ORDER NOW

THE POETS

Click to enlarge.

Benjamin Alfaro is a Detroit-based writer and teaching artist. He is the coauthor of a collaborative poetry collection, Home Court (Red Beard Press, 2014) and has been published widely. He is a writer in residence and youth leadership coordinator with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, serving area high schools and community centers.

Lemon Andersen is a Brooklyn-based playwright, television writer, brand creative, and Tony Award–winning poet. He has been interviewed and profiled by National Public Radio, the New York Times, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal and published in the Nation magazine. His engaged YouTube audience totals upwards of one million viewers.

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, scholar, and performer. Her work appears in the Paris-American, Drunken Boat, Word Riot, and elsewhere. She created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first spoken-word poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-violent contexts. Her chapbook Rewind/Play is forthcoming from YesYes Books in summer 2015.

Aziza Barnes is twenty-two, blk & alive. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, won the first Exploding Pinecone Prize. Her work appears in PANK, PLUCK!, and Callaloo. She is a poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow, and a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Joshua Bennett is a Princeton University doctoral candidate and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Joshua’s wirk has won the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and is published in Anti-, Callaloo, and the Collagist. He is also founding editor of Kinfolks: A journal of black expression.

Tara Betts is author of Arc & Hue and THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali. A Ph.D. candidate and a Cave Canem fellow, she is coeditor of Bop, Strut, and Dance. During the 1990s, Tara wrote as a hip-hop journalist for several publications, including XXL and the Source.

Sarah Blake is the founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, an editor at Saturnalia Books, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her first book, Mr. West, is an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West published by Wesleyan University Press. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Reed Adair Bobroff is To’dich’ííníí Diné from New Mexico and a student at Yale University. Primarily a spoken-word artist, he has been featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices and performed in numerous cities. Reed is the founder of Spoken Roots, which teaches poetry in underserved and Native American communities.

Roger Bonair-Agard was born in Trinidad and Tobago. His collections of poetry include Tarnish and Masquerade, Gully, and Bury My Clothes (long-list finalist for a National Book Award). He is a two-time National Poetry Slam champion and a Cave Canem fellow and teaches poetry at a juvenile detention facility in Chicago.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from Harvard University and the NEA. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award and his second book, The New Testament, was published by Copper Canyon Press. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Mahogany L. Browne is the author of Swag and Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line. She has released five LPs and her journalism is published in XXL and the Source. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, publisher of Penmanship Books, and director of poetry at Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Jason Carney is an award-winning poet, writer, and educator from Dallas, Texas. A four-time National Poetry Slam Finalist, he appeared on three seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is a graduate of Wilkes University MFA program for creative writing and an adjunct instructor at Brookhaven College and Parker University.

Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing). A recipient of the Frederick Bock Prize, she has been a finalist at all three major national poetry slams. She is a VONA Fellow, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.

Michael Cirelli is author of four poetry collections, most recently The Grind (Best Book of 2014 from Amazon Editors’ Favorites). He is executive director of Urban Word and teaches at New York University. The follow-up to his award-winning curriculum, Hip-Hop Poetry & the Classics, is forthcoming from Street Smart Press.

Kristiana Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, activist, and Cave Canem Fellow. Her play Octagon is the winner of Arizona Theater Company’s 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award and Polarity Ensemble Theater’s Dionysos Festival of New Work. Kristiana appeared on season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam.

Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like. Coval is the founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and artistic director of Young Chicago Authors. Coval won a New Voices/New Visions award from the Kennedy Center for a play coauthored with Idris Goodwin about graffiti writers called This is Modern Art, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theater.

Kyle Dargan is the author of Honest Engine, Logorrhea Dementia, Bouquet of Hungers, and The Listening. He has received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is an associate professor and director of creative writing at American University and also editor of POST NO ILLS magazine.

Mayda Del Valle was a contributing writer and original cast member of the Tony Award–winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. She has been featured in Latina, the Source, and the New York Times. She is currently a teaching artist with the youth organization Street Poets in Los Angeles.

Denizen Kane was a poet from Tree City. He wrote a heap of poems and wandered around for a long time. But he’s gone now.

Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) is a former professional DJ, Cave Canem fellow, and father. He has been a Haiku Slam Champion and Individual Finalist in the National Poetry Slam. His poetry appears in Best American Poetry 2014 and TIME. His CD of jazz and poetry is Libation Song.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is a writer, vocalist, and sound artist living in Harlem. The author of TwERK and cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness, yoYO, and SO4, her performances have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets and associate professor of English and director of creative writing at IUPUI. His second poetry collection, \blak\ \al-fa-bet\_ (Persea Books), was a winner of the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. He is a native of Louisville, Kentucky.

Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., currently living in New York City. A Cave Canem fellow and a poetry editor for Kinfolks Quarterly, she is pursuing an MFA at the New School. Her work appears in As/Us magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Bird’s Thumb, and TV1’s Verses & Flow.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the Nation, the Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Ellis has recently been a visiting writer at Wesleyan University, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Montana.

Eve Ewing is a Chicago-born writer, teacher, scholar, and artist. Her poems and essays have appeared in Bird’s Thumb, joINT, Union Station, Blackberry, In These Times, AREA Chicago, Newcity, and the Chicago Weekly. She is managing editor of Kinfolks: A journal of black expression and cochair of the Harvard Educational Review.

Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn and raised in West Texas. She is the author of Seam (SIU 2014). Her poems appear in jubilat, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2013, and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor of poetry at the University of Michigan.

Adam Falkner is a writer, educator, and scholar. He is the founder and the executive director of the Dialogue Arts Project. He is also a Zankel Fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate and instructor of english education.

Camonghne Felix is an MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2013 recipient of the Cora Craig Award for Young Women. You can find her work in various publications including Union Station, No Dear, and elsewhere.

t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high-school English teacher and reformed “slam” poet. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Velvet Park, Sinister Wisdom, Union Station, Wilde, and T/OUR Magazine.

Krista Franklin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work floats between the literary and the visual with a focus on personal narrative, African diasporic cultures, and the interiority of women of color, folklore, and spiritualism. Willow Books published her chapbook Study of Love & Black Body in 2012.

Aracelis Girmay is the author of Teeth (GLCA New Writers Award) and Kingdom Animalia (Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Girmay is a faculty member of Hampshire College’s School for Interdisciplinary Arts and also teaches poetry for Drew University’s low-residency MFA program.

Idris Goodwin is a breakbeat poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of the Pushcart-nominated essay collection These Are The Breaks (Write Bloody, 2011) and the award-winning, widely produced play How We Got On (Playscripts, 2013) He has performed on HBO, Sesame Street, and the Discovery Channel.

Suheir Hammad is the author of breaking poems and recipient of a 2009 American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Poetry 2009. Her work has been widely anthologized and also adapted for theater. She featured in the Tony-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

Aleshea Harris is a playwright and performer who received an MFA in writing for performance from California Institute of the Arts. Her work has been shown many places including: the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Costume Shop at A.C.T., and L’École de la Comèdie de Saint-Étienne. She currently teaches at CalArts.

Alysia Nicole Harris is a poet, teaching-artist, and former member of the Strivers Row performance poetry collective. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in linguistics at Yale University and her MFA in poetry at New York University. She hails from Alexandria, Virginia, and currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

francine j. harris is a Cave Canem fellow and teaches at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Her first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and the PEN Open Book Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Boston Review, Rattle, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares.

Chinaka Hodge received The 2014 San Francisco Foundation’s Community Leadership Award, has been a Sundance Feature Film Lab Fellow, and was visiting editor for the California Sunday Magazine. She serves on the board of directors for Headlands Center for the Arts and is playwright in residence at SF Playwrights Foundation.

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, and most recently a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and an assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven. Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press published Randall’s latest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy.

Paolo Javier is the former Queens poet laureate (2010–14) and author of four full-length poetry collections, including Court of the Dragon, forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

Britteney Black Rose Kapri is a Chicago teaching artist, writer, performance poet, and playwright. A former ensemble member for Kuumba Lynx, she is an alumna turned teaching artist of Young Chicago Authors. She is a member of the Not Enough Mics. Britteney’s chapbook, Winona and Winthrop, was published in 2014.

Douglas Kearney is a poet/performer/librettist and author of Patter and the National Poetry Series selection The Black Automaton. He has received residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in journals such as Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, the Boston Review, and Callaloo. He teaches at CalArts.

Nile Lansana attends Jones College Preparatory High School in Chicago and is a member of the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble, which was among the city’s top teams and participated in the 2014 Brave New Voices festival, placing among the top sixteen youth poetry teams in the world.

Onam Lansana attends Jones College Preparatory High School in Chicago and is a member of the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. He is the youngest storyteller ever to feature at the National Association of Black Storytellers Conference. Onam has also participated in a variety of programs, including Young Chicago Authors.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, and a children’s book, the editor of eight anthologies, and the coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute and the Red Earth MFA Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma City University. He is also a former faculty member of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School. Lansana served as director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002 to 2011, where he was also associate professor of english/creative writing. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy and Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The Walmart Republic, with Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014), and reluctant minivan (Living Arts Press, May 2014).

Malcolm London is a young Chicago poet, performer, activist, and educator. Called the Gil Scott-Heron of this generation by Cornel West, he appeared on PBS for the first TED Talk television program with John Legend, Bill Gates, and Geoffrey Canada. London is a former Louder Than A Bomb champion.

Mario is a Chicago poet, educator, activist, and radio chat-show host who has been performing in the Chicagoland area and the United States for over twenty years. He currently hosts News from the Service Entrance on WHPK in Chicago and is a contributor to Chicago Public Radio’s WBEZ.

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. His first book, Wild Hundreds, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He received his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Center at the University of Michigan and is a Cave Canem Fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Nate won the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. He is also a rapper.

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (winner of New York/New England Award) and Mixology (a winner of 2008 National Poetry Series). His poetry collection, The Big Smoke, won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and 2014 Pulitzer Prize.

Marty McConnell lives in Chicago, Illinois, and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2014, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Indiana Review. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, was published in 2012 by EM Press.

E’mon McGee is a senior at Austin Career Academy in Chicago and a member of Kuumba Lynx Performance Ensemble. She was a recipient of the 2014 Guthman Internship at Young Chicago Authors. She is a two-time Louder Than a Bomb poetry slam champion and a Brave New Voices participant.

Tony Medina is author of Broke Baroque, An Onion of Wars, and My Old Man Was Always on the Lam. A professor of creative writing at Howard University, Medina has received the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, the Langston Hughes Society Award, and the African Voices Literary Award.

Ciara Miller is a poetry MFA candidate and an African American/African diaspora studies MA candidate at Indiana University. She has published poems and scholarly essays in Callaloo, SLC Review, Alice Walker: Critical Insights, PLUCK, Chorus, Toegood Poetry, Cave Canem Anthology XII, African American Review, Muzzle, and Blackberry.

Michael Mlekoday is a poet and performer whose first book, The Dead Eat Everything, was chosen by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2012 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Mlekoday serves as editor and publisher of Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press and is a National Poetry Slam champion.

jessica Care moore is CEO of Moore Black Press, executive producer of Black WOMEN Rock!, and founder of the Jess Care Moore Foundation. The author of several works, her first recording project, Black Tea—The Legend of Jessi James is being released in 2015 by Talib Kweli’s Javotti Media label.

Tracie Morris is a poet and multimedia performer whose most recent collection, Rhyme Scheme, includes a sound poetry CD. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, has studied classical British acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University.

John Murillo teaches creative writing at New York University and is also an assistant professor of creative writing and African-American literary arts at Hampshire College. His first poetry collection Up Jump the Boogie was a finalist for both the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

Angel Nafis is an Ann Arbor, Michigan, native and a Cave Canem Fellow. She is the author of BlackGirl Mansion and her work has appeared in Union Station, MUZZLE, and Mosaic. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor and the founder of the quarterly Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon reading series.

José Olivarez is a nationally recognized poet, educator, and activist from Calumet City, Illinois, and author of the book Home Court. The son of Mexican immigrants, his work has been published in the Acentos Review, Specter, Luna Luna, and other places.

Angel Pantoja is a young poet who was born in Fresno, California, and raised in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. He has one brother and two sisters. This is his first publication.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize, and There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé. A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Coconut, she lives in Brooklyn.

Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books, a core member of the VONA/Voices faculty and is currently an Instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Paul Martinez Pompa is the author of Pepper Spray and My Kill Adore Him, which was awarded the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. He is also a recent recipient of an Illinois Arts Council award.

Joy Priest was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She has received grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A member of the Affrilachian Poets, her poems appear in pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Solstice, Drunken Boat, and Best New Poets 2014.

Lynne Procope is a Cave Canem fellow and a former National Poetry Slam champion. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies. She is curator of the Gaslight Salon Series, cofounder and managing editor of Union Station and executive director of the louderARTS Project.

John Rodriguez was a poet-writer-scholar. His work has appeared in Phati’tude, One Word, Home Girls Make Some Noise, HOKUM, Days I Moved through Ordinary Sounds, and Bum Rush the Page. He held a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. John transitioned in 2013. Rest In Power.

Patrick Rosal has authored four poetry books, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian. His essays and poems appear in Grantland, the New York Times, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and Best American Poetry. A faculty member of the Rutgers-Camden MFA program, he is founding co-editor of Some Call It Ballin’.

Jacob Saenz is a CantoMundo fellow whose poetry has been published in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Pinwheel, and other journals. He has been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He currently serves as an associate editor for RHINO.

Aaron Samuels is a Cave Canem Fellow and nationally acclaimed performer. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, featured on TV One’s Verses & Flow, and published in Crab Orchard Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere. His debut collection of poetry, Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps, was released in 2013.

Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea, the new black (winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry), and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. The creative writing editor for Feminist Studies, Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014). He is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ludacris was his favorite rapper for years.

Nadia Sulayman is an artist and activist from Chicago. She earned an MA in international studies with a research emphasis on poetry, hip-hop, and visual art as resistance by women in the Palestine liberation movement. She has worked in education and as a community organizer for ten years.

Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born poet and social advocate. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications and he is the author of HIGHER GROUND (Finishing Line Press, 2006). He holds an MFA in creative writing and currently serves as an assistant professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College.

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is poetry editor of African Voices literary magazine. Her first book of poetry, Karma’s Footsteps, was published in 2011. She earned an MFA from Mills College and has taught at Medgar Evers College and York College. She is one half of the recording duo the Quiet Onez.

Kush Thompson is an emerging teaching artist for Young Chicago Authors. In Fall 2014, she joined, as a German consulate, the Berlin-based Wort.Word.Lich collaboration for its first-ever bilingual showcase tour. Her debut chapbook, A Church Beneath the Bulldozer, was recently published with New School Poetics.

Samantha Thornhill performs her work across the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. She holds her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and, for the past decade, she has taught poetry to actors at the Juilliard School. She is the founding curator of Poets in Unexpected Places.

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). His poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, Boston Review, Guernica, Best New Poets 2014, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets.

Marcus Wicker is the author of Maybe the Saddest Thing. He has received the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. Marcus is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana and poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.

Steven Willis was born and raised in Chicago. He attends Manhattanville College on a full scholarship. He began doing poetry at the age of fifteen as a participant in Louder Than a Bomb and prides himself on telling stories.

Jamila Woods is a poet, singer, and teaching artist from Chicago, Illinois. She is the associate artistic director of Young Chicago Authors and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Jamila is also the front-woman of the soul-duo band M&O and has been featured in OkayPlayer, JET, and Ebony.

avery r. young is a writer, performer, and visual artist. He is a Cave Canem alum and his work appears in several publications. As artist in residence at The University of Chicago, young completed a collection of sound designs to be featured in his first full-length album booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid.