Knowledge Bank

Reading by Sean E. Andres, 15 March 2023, recorded in Cincinnati, OH. Andres is a marketer, a writer, and a former educator who holds a B.S. in secondary English and language arts education (with a focus on women writers during the Civil War) and a Master’s degree in marketing (with a focus on diversity marketing and applied feminist and race theory). He works on an array of public history projects, especially in the Cincinnati area, centered on preserving and empowering the voices of historically marginalized populations. His work on Piatt has been published in The New Territory Magazine’s Literary Landscapes and Paideuma, the National Poetry Foundation journal. In this recording, Sean reads aloud and explores Sarah Piatt’s poem “If I Had Made the World,” the poem that spurred his initial interest in her work. “If I Had Made the World” was published in the rare Washington, D.C. newspaper The Capital on 5 Nov. 1876.
The reading is preceded by a short lecture on the historical context of the poem provided by Dr. Elizabeth Renker from the Department of English at The Ohio State University, recorded in Columbus, OH on 20 September 2023.