AMHERST — Amherst storyteller, educator, and author Onawumi Jean Moss was recently honored at the State House in Boston as part of the 2026 Black Excellence on the Hill awards, thanks to a nomination from State Rep. Mindy Domb.
“So much has happened that has blessed my life, and then here comes Mindy,” Moss said. “I don’t even know how to express it. It was such a wonderful thing.”
The annual Black Excellence on the Hill awards, hosted by the Massachusetts Black and Latino Legislative Caucus each February, celebrate Black community leaders and influential figures in communities throughout the commonwealth. Every state legislator in Massachusetts is able to nominate someone from their district for the award.
“I think it was probably way overdue,” Domb said. “She’s renowned in the Amherst community and the surrounding area for her talents and her sensibility and her willingness to participate in community events and really bring us together in that way, and I thought, this year especially, we need to recognize the people in our community who bring us together and bridge divides, and I feel like she does that with her storytelling.”
Before Moss became a professional storyteller, she was the associate dean of students at Amherst College, a position she held from 1985 to 2006. The college named a center after her, the Moss Quantitative Center, which provides support for students in STEM classes.
The role — combined with the work of raising three children — kept her busy, but she found time to go to community events when she could. “I was always interested in what [was] happening and where I could be helpful,” she said.
One day, she went to a storytelling gathering in the Amherst Town Common, where she heard a storyteller named Eshu Bumpus, who “is and was absolutely breathtaking in the way he used his voice and the way he’d create a picture of what he was talking about and telling the story about. I mean, it was really something,” she said.
About a year later, Moss decided she wanted to give it a try herself, but first, she wanted to travel to see more storytellers in person.
In 1993, with help from Bumpus, Moss created Keepers of the Word Storytelling Festival, which ran until 2006. During that time, she met “wonderful people, just wonderful people,” she said, including jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp, who invited Moss to perform at a club he was playing at in the Netherlands.
“It was pretty clear from what I saw when I was going to see [other storytelling festivals] that you better have your act together — that this was not something that you just get up and do,” she said. “I had done my homework, so I got respect for that. But I knew I wasn’t going to get invited to somebody else’s storytelling festival. So I started my own.”
Moss’s other accolades include the 2005 Zora Neale Hurston Award, the highest honor given by the National Association of Black Storytellers; and the 2015 Oracle Award for Lifetime Achievement for Sustained and Exemplary Contributions to Storytelling in North America, given by the National Storytelling Network.
Moss is also the author of the 2005 book “Precious and the Boo Hag,” about a young Gullah girl who has to outsmart a shape-shifting witch creature, which she co-authored with Patricia C. McKissack. The book was named one of the New York Public Library’s “100 Titles for Reading and Sharing” list that year and won a 2006 ALA/ALSC Notable Children’s Book award, among other awards.
When asked how they met, Domb and Moss had different answers. Moss remembered an event at Amherst Cinema where she wasn’t in a great mood, but Domb was gracious to her nonetheless; Domb recalled developing a “really good acquaintanceship” built from crossing paths at various community events.
In any case, Domb said, “I deeply, deeply respect not only her position in the community, but what she gives to the community on a regular basis.”
Moss is 89 now, and her next big project will be writing her memoir.
“We make too many assumptions about one another without knowing one another. We’re, each one of us, so interesting, and one of the big parts of storytelling is to listen to what someone is saying, about who it is and where their roots are, where they come from — all of that,” Moss said. “I want to leave something tangible, my memoir, to add to what’s already being printed about storytelling, the respect we can build by knowing more about one another instead of making assumptions.”
For more information about the awards and the 2026 honorees, visit mbllc.org/excellence-awards. For more information about Onawumi Jean Moss, visit onawumi.com.