Mike Moran

Mike Moran is a writer, a schoolteacher, a theater director, a puppeteer and performer, and a musician who worked and taught in Iowa and Illinois for over twenty-five years before heading to the Appalachian Mountains in 2019. 

After getting his M.Ed at Loyola University Chicago Moran's first job was setting up and implementing a new drama curriculum for the River Trails Middle School in Mount Prospect, Illinois. Following, he worked in Language Arts at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids for seventeen years. While there, Moran wrote and developed courses in Theatre Arts and Performance. He set up and ran Kennedy's Speech Team for seven years; then continued as speech team coach at Mt Vernon High School for another three years. Moran also designed and implemented Kennedy's Creative Writing program, offering a different creative writing discipline each trimester, as well as establishing the now twenty-plus-year tradition of a Poet Laureate for each graduating class.  

Moran was co-creator and co-director of Odyssey Theater in Mount Vernon, Iowa, taking enrollment from twelve students performing a play Moran himself had written in 2001, to over a hundred students in 2017. He oversaw the instruction of all aspects of theater, from making an entrance to sound design, working with students from 5 to 18.   

Moran keeps creatively busy writing, directing, or performing. Over the past thirty years Moran has had poetry published, short stories published, and a handful of plays produced; he is a guitarist and songwriter having written a handful of small portable musicals. He produced and worked with a performing arts collective called The Goatsinger Show around the Iowa City/Cedar Rapids area. He relocated to Roanoke, Virginia in 2019 where he is currently the theater teacher and theater director for Patrick Henry High School. 

The combination of music, story, text, image, education, and humor culminates in The Iowa Goatsinger - a mythic, flexible theatrical construct with roots stretching back to the Theater of Dionysus in Ancient Greece. 

He is available for lessons in writing, speech, and performance. Contact at mailto:mikemoran@goatsinger.com