 As an immigrant, I believe deeply that multiculturalism is not a threat to American identity, it is one of its foundational values, and one of its greatest strengths. The story of this nation is bigger than any one of us. There is beauty in every lived experience, if we take the time to listen. That responsibility, to nurture listening, belonging, and shared meaning, is something I carry with me as a public folklorist, artist, peacebuilder and cultural narrative practitioner. It shapes how I move through the world, and how I approach Storytelling: Gift of Hope. Whether building bridges across difference, curating new storytelling festivals, facilitating intimate story circles, or designing spaces for large-scale community festivals and dialogues, I have witnessed people, young and old, come alive through story. I have seen agency and voices strengthen, courage and curiosity grow. I’ve watched people recognize themselves as part of something larger and feel newly empowered to shape change. This work is sacred to me. Asking New QuestionsAt the beginning of this year, I returned to my Telling Stories That Matter toolkit, revamping it, expanding it, adding new projects, and tools. But more importantly, I returned with new questions:
 Collated images from Kiran's Toolkit As a continuation of a Storytelling & Vocation gathering I was invited to present at in 2024 with the King Institute for Faith and Culture, supported by NetVUE and the Lilly Foundation—I was invited onto the Callings Podcast to reflect more deeply on storytelling as a calling rooted in responsibility, service, and as an opportunity to create spaces where people feel seen and heard. Storytelling, Disaster, Climate Futures and RecoveryIn late 2024, Hurricane Helene deeply impacted our region in Appalachia. In the immediate aftermath, I wrote this blog reflecting on how the rivers that run through these mountains are powerful, and how our stories, when cultivated with care, are powerful too. I accepted an invitation to serve as a Task Force Strategy Advisor for the Neighbor-to-Neighbor Disaster Relief Fund at the East Tennessee Foundation. Together, we worked to build trust-based strategies to distribute $6 million in support of long-term disaster recovery for communities across Appalachia. I was also invited to keynote and lead a community dialogue for Dogwood Health Trust’s annual convening in Asheville, supporting more than 450 nonprofits and community groups across 16 counties in Western North Carolina and the Qualla Boundary. There, I spoke about storytelling as a practice and five guiding ideas on cultivating stories for hope and healing. I was also invited to keynote Stories That Ground Us: Building Resilience Through Memory, Place, and Imagination at the inaugural symposium of the Institute for Climate and Community Resilience at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Alongside climate scientists, ecologists, artists, funders, policy experts, and community organizations, we explored how strengthening Appalachian climate science must also mean strengthening community wisdom, cultural memory, and imagination. Closer to home, my poet friend Jasmine Henderson and I rekindled We the Poets as part of a local arts, stories, and music collaboration with local non-profit, the Philosopher’s Tea House. We were honored to both perform and also emcee the gathering, in an effort to continue building awareness around long-term healing and recovery and support the social impact groups doing this quiet, necessary work. Disability Justice, Peacebuilding, and Belonging This year also brought moments of deep gratitude and responsibility. I had the honor of offering the opening keynote, Stories That Sustain, and designing a new America-250 storytelling and narrative change training for 80 national disability justice practitioners, parents, and special education advocates. Reflecting on Judith Heumann and the disability rights movement she helped spark more than 50 years ago, we explored how even moments of turmoil and challenge can be transformed into opportunity. By fostering a culture of listening, we nurture a culture of belonging and full inclusion. I am deeply grateful to the PEAK Parent Center and Idaho Parents Unlimited for trusting me to lead that work and to fellow presenter, Melissa Akie Wiley, whose research on social rejection offered a powerful storytelling companion lens throughout the two-day gathering. While in Sacramento, I joined my dear friend Lorena Rodríguez and her Chicha Festival collective to harvest Colombian corn for a community chicha. Together, we co-led a sacred story circle near César Chávez Plaza, drawing from our ancestral traditions and the voices of others. We closed in song, prayer, and gratitude at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers. In Calgary, Canada, while world leaders gathered nearby for the G7, sixteen Rotary Peace Fellows from sixteen different nations came together simply as ourselves. We shared stories, rituals, poems, laughter, grief, and questions about what peace really means: globally, personally and in our work together. We were welcomed by Indigenous Elders who shared the stories of the land. We walked by a glacial lake, rode a gondola up a 10,000-foot mountain, and closed with a cacao ceremony led by one of our own. None of us lead big nations. But we are leaders in our own ways, through conversation, care, and the stubborn choice to keep hope alive. Folklife, Youth, and the Future Over the summer, I returned to Washington, D.C. as a participant partner in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, themed Youth and the Future of Culture. From Indigenous skate art and lowrider culture to foodways, graffiti jams, native language reclamation, and traditional building trades, the festival explored how young people aren’t just inheriting tradition, they are reimagining it. I had the joy of facilitating Storytelling Across Generations alongside Appalachian storytellers Malcolm and Hasan Davis, Mama Deborah Pierce Fukunle, David Fukunle, Jada Anderson, and Maryland Youth Poet Laureate Chelsea Zhu and her mentor Patrick. Chelsea told me it was her first panel discussion ever, and then she absolutely owned the National Mall on the Fourth of July! Later that evening, over dinner with some lowrider artists from California, we joked: What if lowriders welcomed the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2028? Weeks later, one of them emailed to say conversations had begun with an official Olympic committee. That’s how imagination works, casually, relationally, and then suddenly… seriously. Home, Family, and Art Amid all of this, I also snuck in a family trip to New York City. My first time bringing my own family since my parents took me there when I was twelve. One highlight was seeing Jack Whitten’s Messenger exhibition at MoMA. Whitten’s work is incredible, moving, personal, and highly relevant to what’s happening in our world today, and includes multiple works that explore art created out of turmoil, social unrest, and struggle. My wife (a visual artist) and I talked deeply about the work, its history, and its urgency. But what stayed with me most was watching our nine-year-old daughter encounter the art in her own way. Our daughter is a dancer who loves to play, loves nature, loves ideas and colors, and also cares deeply about the world. I imagined what she experienced through her eyes. I also just love that the painting mirrored her outfit. Later that day, we found ourselves watching her dance freely on a subway platform, as if she were carrying the art and the museum back out into the world. If you ever get a chance to see the work of living artist Jack Whitten. It comes highly recommended from all three of us (a visual artist, a storyteller, and a dancer!) When I asked our daughter what she thought of New York City, she said she loved it, but couldn’t understand why people don’t drink sweet tea. Our daughter is Southern! Stories of Belonging: Marshalltown, Iowa One of the greatest honors of this year was being selected as the inaugural recipient of the Arts & Culture Alliance’s Community Artist Grant for Gather ’Round the Table – Stories of Marshalltown. I had never been to Marshalltown before. On paper, it is a town of 27,000 in central Iowa. In practice, it feels like an international community, shaped by migration, labor, faith, and resilience. More than 60 languages are spoken in its schools. A town that was recently featured in this New York Times article From May to November, I served as a socially engaged storytelling artist, spending time and facilitating storytelling in schools, libraries, social service projects, cafés, neighborhoods, and the Iowa Veterans Home. I asked people not how they wanted to participate, but how they wanted to help shape the work. That question changed everything. What emerged was a shared longing to be a fully inclusive community of welcome. That longing came alive through kitchen-table conversations, front-porch storytelling, school visits, immigrant justice potlucks, intergenerational sunset walks, and a culminating live storytelling evening, reaching more than 800 direct participants. While I am still writing up that experience, as a case study for my toolkit and other publications, I offer an overview of the project. A docuseries of the project will also be coming out soon. I believe deeply in the wisdom of rural and small towns. Gather ’Round the Table reaffirmed that when people are invited to imagine and speak from lived experience, storytelling becomes a powerful form of civic care. Stewarding Stories, Shaping FieldsThis year also asked me to steward and help shape creative initiatives across fields, institutions, and movements. I served as Storyteller in Residence for the Appalachia Funders Network, where I led Stories from the Front Porch, a series of civic imagining plenaries and community conversations with more than 150 funders, practitioners, artists, and changemakers from across Appalachia and beyond. I was also invited to lead the Stories That Shape Us plenary at the Appalachian Big Ideas Festival, continuing a regional conversation about imagination, power, and belonging. Alongside this, I led a series of Creative Consultancies, exploring how public narratives contribute to democracy through arts, culture, civic-minded citizenship, and a deeper sense of belonging. Some of this work will continue into the new year and feels increasingly relevant in the moment we are in. I was invited to serve as a discussant for The Power of Dialogue to Build Community as part of International Development Week, hosted by the Atlantic Council for International Cooperation in partnership with Canada. I also had the honor of serving as a South Arts Cultural Advisor for Walking Together, a national philanthropy initiative funded by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, supporting cultural vitality investments across all 56 U.S. states and jurisdictions; and providing advisory input to New Pluralists Collaborative Breakthrough Fund, a multi-million-dollar effort focused on strengthening trust, belonging, and cooperation in communities across the country.  This year, I continued my service on the Board of the American Folklore Society, helping host its 137th annual meeting in Atlanta, where nearly 900 folklorists, cultural workers, and scholars gathered around the theme of restoring and restorying. As one of the nation’s oldest cultural organizations, it is an honor to help steward this work, and I’m especially excited that our 138th annual meeting will be held in Asheville in 2026, much closer to home. Publications & ContributionsI was invited by my colleague Dr. Benjamin Gatling to author Chapter One, “The Transformative Power of Storytelling – A Social Force for Social Change,” adapted from my Botkin Lecture at the Library of Congress. The chapter offers practical, everyday ways storytelling can foster dialogue, pluralism, and civic imagination. As a whole, Migration Stories: Connecting Activism, Policy, and Scholarship offers actionable ideas for how ethical storytelling can be used in everyday life, community dialogue, and cross-sector work to foster a more pluralistic society. Now available via the University of Illinois Press (with Oxford University Press/Oxford Academic). I was also deeply moved to learn that my 2016 lecture, The Transformative Power of Storytelling, has now been digitized and made publicly available as part of the American Folklife Center’s Library of Congress Botkin Lecture archive. At the invitation of my colleague Dr. Susan Hartley, I had the honor of contributing a Storytelling: A Gift of Hope reflection to Global Voices for Peace, a powerful anthology that brings together more than 100 peacebuilders from over 50 nations to explore what peacebuilding looks like in practice across the world. This collection offers hopeful, grounded reflections that deepen conscious discourse on peace while inviting individual and collective participation in the peace process. The anthology traces the intersections of peace and conflict with urgent global realities, including climate and environmental crises, food insecurity, inequality, gender justice, migration, sport, colonialism, health, and mental health. Proceeds from Global Voices for Peace support Right to Learn Afghanistan, advancing education for Afghan women and girls, and the Rotary Peace Fellows Alumni Association, which works to mobilize a global network of more than 1,700 peace fellows in the ongoing promotion of peace worldwide. And finally, I was honored to contribute Every Meal is a Story- Haldi, Lune, Mirch, Masala to PeaceMeal—an anthology of culinary stories from 40 global peacebuilders, nourishing hope through food, memory, and resilient peacebuilding in times of conflict. Edited by my Australian friend, Dr. Tania Miletic, this book is a reminder that in times like these, when conflict and division weigh heavily, one of the simplest and most powerful acts we can do is share a meal, to break bread, and know that every meal is a story. Since food, like peace, is meant to be shared. Looking Ahead As we move into a year when this nation formally marks its 250th anniversary, I’m holding this truth close: America is a story in progress. As a 15-year immigrant to this country and since becoming a new American in 2023, I truly believe it is an experiment that holds real potential, if we are willing to listen, reckon, and imagine together. As such, I’m also deeply honored to be a recipient of the Waymakers Appalachian Futurism Liberation Fellowship, a regional BIPOC + LGBTQI+ + Working Class intersectional solidarity project rooted in the place I call home.  Somewhere between my home in Tennessee and a project I led in Iowa. In 2026, I’ll be stepping into a year-long, in-depth multi-city storytelling collaboration exploring how communities across our nation are creating meaning and truth around America 250. Shaped by place and culture, and what civic identity, truth-telling, and shared stories can make possible. I’m excited to be collaborating on this project, not just to reflect on stories of the past, but to help us explore the story of our future potential.
I’ll be on the road a lot this year, especially with the latter project, so I hope to connect with friends and colleagues along the way. And there is more to come. For now, I remain grateful for the stories shared with me, for the people who trusted me to listen, and for all those who hold the belief that storytelling, practiced with care, can still help us meet this moment. With gratitude and hope, Kiran Past Newsletters: February 2025. October 2024 Sign Up to Storytelling: Gift of Hope Newsletters & Blogs |
