Mel Michele Lewis
6:30 pm | Virtual Event
Step into the rich tapestry of Gulf South culture with Mel Michele Lewis, author of the new Biomythography Bayou, as part of our exploration of our appetite theme.
Biomythography Bayou is a decolonizing storytelling project that combines experimental writing, folklore, recipes and ancestral tales to challenge traditional ways of telling stories and celebrate diverse voices. Biomythography Bayou presents local and regional Black southern folklore, dialect, foodways, religious and spiritual practices, music, and cultural events. These are explored in the portraits and conveyed from the first-person viewpoint characters whose generational and place-based connections reveal themselves throughout the book.
Mel will be in conversation with Isaiah Hunt, Hopkins Post-Graduate Fellow in English at John Carroll University. Mel will also read from the book and engage in a Q&A.
This event is part of the 2025 Cleveland Humanities Festival: Appetite.
Click HERE to view the conversation. Livestream link will be updated close to the start of the event.
About the speakers:
Rooted in the Gulf South’s folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and natural landscapes, Mel Michelle’s Lewis’ creative work explores nature writing themes in rural coastal settings. Raised in Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama Gulf Coast, their multimedia projects and creative writing portraiture features ancestral lands, generational lineages, and queer longings in frontline communities. Their work presents local and regional Black, Creole, and Indigenous southern religious and spiritual practices, cultural events, and everyday community rhythms, through the lens of social and environmental justice and the ancestral imaginary. Their narrative portraiture project, Biomythography Bayou, is now available from The Griot Project Series at Bucknell University Press and their forthcoming project Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective and Re:wild.
When Isaiah isn’t studying Pan-African history or obsessing over 90s and Y2K culture, he is teaching Fiction Writing and Afrofuturism at John Carroll University. He is currently working on a novel of linked stories that focuses on the entertainment industry, commercialism, Black cyberculture, and R&B, along with a companion novel set in a near-future Cleveland. He received his MFA from Northeast Ohio Masters of Fine Arts in ‘22, is one of the recipients of the Ohio Arts Council Award for Fiction in ‘24 and is a Clarion West ‘24 alumni. You can find his stories in his instagram bio: @Casual.dream