Teamsters Local 667
Memphis Strong — carrying the legacy of 1968
Powering · Labor Education
Leader Spotlight · Memphis
Tiffany Mishè Gray
Strategist. Organizer. Arts educator. A Memphian who has spent the last decade teaching young people to speak, teaching grown folks what a bill actually does to them, and writing down the stories of people rebuilding a life after prison.
I know Tiffany personally. What most people don't know is how many different rooms she works in — a poetry workshop with teenagers on a Friday, a town hall on federal policy the next week, and in between, writing down the story of a man who came home from prison and built a career. Those look like three different jobs. They are one job: getting working people the words, the information, and the shot they were never handed.
— Kevin Bradshaw, LaborEducation.org
In her own words
Born to win
They investigating the heart Persecution of the mind But I'll write the story first And pray heavy to Divine
I'm a God send Home is heaven And when you meet the Lord She'll show you just what you did in lessons
Daily digression No issue left to press with No conversation with verbs in past tense Copywrightable Tiffany Gray got words that's likeable Cadence so strong a library might bite em
.... But it's peace on my face Love in my heart Pain in my bones like growth is going to take a surgery I'm down for rhetoric though I don't want to talk to no more No time helping for those who watch me fall As they grow From things they wouldn't know Or places they shouldn't have been I talked to the Creator Says that I was born to win Snapped my fingers Start over Time to begin again Close my eyes End the the poem Live like - Amen
Tiffany Mishè Gray
Memphis, Tennessee · July 5, 2018 · #NitePoems #HealingMySoul
Posted publicly by the poet. Her words, her copyright — printed here with the lines as she wrote them.
Many hats
Where her work shows up
The Multicultural Progressive South
Founder & Executive Director
A Memphis-based group doing political education and civic engagement with working-class communities across the Mid-South — including town halls that walk people through how a bill in Washington lands on their family, their school, and their nonprofit. It is the Tennessee chapter of the national Indivisible network.
Their work in MemphisSpeak Poetry Memphis
Founder · Spoken word artist & teaching artist
She teaches spoken word to young people who are carrying something heavy. Her signature workshop, “Tell-Lie-Vision,” started as a poem she wrote at seventeen as a struggling student at Overton High — about the media and what it was doing to her. She now runs it for kids, including at the Memphis Black Arts Alliance FireHouse. In 2012 she placed fourth in the nation in the Community Action Project.
A workshop, in the kids' own wordsCenter for Employment Opportunities
Writer — participant stories (byline: T.M. Gray)
CEO puts people coming home from incarceration straight onto paid work crews and walks them toward permanent careers. Tiffany writes the participants' stories in their own voice. CEO has had a Memphis office since 2018.
Read “Fernando Found the Strategy First”Crosstown High · XQ Memphis
Founding team
She served on the founding team for Crosstown High and helped secure $2.5 million for the school — an effort that became a cornerstone of the $200 million Crosstown Concourse redevelopment, which brought housing, entertainment and foot traffic to a part of Memphis far from downtown.
Freelance journalism
Former freelance journalist
She covered political movements and policy shifts on the ground, with an eye on the perspectives that usually get left out of the story. That reporter's habit shows up in everything else she does.
Shelby County & Change Collective
Committee volunteer · 2026 Fellow
She serves as a volunteer member of an official Shelby County committee and is a 2026 Fellow with the Change Collective, which trains people in Memphis and elsewhere who intend to lead.
Her Change Collective profileThese are Tiffany's affiliations, listed so you can see the range of one person's work. LaborEducation.org vouches for Tiffany — not for the organizations. We haven't vetted them, and listing them is not an endorsement of any group's politics or program.
The thread for us
Her reporting lands on our road
The story she wrote about Fernando runs straight through the pathway this site was built to show people. He came home from incarceration without a house, learned about the skilled trades and the unions — boilermakers, ironworkers — through a seven-week program, got onto paid work crews, and was handed a gas card so he could make it to an interview. Today he works a public-sector career at Caltrans.
“This is not just a job. This is a career.”
— Fernando, in Tiffany's story for the Center for Employment Opportunities
That is the argument for union apprenticeship, told by a worker instead of by us. If you or someone in your family is coming home and looking for that same road, start here:
Still climbing
Her own bio ends with a line worth repeating: she believes “the stage is everywhere — and political leadership is her next one.” Memphis has a habit of producing people who organize, teach and write all at once. She's one of them, and she isn't finished.
Her full bio
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