A poetry slam is a competition arts event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges. Culturally, poetry slams are a break with the past image of poetry as an elitist or rigid art form. 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.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Joshua Beckman is an American poet.
Erasure is a form of found poetry or found object art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.
Tiziano Fratus is an Italian poet and publisher.
Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet, author, playwright and TV presenter. He was the first writer in residence to be appointed by any national rugby union team.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Carnegie Mellon University Press is a publisher that is part of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
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.
Belladonna* Collaborative is a small press non-profit publisher and collaborative organization based in Brooklyn, New York City. It was founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky as a reading series at Bluestockings in New York, NY. The reading series quickly expanded to a matrix of readings, publications, and informal salons, featuring avant-garde feminist writing, with an emphasis on hybrid and language-focused writing. Currently, the press operates as a non-hierarchical collaborative, publishing books and hosting literary events with attention to diversity in its roster of authors and editorial board.
Scott Woods is an American author and poet from Columbus, Ohio.
Ilavenil Meena Kandasamy is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Kent Shaw is a contemporary American poet.
Rachel Zucker is an American poet born in New York City in 1971. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, SoundMachine. She also co-edited the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections with fellow poet, Arielle Greenberg.
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
Poetry Bus Tour was a literary event sponsored by independent poetry publisher Wave Books in 2006. It featured a tour of contemporary poets, traveling by a forty-foot Biodiesel bus, who stopped to perform in fifty North American cities over the course of fifty days. Starting in Seattle, WA, where Wave Books is based, on September 4, the bus visited major cities in every region of the United States, as well as three stops in Canada, before returning on October 27, 2006. The bus made stops at venues in each city, where participating poets gave readings and lectures. Organized by poets Joshua Beckman, Matthew Zapruder, Lori Shine, Monica Fambrough, and Travis Nichols the tour featured many poets published by the press, as well as performance artists and local readers. One reviewer characterised the project as being "like some strange collective of disenfranchised rock musicians, shorn of their instruments and forced to travel together for warmth", while another posed the question, "What would happen if poets started acting like one big heavy metal band?"
Kim Hyesoon (Korean: 김혜순) is a South Korean poet.
Picasso's written works, that is, works created by Pablo Picasso, are often overlooked in discussion of his long and varied career in the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, papier-mâché, (photography), assemblage, ready-mades, printing, ceramics and theatre designs. Despite being immersed in the literary sphere for many years, Picasso did not produce any writing himself until the age of 53. In 1935 he ceased painting, drawing and sculpting, and committed himself to the art of poetry; which in turn was briefly abandoned to focus upon singing. Although he soon resumed work in his previous fields, Picasso continued in his literary endeavours and wrote hundreds of poems, concluding with The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1959.
Don Mee Choi is a Korean-American poet and translator.
