Seasoned spoken word artist, Maria James-Thiaw, gracefully bridges the gap between stage and page. She delivers well-crafted lyric poetry with dramatic flare. Every performance is an experience of the power of words.

Her poems have been featured in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, Come Shining: On Writing in A Dark Time, Essentials: A Covid19 Anthology, The Power of the Feminine I, and the soon-to-be-released Keystone Poetry.  She is the author of four books, including: 

• 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)

The Choreopoems

Maria James-Thiaw is a gifted literary artist with a unique talent for translating story into poetry and weaving poetry into a virtual quilt of social justice-themed spoken word for the stage.

A choreopoem is a staged production in which various poems are woven together to tell a cohesive story. Maria’s writing style is unique; Her choreopoems are based on the stories “griots” or storytellers give her. She translates them into poetic form and brings them to life on stage. This touches audiences in a personal way, because all of her powerful poems come from the hearts of real individuals who experienced them.

In March 2018, her choreopoem, Reclaiming My Time: An American Griot Project, sold out 6 times, touching audiences with her poetic interpretation of real women’s stories from the Jim Crow era.  Poems from this choreopoem won the Art of Protest Poetry Prize from the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State University.

With Reclaiming My Time director Janet Bixler, Maria James-Thiaw infused her passion for writing and the arts with her 20 years of teaching experience into a new venture: Reclaim Artist Collective, which is now Reclaim Arts, LLC, a production company that will help get her work out into the world. Reclaim Arts serves communities with affordable theater and literary arts programming,  large theatrical productions, and intimate creative workshops. In 2019, Maria teamed up with Sharia Benn, founder of Sankofa African American Theatre Company to co-write Bridge {The Gap}, which was produced and performed at the Capital BlueCross Theatre in Summerdale, PA.  In 2020, RMT 2.0, a digital version of the original Reclaiming My Time, was released.

May, 4, 2023 was the opening night for the next choreopoem in the American Griot Series: HairStory: Reclaiming Our Crown.  Featuring a cast of 13 dynamic actors,  HairStory is a choreopoem about a woman’s journey from conformity to radical self-love. 

 In a recent review, Andrea Stephenson wrote:

“This production is a powerful piece of visual and performance art that tells a story that is filled with passion, emotion, and the convergence of past, present, and hope for the future. ”  Read the full article here. 

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Cover art designed by Shannon High-Patterson.