Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Ka Vang is a Hmong-American writer in the United States. Vang was born on a CIA military base, Long Cheng, Laos, at the end of the Vietnam War, and immigrated to the United States in 1980. A fiction writer, poet, playwright, and former journalist, Vang has devoted much of her professional life to capturing Hmong folktales on paper. She is a recipient of the Archibald Bush Artist Fellowship and several other artistic and leadership awards. She is the author of the children's book, Shoua and the Northern Lights Dragon, a finalist for the 23rd Annual Midwest Book Awards in 2012.
Bao Phi is a Vietnamese-American spoken word artist, writer and community activist living in Minnesota. Bao Phi's collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published in 2011 and, Thousand Star Hotel, was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press. He has written three children’s books published by Capstone Press. First book, A Different Pond received multiple awards, including the Caldecott Award, Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books.
Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way, a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.
Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, writer, consultant, and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue. Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago, In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.
Deborah Keenan is an American poet.
Sarah Kay is an American poet. Known for her spoken word poetry, Kay is the founder of Project V.O.I.C.E., a group dedicated to using spoken word as an educational and inspirational tool.
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud is a Sudanese-American poet and activist, who won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam championship. In 2018, she became UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and in this capacity, has traveled to refugee camps in Kenya, Greece and Jordan, drawing wider attention to the situation of refugees.
Neil Hilborn is an American slam poet who writes and performs poetry. His poems often detail personal experiences and battles with mental illness. He is best known for his poem "OCD", which has received 75 million views online. Hilborn tours to perform his poetry at colleges and other venues.
Alyesha Wise, aka "Ms. Wise" is a poet, teaching artist and co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement (S.L.A.M). From Camden, N.J., Alyesha currently resides in Los Angeles where she also serves as a teaching artist for Street Poets, Inc. She previously served as the head coach of Da Poetry Lounge's slam team and a co-coach for the Get Lit Youth slam team. Wise co-founded and was a co-host of The Pigeon Presents: The Philadelphia Poetry Slam. She has been featured in a speaking engagement on the TEDx Talk series in which she dedicated the talk to her younger sister and Camden. While in Philadelphia, Wise was a co-host of Jus Words, the longest running weekly open mic in the city at the time. She also founded the organization Love, Us, a Philadelphia-based organization and annual production which worked to spread unity and self-love through the arts. The production was a large attraction in the Philadelphia poetry scene and a Twitter trending topic in 2010. She is currently the founder and organizer of Black Women Necessary, a safe space for black women. Wise also served as a former teaching artist and volunteer coordinator at New Earth, and continues to teach and mentor in Los Angeles youth detention centers. In 2017, she authored the book, Carnival. Ron Howard once said about Alyesha's performance style, "Very Powerful."
Imani Cezanne is an American activist and spoken word poet. She is the founding president of President of S.P.E.A.K..
Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.
Aranya Johar is an Indian poet. She uses social media to address issues like gender equality, mental health and body positivity. She uses slam poetry to confront beauty standards. Aranya's first released piece, “A Brown Girls’s Guide to Gender” became a viral sensation and hit 1 million views within two days of its upload. She integrated spoken word in Bollywood for the first time through her collaboration with Akshay Kumar for the movie ‘Padman’. Aranya was a speaker at TEDxICTMumbai in April 2017. She has been invited and praised by various poets and foundations.
"Shrinking Women" is a poem by Lily Myers. Myers recited it at the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational; the video was subsequently reposted by Button Poetry and HuffPost, where it went viral. The video of this performance had been viewed more than five million times by 2016. The poem explores how Myers's mother, and as she realizes, herself, have been taught to take up less space, particularly to "make room" for men, such as Myers's brother and father. For her mother, this manifests as consuming fewer calories, and Myers additionally links this to her own use of apologies when asking questions in class. When spoken, the poem is about three and a half minutes long.
Afra Atiq is an Emirati spoken word poet who was born in the United Arab Emirates to an Emirati father and a Japanese-American mother. Atiq holds a PhD in Media and Creative Industries from the United Arab Emirates University and is the co-founder of the Untitled Chapters, a collective of female Emirati writers. Now, she works as a full-time poet. In 2015, She was named the "Best Performer" by Rooftop Rhythms and won the Abu Dhabi Music and Art Foundation Creativity award for her poem "An Open Letter to Cancer" in 2017.
Dominique Christina is a writer, performer and social activist. She is a champion at the National Poetry Series and Women of the World Poetry Slam.
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli poet, educator, and activist who lives and works in Hawai'i. She is known for her poetry and activism centered on Hawaiian culture and identity.
