Louis Alemayehu

Louis Alemayehu is a writer, educator, administrator, poet, father, grandfather, great grandfather, performer, and activist of African and Native American heritage. He emerged as a poet during the Black Arts Movement in the early 1970s with mentoring from poet & essayist Haki Mahdubuti and his spiritual mother, the Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks. He is a cofounder of the Minneapolis-based Native Arts Circle and also of the award-winning poetry/jazz ensemble Ancestor Energy, which connects music with spoken word for healing. He is the recipient of many honors and awards including an award from the Process Work Institute of  Portland Oregon & Zurich Switzerland which recognized him as its first World Work Elder. Today Alemayehu is founding Elder of the BIPOC majority Wild Path Collective that recently received the 90-acre Lily Springs Farm in Osceola Wisconsin from the Nina Utne. This intergenerational multicultural collective is guided by Indigenous values and practices, the challenge of the 21st century.