Official 2026 Bio

Tifara Brown is a performance poet, oral historian, published author, activist, and organizational culture strategist with roots in Southern Georgia. She is the founder of Honeysuckle Poetry LLC and Creative Director of Honeysuckle Studios — a creative direction and organizational culture practice whose work sits at the intersection of art, ancestral memory, and institutional transformation.

Tifara began her relationship with storytelling and performance before she had language for it. She shared her first stories in front of her home church congregation and performed at school assemblies at age 9. By 12, she was competing as a performance poet and saxophonist, winning regional and state awards and composing original jazz and spoken word pieces. She recorded a saxophone album and made radio and television appearances with her family's band, and became her church's pianist at 15. These early formations — music, congregation, public witness —remain the bedrock of her practice.

She began writing original poetry in 2013 at the University of Georgia, where her voice found its academic grounding. She was selected to deliver a TEDx talk to an audience of 1,500 on the power of the spoken word as a tool for healing — an early articulation of the methodology she would later formalize as Imagination as Infrastructure.

Tifara was the inaugural fellow at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra, Ghana — an international research institution commissioned by the Ghana Ministry of Defense — through a research grant from the Office of the Provost at the University of Georgia. During her three months in Accra, she executed gender policy projects, studied peacebuilding operations, and facilitated workshops for military staff. She also deepened her study of oral storytelling through the griots of Ghana, whose traditions of preserving collective memory through the spoken word have shaped her approach to history, performance, and facilitation ever since.

Since 2018, Tifara has partnered with the Government of Ireland Reconciliation Fund and Peaceful Schools International to conduct seminars on justice and conflict resolution for students in Northern Ireland. Working in the model of the modern American civil rights movement, she teaches students to transcribe their own stories and facilitates reconciliatory conversations between opposing religious factions. She trains young people in peacebuilding through storytelling in collaboration with Northern Ireland Alternatives (NIA), a restorative justice program, and the Star Neighbourhood Centre in Belfast.

Tifara self-published “Honeysuckle: Poems and Stories from a Black Southerner” on Juneteenth — a memorial to one of her ancestors who was killed by racial violence in the late 1950s. She committed the initial profits from the book to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. Honeysuckle has since been used as a tool for reconciliation in academic settings across South Georgia and Northern Ireland, and as a resource for women transitioning out of the sex industry into writing and entrepreneurship.

Her poems have been widely published in Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Sunspot Literary Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Quartz Literary, Wingless Dreamer Publisher (Oxymorons and Poets Anthology), Minerva Rising Press, Haunted Waters Press, Main Street Rag Publishing Company (A Tether to the World: An Anthology of Mental Health Recovery Stories, edited by Erica Nichols-Frazer), Club Plum Literary Journal, and Words and Whispers Literary Journal.

Tifara is also the librettist of LALOVAVI, an original opera commissioned by Cincinnati Opera in collaboration with The Black Opera Project and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the world premiere in the summer of 2026. The work marks a significant expansion of her practice into the operatic form and cements her standing as one of the most versatile and commissioned voices working at the intersection of Black American history, performance and cultural preservation.

Through Honeysuckle Poetry LLC, Tifara brings this full arc of experience — church stages and military commands, Belfast classrooms and Cincinnati opera houses, C-suite retreats and youth detention facilities — into her flagship organizational offering: Imagination as Infrastructure. A facilitation methodology grounded in peer-reviewed research and delivered through the irreplaceable power of story, IAI builds the psychological safety, voice equity and creative capacity that organizations need to sustain belonging from the inside out.