Limestone United Cross Community Project – Poet – Tifara Brown

Tifara Brown is a published writer, performance poet, oral historian, and activist whose work is rooted in the Black American South. Hailing from Southern Georgia, USA, her creative practice explores cultural preservation, art activism, and the intergenerational transmission of memory through language and story.

Tifara began her artistic journey as a saxophonist and performance poet in adolescence, winning regional accolades for her jazz and spoken word compositions. She first shared original poetry publicly in 2013 while studying at the University of Georgia, where she later received a research fellowship to study at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre in Accra, Ghana. There, she conducted workshops for military personnel on gender policy and peacebuilding and apprenticed with griots to study oral storytelling traditions that continue to shape her work today.

In 2020, in response to global calls for racial justice, she self-published Honeysuckle: Poems and Stories from a Black Southerner, a poetic memoir dedicated to an ancestor lost to racial violence in 1950s America. The book has since been used internationally in reconciliation efforts, academic mentorship, and creative writing workshops for women exiting the sex industry. Her poetry explores themes of ancestral memory, resistance, and radical love.

Tifara has conducted seminars promoting justice and conflict resolution for students in Northern Ireland since 2018, 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. She 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 Star Neighborhood Centre in Belfast.”

Tifara is currently the creator and librettist of LALOVAVI, her debut opera, commissioned by The Black Opera Project, a groundbreaking initiative in collaboration with Cincinnati Opera and supported by the Mellon Foundation. Scheduled to premiere in summer 2026 as part of Opera Fusion: New Works, LALOVAVI is the first operatic media project in history to feature the Tut language—a centuries-old Black American code language historically passed down in secrecy as a form of resistance. Through this landmark work, Tifara continues to merge ancestral legacy with radical storytelling for the stage.