By Mike Templeton

One of the first people I got to meet and interview as a writer for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition was long-time associate Omope Carter Daboiku. Storyteller, advocate, educator, researcher—by any title Omope Carter Daiboku is one of the most powerful voices of Black Appalachian experience at work today, and she has just won a prestigious and important fellowship. Omope Carter Daboiku is a recipient of the 2024 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowship from Mid Atlantic Arts. Daboiku will represent Ohio with this prestigious fellowship. It marks yet another significant milestone for one whose career and work as a storyteller stretches over more than three decades.

In their own words, “Mid Atlantic nurtures and funds the creation and presentation of diverse artistic expression and connects people to meaningful arts experiences within our region.” The Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellowship is meant to carry the overall mission with the specific focus on Black Appalachian culture, life, history, and art. It is hard to imagine anyone better suited to take on this kind of work that Omope Carter Daboiku. Omope once described the craft of storytelling as “the art of living and remembering.” Her’s is the art of human experience as it unfolds. She has worked with the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition to bring the Appalachian Studies Conference to Cincinnati and has been a long-standing participant at the Appalachian Festival at Coney Island. Her work with UACC and beyond has been stellar.

Omope told me that the path to this fellowship stretches back a long way. She explained that she learned of MADs (Mid Atlantic Arts) many years ago when colleagues and friends told her they offered fellowships and assistance to storytellers who represent Black Appalachians. However, a little digging revealed that the fellowship was exclusive to people who currently lived in the Appalachian regions. With that, Omope had to explain to them the significance of the Appalachian migrant and urban Appalachians. “I called them up and gave them a piece of [Core member] Mike Maloney’s mind,” she said. It took several years but they eventually opened up the fellowship to applicants who were from the Appalachian region. She finally applied, and was out at a farm doing research and got what she described as “The Call” that she had been awarded the fellowship.

Part of this fellowship involves working with a seasoned and experienced mentor, Ilene Evans of the Voices from the Earth, a theater and storytelling organization that offers performances and workshops through West Virginia and the mid-Atlantic region. Evans “is an inspired storyteller, performer and scholar who weaves music, poetry, dance and drama, to bring history alive.” Her work with the fellowship awardees is a unique opportunity to develop and showcase storytelling talents in new and unique ways, carrying the storytelling gift we have come to know from Omope to new audiences in entirely new ways.

Omope Carter Daboiku will bring more that thirty years of experience with storytelling and performance, study and research, and her heritage as a Black woman Appalachian storyteller to this fellowship. Working with a mentor should feel more like working with a colleague, as Ilene Evans is described as “an energetic, vibrant, original performing artist” who uses “movement, poetry, story, song, rhythm and rhyme” that is inspired “by a rich Affrilachian life and all its folklore.” Such a meeting of minds and talents seems monumental.

I asked Omope what her goals are with the fellowship. She told me that her main priority “is to bring together all the disparate works of the past thirty years, my work teaching, and the research, [the writing published in] Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and contributions to other journals, under one book-length project,” she explained. This too appears to be something genuinely monumental, and the main project is part of her obligation to Mid Atlantic Arts and will be presented at their main conference next year. Other things in the works for Omope are performances and storytelling engagements around the region, of course.

Being a storyteller, for Omope, is much more than just a kind of folk performance. In her words: “I see storytelling as being on the order of a ministry, not to preach and proselytize, but to use the art as a way of unifying people, of showing people that we are far more alike than we are different, and this is reason enough to see ourselves as one.” The art of storytelling has always brought people together. Whether in the old Appalachian traditions of gathering around elders in front of a woodstove, or in more formal contexts like contemporary performance halls, the art is one that pulls people together around common forms of meaning and understanding. These are things that Omope Carter Daboiku know quite well.  

As far as other work with Mid Atlantic Arts, Omope said she was still trying to decide if she wanted to focus on folklore or on autobiographical projects. She explains that “so much of who I am and so much of my work is built from the cultural momentum of being Appalachian, it is difficult to pull the two areas apart.” With so much experience, research, and cultural engagement with the storytelling world of Black Appalachian women, Omope Carter Daboiku has plenty to work with for the fellowship from Mid Atlantic Arts. It is exciting to think about what is to come. Omope did promise me a copy of the book when it comes out. I can hardly wait for that! Omope Carter Daboiku is a long-time friend and associate of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. We offer a tremendous congratulations on the achievement, and will all look forward to what is to come.    

Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.