T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Storytelling artist and folklorist Kiran Singh Sirah, the 2025 recipient of the Arts + Culture Alliance’s Community Artist Grant, delivered a keynote speech at the ACA headquarters on Thursday night as part of a series of events he is leading between Nov. 12 and 21.

A few weeks after he was first announced as the 2025 recipient of the Arts + Culture Alliance’s Community Artist Grant back in July, folklorist and storyteller Kiran Singh Sirah first visited Marshalltown to learn more about the community and formulate plans for a larger project. Beginning on Wednesday with an event at the Iowa Veterans Home, Sirah is leading a series of storytelling events that included a keynote address at the ACA headquarters on West Main Street Thursday night.

Once ACA Executive Director Amber Danielson had introduced him, Sirah commended the organization for hosting him and the community for showing a strong interest in arts and culture before an audience of about 25 people. From there, he invited the crowd on a journey to the past, first inviting them to visualize their childhood homes and then sharing his own growing up in England as the child of Sikh parents of Indian descent who had been expelled from Uganda at the order of dictator Idi Amin, arriving in his home country at a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK. He was the first person with dark skin to be born in the town, which he admitted wasn’t always easy, often making him feel like an outsider as he did his best to shug off racist jeers and commands to “go back to where he came from.”

A foundational memory he recalled was his mother serving tea and British biscuits to the garbage men in Eastbourne, connecting, telling stories and building a better world. Sirah also spoke of the experience of returning to his ancestral homeland of India for the first time and all of the places his family came from that come together to create his story. In addition to England, Sirah has lived in Scotland, Northern Ireland, North Carolina and now Johnson City, Tenn.

As he shifted his focus to the present, Sirah described the United States as a country in the midst of an identity crisis but added that some of the greatest moments in human history have come from a collapse or an upheaval. He recounted his efforts to bring people of all faiths together in Edinburgh, Scotland after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as Coptic Christians and Celtic Jews came together to worship.

“It may seem like an impossible task, but it happened on a personal level one connection at a time. You don’t need to spend months building these connections. You start with one person and one conversation,” he said.

He again invited the audience to envision returning to their childhood homes and then asked individuals to pair off and tell their story in just a few minutes without judging each other. After that exercise, Sirah wound down his speech by joking that even his reserved father could turn into a storyteller on the level of Mark Twain with the right amount of whiskey and masala chicken.

Sirah finished with a story of how he brought people of wildly different political backgrounds together in Tennessee, where he currently resides, after first breaking bread.

“I’ve got conservatives living on one side of me, and I’ve got liberals on the other. And in the middle is a modest house owned by a brown skinned, beatboxing, English-born Sikh original Asian, Indian African descent who periodically wears a kilt and plays the didgeridoo on his porch,” he said. “And we eat together, we drink together, we celebrate birthdays together, and even when we disagree, we listen to each other.”

In conclusion, he described the modern moment as “complicated” but touted storytelling as a tool to overcome superficial differences and connect with others on a deeper level, open up in a vulnerable level and learn meaningful lessons in the process.

“It’s a sacred pact to listen and to be a witness because storytelling, like two wings of a bird, one is the teller and the other is the listener. We need both,” he said before ending on one final question. “What’s your story?”

In addition to the first two events that have already been held, Sirah is planning a public event at the Mowry-Irvine Mansion in conjunction with the Historical Society of Marshall County on Saturday, and he will appear at the Immigrant Allies community potluck on Sunday at Midnight Garden. A sunset walk is planned at the YMCA/YWCA beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, and he will wrap up his residence with “Stories from Our Front Porch — Humans of Marshalltown Live!” next Friday, Nov. 21 at the ACA building from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.