Niveah Glover is a 20-year-old playwright and Jacksonville native whose first play, "Callas," will debut at the Jacksonville Arts and Music School on Friday, Aug. 1, 2025. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on July 31, 2025 at 2:25 pm
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Calla lilies are as much a part of the Black experience as funerals that serve as de-facto family reunions and repasts after internment.
The flowers are ubiquitous, even if people do not know their name. Niveah Glover does.
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The 20-year-old Jacksonville native wrote a feature-length play that focuses on conversations three sisters have on the morning of their mother’s viewing.
Callas will debut at the Jacksonville Arts and Music School on Friday. The name came from the white flowers that are ever-present at Black funerals.
The play will be performed four times this weekend. Tickets are $15.
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Afterward, Glover will prepare for her sophomore year at Howard University. She earned praise as a playwright, poet and orator before she arrived in the capital city. Callas is the next step in her literary journey.
“A lot of the artists that I model myself after are artists who take risks and take chances,” Glover says. “Those are the artists that I think, especially literary artists who I believe do the hard thing.”
Glover aspires to be the next Hurston, the next Morrison, the next Bozeman. At Howard, those artists do not need first names. They are immortals whose talent was incubated at The Mecca, before it was appreciated by the world.
An artist in bloom
Glover’s ability to collate words, and tell imaginative stories with them, has been recognized by multiple local and national entities.
In 2023, Glover addressed an audience at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History annual conference.
During her senior year at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, she recited an original poem Pan African Skies before Jacksonville civic leaders as part of city’s 2024 Black History Month celebration.
Last May, Glover was honored as U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She won for her writing.
Weeks later, Glover was named the Poetry Out Loud national champion for her oratory skills. She earned the $20,000 top prize after reciting works from Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ashanti Anderson and Patricia Smith.
This summer, Glover attended the New South Young Playwrights Festival in Atlanta.
Art that is ‘for us, by us’
Glover has entered spaces that have been opened and cultivated throughout her life. She is also a member of Gen Z. Gatekeepers do not dissuade her from her dreams.
“I’m a big believer of curating, a big believer of FUBU,” Glover says referencing the axiom For Us, By Us. “If its not being made. If there’s nowhere to go get it, make it yourself. Find the people who have the resources and make it yourself.”
Two years ago, Glover partnered with local artists who are racial and sexual minorities to curate The Freedom Ride at Yellow House Art Gallery.
The exhibition featured young artists who believed modern policy proposals, particularly in Florida, emulated the racial oppression of past decades and periods in American history.
“You have to be OK with knowing that years later, down the line, somebody’s going to find that play, that journal entry, that spoken word piece,” Glover says. “Some people are going to give you your flowers while you’re alive. Most people are going to wait until you can no longer smell them, or see them, to finally do it. And, I’m OK with that because I’m not an intellectual laborer for praise. I’m not an intellectual laborer because I think it’s fun. I’m an intellectual laborer because it needs to get done.”
A home for stories
Callas is set in Brooklyn in 1970, weeks after the Vietnam Draft Lottery began. Glover quips that the works of August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry inspired her to incorporate multiple monologues into Callas to ensure every character has a chance to tell their story.
Whose story gets told in full and complete humanity is something Glover says her play touches. The dichotomy of the Vietnam War being packaged as a fight for freedom — during a period where many Black Americans did not enjoy civil liberties in the United States — provides part of the tension in Callas.
“I always say that art is one of the most accessible ways to push people toward change. I say that because you will teach someone something,” Glover says. “You will enact a feeling in someone, and you won’t ever have to be like ‘This is what’s happening.’ Art is a lot of show and not tell.”
Friday’s debut show is part of a decade-long investment in the arts by the Jacksonville Arts & Music School.
Executive Director Jason Peoples was credited with transforming a former cafeteria space into a black box theater. Over the last 18 months, JAMS has painted the room black, custom-built a stage, constructed a sound booth and installed production-quality lighting.
Callas will be the first feature-length play produced inside the renovated space.
Maxie Coleman, the creative director and drama teacher at JAMS, finds it fitting that a Niveah Glover production will be the first feature-length performance. Glover was a JAMS student when it opened in September 2016.
“She has the ability to tell these stories that draw you in and places you in the middle of that world,” Coleman says. “You experience all the emotions: empathy, sympathy, grief, forgiveness, unforgiveness.”
An exodus and genesis
Death was the genesis of Niveah Glover’s life in Jacksonville. Three decades ago, Niveah’s mother, Shameka, headed south with her mother from New York City to Jacksonville to be closer to family after Niveah’s great-grandmother, Mazel Spellman, died.
Niveah recalls sitting in her grandmother’s lap in a home on Cleveland Street in the Fairfax neighborhood. The red and white wood home had a porch wide enough to lounge on. That was where Niveah heard Shameka Glover and Dorothy Mack tag-team as modern-day griots.
Jacksonville is the place where Glover looked for herself in the horizon and found her.
“For me, it’s one of the proudest moments,” Shameka Glover says. “I’ve always tried to instill in Niveah, ‘You can do whatever you want to do.’ People say the sky is the limit. There is no limit if you work hard, stay focused and believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t believe you can’t make others believe.”
Whether it was former Douglas Anderson teacher Tiffany Melanson, local art entrepreneur Lydia-Rose Hanson, Coleman; the JAMS faculty or the half-dozen people who devoted their Saturday to the creation of the set for Callas, Glover says Jacksonville has enveloped her with encouragement.
“You always have naysayers like ‘Why don’t you do it in (Washington) D.C.? Why don’t you do it in New York City? Why won’t you do it in Atlanta? But, I wanted to bring it home for the very first time. It was imperative to me that our community got the chance to see the brand, new work, by a local artist who is trying to get to Broadway, trying to make it to Tony night, trying to do the things that we see all the big, fancy celebrities do.”
That is why director and cast are Jaxsons.
Callas Director James F. Webb III is a native Jaxson and Jacksonville University graduate with nearly two decades in the theater industry.
Actors Kanesha Mitchell and Zahara Mauldin are Jacksonville natives. Andrea Mauldin will make her theatrical debut alongside her daughter. Marquia Presley and Jahquez Fudge are both Douglas Anderson graduates. Meanwhile, Milan falls is a current student at Jacksonville University.
“She said to me ‘I can take it to other places, but I have to debut it at home because Jacksonville gave me the experiences and the courage to do it,’” Shameka Glover recalled.
“So, I owe it to Jacksonville.”
