Storyteller Mitch Capel is one of the few practitioners who specializes in poetry recitation. It’s an unusual focus not just in the world of storytelling, but in poetry itself, where most people read words printed on a page. Something alchemical happens when you throw away that piece of paper. The musicality of the language feels more alive, the emotions behind the words feel more urgent, and the story becomes fully embodied.
Capel’s hero and the center of his work is the American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, who died more than 100 years ago. They grew up in different times with surprising similarities. As boys, they both had close ties with their families and possessed a preternatural sense of purpose. Inspired by his grandmother (who read Dunbar stories to him from the time he was three) and his parents (who encouraged him to recite poems at family dinners and church functions), Capel knew that he wanted to be a performer as early as kindergarten. Helped along by a photographic memory, he started performing professionally in 1985 and estimates he has memorized some 70 percent of Dunbar’s expansive oeuvre.
Dunbar was a breakthrough figure in African American letters even though he died young, at the age of 33. When he graduated high school in 1891, he was the only Black student not just in his class, but at the school. While he ran in intellectually heavy circles — he was friends with both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington — his primary influences were his parents. Both his mother and father had been enslaved and emancipated before Dunbar was born. Their intelligence, interests, and sensibilities shaped how Dunbar saw the world and his place in it.
“His mother was born on a plantation in Kentucky,” says Capel. “As a child, she was allowed to listen as her master read poetry to his wife at night. She fell in love with the poetry.” A washer woman in Ohio, she taught herself how to read and write, and watched with delight when her young son, a prodigy, began writing poetry at the age of six.
While Dunbar found success and acclaim as a writer and poet, he also encountered many obstacles and professional frustrations. One was that publishers only seemed to be interested in his African American dialect poems, which constituted a small portion of his output. Just one generation removed from slavery, Dunbar used poetry to celebrate the musical speech patterns of people from the recent past. He loved those poems but also resented the publishing industry’s disinterest in his other work. In the wider context of white peers known for writing in Black dialect, including Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris, Dunbar found the focus on his dialect poems limiting and even unsavory.
“The African American community thought it was degrading,” says Capel. “A lot of the Harlem Renaissance writers gave Dunbar a bad rap for it. But if you look at his standard English poems, they’re just as beautiful as the ones by Shelley, Keats, Pushkin, and all the other poets.” Today, the appreciation for Dunbar’s work is more broad and balanced than it was in his own time.
But it has been a long road to get there. Capel recalls occasions early in his career when he performed at schools named after Paul Laurence Dunbar where no one had any familiarity with the poet. (Even the principals would confess their ignorance.) Capel saw his work as a performer as integral to keeping Dunbar’s legacy alive in a world that was rapidly forgetting him. Having lived through desegregation, Capel saw Black writers and thinkers fall out of literary and historical canons in real time. “Before schools integrated, you had to learn some Dunbar,” he recalls. “You had to memorize stuff and recite it; it was part of the curriculum. Once the school was integrated, I saw that was taken out.”
For Capel, bringing a Dunbar piece to life is far beyond an act of recitation. His audience often comments on his delivery, which has the natural ease of storytelling. “Before I even think about telling it to someone else, it has to be impactful in some kind of way,” says Capel. “It has to shift the paradigm. I’m crawling into Dunbar’s skin, crawling into what he wanted to show in his work. I actually lose myself sometimes in historic pieces. The audience just disappears and I’m in another time. It’s transformational.”
After a long stint of limited travels while members of his family were ill, Capel was delighted to return as a featured performer at the 2025 National Storytelling Festival. (“It’s like riding a bicycle,” he says. “You just get right back on it.”) This autumn, he’ll return to Jonesborough for a weeklong residency at the International Storytelling Center. He’s still doing Dunbar poems, of course, and he has added more personal stories and even standup comedy into his repertoire. It may sound like an eclectic mix, but to Capel it’s all cut from the same cloth. “It all feels like storytelling,” he says. His naturally expansive view helps push the boundaries of the form and what we think a story can be.
This article is the second in a series of storyteller profiles for the newsletter of the International Storytelling Center. Read the first profile, on storyteller Adam Booth, here.