CoCoLit Founders
Amy Jo Sayre Baptista, MFA, Co-Founder
Amy is an author and recipient of numerous awards for her poetry and fiction, which have appeared in The Best Small Fictions, Ninth Letter, The Butter, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others.
Her collection, Primitivity, is a Black River Competition Winner (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). A SAFTA fellow, a CantoMundo Poetry fellow, and a fiction scholarship recipient to the Disquiet Literary Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, Amy has performed her work at various venues including The Poetry Foundation in Chicago and the St Louis BookFest.
She is also a performer with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artist’s collective, a contributing editor at Quiddity, and a co-founder of Plates & Poetry, a community arts program focused on food and writing.
She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has taught at Benedictine University as well as in a variety of outreach venues, and currently teaches Humanities at WGU.
Joanna Beth Tweedy, PhD, Co-Founder
An ardent foreign-adventurist with chronic and gravitational home-soil leanings, Joanna Beth is the founding editor and host of Quiddity (NPR Illinois).
She serves as the lead writing faculty at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership and as a contributing facilitator for Plates & Poetry. She teaches at WGU. Joanna Beth has presented widely throughout the United States and internationally on her research interests, which include flourishing, leadership, publishing, linguistic dialects, and writing.
Publications include a novel and two book-length works on creative poiesis and leadership from (respectively) Southeast Missouri University Press, Benedictine University, and the University of Delhi; poems and short stories; as well as chapters and articles in journals related to leadership and creative craft.
With degrees in values-driven leadership (PhD), English (MA), and education (BS), Joanna Beth has served as faculty-in-residence at the University of Illinois, an Associate Professor of Arts & Letters, and a Dean of Academic Affairs at Benedictine University. She lives and loves in a foothilled fraction of the Ozarks steeped in the wonders of nature and the blessings of generations.
Inspirator (n.)—proof positive that everything is possible... Everything.