of WordPlay Cincy program participants are from low-income backgrounds, and more than 70% identify as BIPOC. The organization intentionally engages young people who are refugees, immigrants, LGBTQIA-identified, with developmental and/or physical disabilities, experiencing housing insecurity, in foster care, and other systems-involved youth. Program participants are encouraged to claim power over who they are, what they are capable of, and how they want to contribute to a more just, inclusive, and creatively connected community. 

Operating within local classrooms and its Creative Hub in the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati, WordPlay Cincy’s programming has documented measurable increases in self-growth, self-identification as writers, relationship-building, and trust in a supportive community. Success is attributed to the staff, teaching artists, and volunteers who power programs, from design to implementation and measurement.

Programs include: 

• Poetry and creative writing workshops at their Creative Hub in the Northside Neighborhood of Cincinnati.
• Voices Teen Poetry and Performance Troupe, in which teens ages 13-19 create poetry for public performance, publication, and competition.
• The I AM Poetry Residency, which focuses on personal narrative through poetry in seven local schools serving middle, junior, and high school students.
• The Page to Stage program, an 8-12 week playwriting residency at three local schools in which students ages 13-19 write and perform a 10-minute play. 
• The Writers’ Room, in which WordPlay staff facilitate creative writing experiences with historical context in 7th-12th-grade humanities classes at Aiken New Tech High School.

WordPlay Cincy also administers the Cincinnati Youth Poet Laureate Program (Cincy YPL), which honors and provides $1,500 to young poets committed to community service through poetry, performance, and social justice. The Cincy YPL represents Cincinnati nationally and is featured in local events like Cincinnati City Council’s inauguration and Little Amal’s welcome celebration. In 2024, Cincy YPL celebrated its third year as the regional YPL Hub in collaboration with Urban Word NYC and obtained legacy funding in honor of Tyrone Williams, a distinguished Cincinnati poet and educator who dedicated his life to teaching, mentoring, and supporting writers of all ages. 

WordPlay Cincy received an Equity in Verse grant from the Poetry Foundation in spring 2024. The grant helped strengthen capacity by supporting payments to teaching artists and providing material support for programming. On a community level, it helped bring more recognition to the organization’s dedicated staff and supporters as they continue to center equity, inclusion, and racial and social justice in the delivery of poetry programming.

Connect with WordPlay Cincy:

• Website
• Facebook 
• Instagram
• YouTube