About Club Medici

Founder and co-owner of Kansas City’s maverick indy bookstore, Prospero’s Books, Leathem is co-founder and executive publisher at Spartan Press where he has helped bring to print over 300 books of essay, memoir, poetry and fiction, including several Kansas and Missouri Poet Laureates. He has organized over 2,500 live arts events including the 2007 & 2008 Plaza Literary Festivals which drew over 20,000 people annually. A former political consultant, Leathem has extensive board experience, having served on the boards of the Writers Place and the Metropolitan Ensemble Theater in addition to The Lighthouse and the student board of the University of Kansas Crew Team. He has released numerous essays, short stories and books of poetry. He edited the 2002 anthology Leaven’d 911 a collection of essays touching on the impact of the 911 terrorist attacks, and the anthology “war/RAW” a poetic response to the second gulf war. A past editor of Present Magazine and Friction Magazine and publisher of The Alternative American, he is currently editor for the cultural arts journal The Orphan*Age. He resides in Parkville, Missouri where he is an avid hiker, bicyclist and outdoor enthusiast.

President of Strategic Educational Consulting, Washington, DC, Jayaraman offers over 18 years of emergency preparedness experience. He has worked with business leaders, government officials, advocacy groups, and community based organizations to generate support for innovative approaches to emergency preparedness planning, and has conducted numerous training exercises for thousands of government personnel, District residents, and businesses. Over his career, he has been involved in workforce development for youth, working with faith-based and community-based organizations to increase participation in hard-to-reach populations in training and employment programs. Outside of work, Jayaraman is currently serving his fifth term as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner (ANC) representing Ward 6 and Hilliest areas of Capitol Hill. He serves as Alumni representative on the Board of Directors of Jenkins Hill Child Development Center. He is also actively involved in Little League baseball as an umpire. Born in Bangalore, India, he moved to Kansas at the age of ten and has resided in Washington, DC since 2007. www.sedcllc.com

A professional with a thirty-year sales and marketing career, John Caswell has excelled at technology sales in the private sector and within higher education, working directly with the virtually every level of University leadership. During his career, John has given hundreds of technology presentations to Universities throughout the United States and piloted dozens of enterprise technology deployments. With years of experience in asking the right questions to look around institutional corners, he has developed an capacity to address risk for decision makers and the ability to close early by clearly defining the institution's goals. John brings a wealth of business acumen, consultative experience, along with a “220/221, whatever it takes” personality to Club Medici’s leadership team. A second generation University of Kansas graduate and a resident of Kansas City for the last twenty-eight years, John spends his time outside of work raising his teen daughter, volunteering with a local veteran’s organization, sailing on lake Perry and skiing in Colorado, when not reading on his porch and/or putting off the next home improvement project. 

Renae Price (she/her) comes to Club Medici after a long career in the education and non-profit arenas, which began with a degree in sociology and a 10-week Coro Kansas City internship in public affairs. Renae is a former board member and grant writer for the Independence Symphony (now Heritage Philharmonic), and has designed surveys and written reports and grants for the Ryan White CARE Consortium, the UMKC Institute for Human Development, and the Mid-American Addiction Technology Transfer Center. Most recently, Renae spent 15 years at Kansas City Public Library, seven of those years in youth services. Price is nearing the end of 20+ years as a home educator, having taught literature, composition, math, and science during her tenure (but her favorite class was called 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do!). A life-long learner, Renae enjoys investigations into new and interesting topics, and trying out things she was never allowed to do as a kid. In her free time, you can find Renae walking and hiking, reading, and spending time growing with her family.