Saxophonist JT Lynch serenades guests on April 18, 2026, at our Jazz Brunch.
By Regennia N. Williams, PhD
Special thanks to the St. Luke’s Foundation, the host institutions and businesses, our guest presenters, and the more than 100 program participants whose support helped to make our inaugural “From the Square to the Circle and Back” series a success. I am looking forward to doing more amazing things in the Greater Shaker Square and University Circle communities in the future, and I hope we will be able to work together to make this happen. Until then, I invite you to enjoy some of the photographic memories below that relate to the spring 2026 series.
Dr. Adam Banks, UnBar discussion leader for the May 9, 2026, featured book, Imagination: A Manifesto.
Dr. Deforia Lane, keynote speaker for the April 18, 2026, Jazz Brunch and author of Music as Medicine.
(left to right) Featured speaker and tour guide for “Adventures in Egyptian Art and Culture,” Kevin “Chill” Heard, is shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art with Mayor Sandra Morgan of East Cleveland and Dr. Dorothy Salem.
J. Everett Prewitt, author of A Life in the Sunshine, leads the Cafe Indigo book discussion on Saturday, June 13, 2026.
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 