Ember Smith

Background

About Ember Smith

Alyssa "Ember" Smith is an experienced customer service representative with 4 years of customer service work under her belt. After two years at Kroger as a Personal Shopper for Kroger Pick-Up, Ember set her sights higher and looked into organizations that would help People of Color through her passion of writing. Not long after, Ember became a Developmental Fellow at Roots. Wounds. Words. Inc: A Literary Arts Revolution (RWW), a non-profit organization dedicated to creating affordable and high-quality opportunities for BIPOC storytellers. Ember assisted the grant-writing process by prepping grant responses, attending seminars, and collecting information needed to complete the grants for RWW. She also aided the social media coordinator by creating graphics through Canva to be published on RWW's social media pages and in their weekly newsletter. Just two months after Ember signed on as a fellow, RWW promoted her from a fellowship in order to hire her part-time as the Freedom and Justice Programs Manager. Through compiling monthly data reports, hiring the faculty that hosts workshops, and continuing to assist the grant-writing process, Ember worked to create a year of workshops to help RWW fulfill its mission of making literary arts training more accessible. In addition, Ember ran RWW's Justice Program, entitled "Words of Resistance and Restoration: A writing-intensive for justice-involved and -impacted BIPOC poets and writers." Through "Words of Resistance," Ember worked with Humanities New York representing RWW as part of the cohort that received funding for the Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership. Ember has worked with amazing POC literary artists like Ivelisse Rodriguez, Elizabet Velasquez, C.L. Clark, and Kiese Laymon. At the start of 2022, The College of Wooster raised the status of Ember's senior independent study thesis "Whitewashing v. Blackwashing: Structural Racism and Anti-Racist Praxis in Hollywood Cinema" from Honors to Exemplary, making the document available for public viewing. Because of this, Ember received an opportunity to be interviewed by "The Reel War Project" podcast to discuss this topic and its importance in the world where every character of Color is considered "woke-ism".