
Photo: DelPazzo Studio
Writing
Telling Stories to
Change the World
Telling Stories to Change the World is a powerful collection of essays about community-based and interest-based projects where storytelling is used as a strategy for speaking out for justice. Contributors from locations across the globe―including Uganda, Darfur, China, Afghanistan, South Africa, New Orleans, and Chicago―describe grassroots projects in which communities use narrative as a way of exploring what a more just society might look like and what civic engagement means. These compelling accounts of resistance, hope, and vision showcase the power of the storytelling form to generate critique and collective action. Together, these projects demonstrate the contemporary power of stories to stimulate engagement, active citizenship, the pride of identity, and the humility of human connectedness.
Selected Published Work and Blog Posts
“Arts Education as Making Home: Pedagogies of Being Seen”
Imagining: A Gibney Journal. Issue 15, 2023
“Unafraid of Uncertainty: Developing Grassroots Leaders in Afghanistan Using Theater”
The Journal of the International Leadership Association, Arts & Social Change Corner
"Storytelling for Social Justice: Creating Arts-Based Counterstories to Resist Racism"
Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way
"The Big Question: Is There a Global Canon?"
World Policy Journal, Fall 2010
"For the Sake of Others: Virtual Roundtable on 'The Role of the Artist in a Conflict Zone"
The Mantle, October 2012
"New Life Café"
We Are New York Magazine, a comic book co-written by Kayhan, as a companion to her Emmy-award winning TV series We Are New York, a 9-episode broadcast TV drama used as an English language and civic engagement tool for immigrant New Yorkers.
Turning Towards Love
While I inch along with my creative community-building projects, I am thinking of creativity in a new way.
The Not Yet Visible
Who knew that in the last four months of this year I would become an immigration pathway
Weekend Joy Practice
This weekend I’m looking at the plant life blooming in my neighborhood and using all my senses to drink in life!