Jordan Claire McCraw (author/poet/performance artist) Born and raised outside of Washington, D.C., Jordan grew up an overachieving nerd with a passion for reading aloud, performance and her self-produced radio program about breakfast foods and Bette Midler, which she recorded religiously on a Fisher Price tape player. At the age of twenty, while completing bachelor’s degrees in Theatre Performance and English (Creative Writing for Poetry) in the Gemstone Honors Program at the University of Maryland, Jordan volunteered as a schoolteacher in Ghana. It was while working in West Africa that she met a hunky British geek, the resulting crisis being a spontaneous move to rural England and a near-decade of teaching English and Drama in the British state education system (near Stonehenge, no less- it was characteristically absurd). Horrendous commuter traffic on winter and summer solstice became par for the course. Her students were her whole world. The birth of Jordan’s son in 2015 and her subsequent struggle with postpartum depression inspired her to fight for her first love, her love of acting; Jordan began working as a passionate voiceover artist for commercial clients in London such as Mattel. Jordan reached the Top 16 in the 2019 Maxim Cover Girl Competition as a women’s postpartum mental health advocate, and she has returned to the United States full-time as a writer, activist, performance artist and audiobook narrator for HarperCollins (Audible) and the Library of Congress. Jordan is on her bicultural artist and global citizen hustle, using her own story of survival as a platform for empowering women’s voices worldwide. In her heart, she will always be a teacher. Jordan feels that she has been put here on Earth to break down barriers with her honesty and uplift those who are trapped by shame and grief; more than anything, she wants to help us all feel better.