Dale Davis (poet)

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Dale T. Davis is an American writer, educator, publisher, producer, scholar, dramaturge, and advocate for young people. She was one of the founding poets of New York State Poets In The Schools. In 1979, she co-founded The New York State Literary Center with poet, translator, and editor A. Poulin, Jr. where she continues to serve as Executive Director.

As a publisher she established The Sigma Foundation, a limited edition, private press with Dr. James Sibley Watson, Jr., avant garde filmmaker and publisher and editor of The Dial magazine, the leading modernist journal of arts and letters. The Sigma Foundation published the writing of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Margaret Anderson. The books are in many permanent collections, including The Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University and The Collection of American Women, Smith College.

Between 1979 and 1995, Dale Davis edited and published over six hundred books and anthologies of the writing of young people with whom she worked in New York State Literary Center programs. The plays she wrote with young people have been performed throughout New York State, and her installations, combining the writing of young people and her own photographs, have been exhibited in many prominent venues.

In 1990, The New York State Literary Center began to concentrate on education programs with young people at highest risk for educational failure, in residential placement and day treatment facilities, juvenile detention centers, juvenile justice facilities, and jails. Davis pioneered teaching literacy and communication skills using hip-hop culture as an education tool. She has written and directed two hip-hop theater pieces, adapted from the writing of the young people with whom she works. She also edited and published a series of children’s books written by incarcerated adolescents. She has produced thirty CDs that feature the poetry, spoken word, and rap of young people.

As an advocate for Teaching Artists, Dale Davis was one of the founders of the Association of Teaching Artists in 1998. In 2006 she was named as the Association of Teaching Artists’ first Executive Director. She develops and maintains the organization’s listserv and website, is in communication with Teaching Artists throughout the country, and consults on training and professional development for Teaching Artists. In 2007 she presented The Association of Teaching Artists at Americans for The Arts national conference. Davis also serves as Administrator for the New York State’s Arts In Correctional Education Network which she founded.