A poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges. While formats can vary, slams are often loud and lively, with audience participation, cheering and dramatic delivery. Hip-hop music and urban culture are strong influences, and backgrounds of participants tend to be diverse.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
Non-binary and genderqueer are umbrella terms for gender identities that are not solely male or female. Non-binary identities fall under the transgender umbrella, since non-binary people typically identify with a gender that is different from their sex, though some non-binary people do not consider themselves transgender.
Spoken word refers to an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play, such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection. Spoken word is a "catchall" term that includes any kind of poetry recited aloud, including poetry readings, poetry slams, jazz poetry, and hip hop music, and can include comedy routines and prose monologues. Unlike written poetry, the poetic text takes its quality less from the visual aesthetics on a page, but depends more on phonaesthetics, or the aesthetics of sound.
Karyna McGlynn is an American poet and editor associated with spoken-word, New Sincerity, and Gurlesque.
Eaton Hamilton is a Canadian short story writer, novelist, essayist and poet, who goes by "Hamilton", 2021 legal name “Eaton Hamilton" and uses they/their pronouns.
Derrick C. Brown is a comedian, poet/performer and founder of Write Bloody Publishing. He is the author of several books of poetry and is a popular touring author. He lived outside of Austin, Texas in Elgin, Texas and currently resides in Los Angeles.
The National Poetry Slam (NPS) is a performance poetry competition where teams from across the United States, Canada, and, occasionally, Europe and Australia, participate in a large-scale poetry slam. The event occurs in early August every year and in different U.S. cities.
The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word is an annual festival produced by Spoken Word Canada and planned by a local Festival Organizing Committee in each host city.
Andrea Gibson is an American poet and activist from Calais, Maine, who has lived in Boulder, Colorado since 1999. Gibson's poetry focuses on gender norms, politics, social reform, and LGBTQ topics.
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is an American nonfiction writer and poet.
George Virden Watsky, known mononymously as Watsky, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, poet, author, and illustrator.
The Individual World Poetry Slam (iWPS) is a yearly poetry slam tournament put on by Poetry Slam, Inc. that pits individual slam poets from around the world against one another.
The Vehicule Poets was a collective formed in Montreal in the 1970s by poets Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Tom Konyves, Claudia Lapp, John McAuley, Stephen Morrissey and Ken Norris, who shared an interest in experimental American poetry and European avant-garde literature and art. While they were each distinct in their own writing, and published books as individuals, they were collectively involved in organizing readings, art events, and in controlling their own means of literary production through the development of a variety of periodicals and collective publishing ventures. In 1979, John McAuley’s Maker Press published a collective anthology, The Vehicule Poets. Six of the original Vehicule poets are still active as poets, artists and teachers. Artie Gold died on Valentine's Day, 2007.
Kae Tempest is an English spoken word performer, poet, recording artist, novelist and playwright.
Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He also writes plays and screenplays. Yan lives in New York.
Danez Smith is a Poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards. Their most recent poetry collection Homie was published on January 21, 2020.
Ellen van Neerven is an Aboriginal Australian writer, educator and editor. They are queer and non-binary. Their first work of fiction, Heat and Light (2013), won several awards, and in 2019 Van Neerven won the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award. Their second collection of poetry, Throat (2020), won three awards at the 2021 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, including Book of the Year.
Rudy K. Francisco is an American spoken-word poet and writer. He has won several Poetry Slams and written six books of poetry: Getting Stitches, Scratch, No Gravity, No Gravity Part II, Helium, and I'll Fly Away. He made an appearance on TV One's Verses and Flow and performed his spoken-word poem "Complainers" as well as "Rifle" on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Franny Choi is an American writer, poet and playwright.
