The long list of accomplishments by Cleveland poet and educator Daniel Gray-Kontar is remarkable.

In his early 20s, he burst onto the literary scene as a member of the history-making Cleveland Slam Poetry team, winning nationals in 1994. Returning to Cleveland a mini celebrity, Gray-Kontar co-founded the Black Poetic Society in 1997, uniting Black poets from across Northeast Ohio.

“I’m very proud of my experience with Black Poetic as a founder and as being one of the progenitors of the Black poetry movement [in Northeast Ohio],” Gray-Kontar said.

With a bachelor’s degree in English and Pan-African Literature from Cleveland State University, he headed to the University of California, Berkeley to pursue a doctorate in education. Soon after, he was recruited to redesign the Cleveland School of the Arts literary arts department in 2013.

That experience led Gray-Kontar to open his literary workshop and performance space, Twelve Literary Arts, for which he received the prestigious national Joyce Award for innovative arts programming and leadership. He ran Twelve Literary Arts until 2022.

A major player in the Cleveland arts scene, Gray-Kontar either consulted with or joined boards for Northeast Ohio arts and culture organizations such as the Cleveland Foundation, the Gund Foundation, Northeast Ohio Shores Development Corporation, the Cleveland Arts Prize and Brews & Prose.

For Gray-Kontar, it was during his six-year run at Twelve Literary Arts where he hit high marks as an arts educator, but it was also during this time that his ever-expanding role as an arts administrator landed him in the hospital.

“I was not making art at all, [for] about five or six years, maybe longer than that,” he said.

Almost two years after closing the doors on Twelve Literary Arts, Gray-Kontar is rediscovering his passion and love for making art.  He has returned to another of his enjoyed mediums - music - which gave way to a new creative outlet – AI art.

Gray-Kontar’s passion for the spoken word began in the mid 70s at St. Timothy Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland, where Rev. John T. Weeden preached to a congregation that included him, his mother and grandmother.

“I was about four years old, and I remember Rev. Weeden was pastoring,” he said. “My grandmother, who was sitting right next to me, she started to shout and get happy.”

Four-year-old Daniel was amazed by how his grandmother was overcome by the power of another’s words, and he pointed at the pastor.

“What that meant was, ‘I want to do that.’ I didn’t know what ‘that’ was,” he said.

“The only thing I knew was that this man was reading from this book, and reading from this book was making people experience joy. And I said, ‘I want to do that now.’”

Growing up the only child of a young, single mom, Gray-Kontar attended multiple schools across Northeast Ohio as the two moved from town to town.

“I was raised by an incredible mom,” he said. “I watched my mother grow up like she watched me grow up.”

He attended schools in Shaker Heights, East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and Maple Heights, where he graduated from high school.

On the one hand, moving around made him a transient kid who had to make new friends each school year.

“But on the other hand, I learned to talk to anybody,” he said.

Recognizing Daniel’s interest in the spoken word and reading, his mother introduced him to the work of esteemed Cleveland poet Langston Hughes.

His grandmother encouraged Gray-Kontar to read his first poem in front of an audience at St. Timothy’s.

“I remember the joy, the pride that folks in the congregation had for this young, Black child poeting at six years old and I never forgot it,” he said. “I guess a poet was born.”

Gray-Kontar’s ability to connect with a variety of people paired with his passion for the spoken word led him to the world of performance poetry where he flourished.

For his contribution in ‘94 to the Poetry Slam win in Asheville, North Carolina, Gray-Kontar said he read a poem he’d written about Langston Hughes in front of a crowd of close to 500 people.

“I left my body,” he said. “I remember I still had the poem in my hands. I was still reading the poem. But as I read it, somehow, I was there, but I wasn’t there.”

After his performance, he left the stage and began to sob.

"I was somehow channeling or connecting to something much, much greater than me," he said. "I never experienced [poetry] in that way before."

Gray-Kontar’s home office in Lakewood is a creative studio where the organic and the digital mingle. His recording equipment and Mac computer are surrounded by more than a dozen plants. Framed images of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and A Tribe Called Quest look down on him as he created his Afrofuturist imagery on a recent afternoon.

He quickly typed various prompts into the AI app Adobe Firefly. “Profile of African man with long dreadlocks sitting in a lotus position…background of planet Mercury,” he said as he typed.

AI took the prompt and began making various images that appear on his screen. But the images looked too “AI-ish,” so he adjusted the prompts for more detailed imagery.

“The joy that I started experiencing creating this stuff was just like I hadn’t felt anything like it before,” he said.

He also uses AI to enhance his own photographs of his plants, his friends and even himself.

“I’m able to take these images and merge them, until I have the right texture, feeling, structure, mood, mode,” he said. “It’s merging my artistry …with what’s in my head that I can’t draw. It’s like collage work.”

He acknowledged that many don’t think it’s real art.

“They think it’s stealing,” he said and compared it to hip hop sampling.

 “We started creating whole other compositions based on what we discovered,” he said. "Same thing with AI art.”

Gray-Kontar has returned to teaching English language arts at Castle High School in Cleveland, a credit recovery school that allows students retake classes.

“I really wanted to go back to teaching and working with young people,” he said.