STORY + NARRATIVE
PEOPLE HOLD THE KNOWLEDGE. I HELP BRING IT FORWARD.
I gather, shape, and activate stories to preserve cultural memory, deepen understanding, and imagine new futures. Through research, conversation, writing, and collaborative creation, I help individuals, organizations, and communities turn lived experience into powerful narratives that can be seen, heard, felt, and remembered.
THE FRAMEWORK
The Storyholding Framework is my process for moving a story from something felt or discovered into something that can be experienced, shared and preserved.
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Conduct qualitative interviews, oral histories and story gathering to surface lived experience, community knowledge and meaningful insights.
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Develop narrative frameworks and story systems that connect organizational goals, community perspectives and audience engagement.
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Transform research, interviews and lived experience into compelling written narratives for scripts, librettos, publications, campaigns and digital platforms.
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Organize and activate stories to communicate impact, preserve cultural memory and create accessible resources for organizations and communities.
The Detroit Poetry Archive (DPA) is a living, multimedia archive designed and curated by Brittini Ward to document, preserve, and celebrate the Detroit Poetry Scene…from its earliest roots to its present-day evolution. Built from love, responsibility, and reverence, the archive uplifts the stories of poets, organizers, and cultural workers whose words shaped Detroit’s creative and political imagination.
Through video interviews, archival photographs, performance recordings, oral histories, and personal narratives, DPA seeks to both preserve memory and provide a blueprint for future generations of artists. It positions Detroit’s poetry scene not just as an artistic movement, but as a social and spiritual ecosystem…one that has offered healing, protest, community, and continuity for decades.
THE SEER
The Seer is a groundbreaking operatic libretto written by Emmy-winning artist Brittini Ward, founder of Eye N Eye, as part of The Cartography Project—a Washington National Opera and Kennedy Center initiative that reimagines how opera can confront, transform, and reframe the Black experience in America.
Set to music by composer Levi Taylor, The Seer explores themes of Black dignity, self-reclamation, and ancestral remembrance. The work merges poetry, prophecy, and ritual into a narrative that envisions liberation not as a distant dream, but as something already encoded in our collective DNA.
Praised by NPR and The Kennedy Center as a vital contribution to the future of American opera, The Seer expands the genre’s canon by centering a Black woman’s journey toward wholeness—bridging Detroit’s modern reality with an ancestral, spiritual cosmology of freedom.
