Mason Granger's SlamFind App Puts the Slam World at Your Fingertips

Mason Granger is the kind of poet who’s concerned with more than quietly writing his own poetry. As part of Mayhem Poets, a performance poetry trio, he tours the country inspiring audiences by bringing their poetry to places “from prisons to playgrounds, nursery schools to nursing homes, colleges and universities, art festivals and more.

In his local community he takes time to talk with young people about the life of an artist and what it’s like to be a full time performer.

Granger’s latest project, and a real service to all, is SlamFind. As Mason describes it: “SlamFind is the world's first performance poetry network & mobile app, putting the entire North American poetry scene in the palm of your hands. You'll be able to discover featured touring artists, find new poetry venues to attend using our nationwide SlamFind database, watch the best select performance videos from all over the world, and even submit your own spoken word videos to share with the SlamFind community directly thru the app.”  He talks about SlamFind in this Poetry Spoken Here podcast.

Andy Karol is a Different Kind of Slam Poet

Andy Karol met with quick success when she began performing her poetry in public just a few years ago.  Part of that success included representing Chicago in the 2015 National Poetry Slam in Oakland, California with the Lethal Poetry slam team. But Andy doesn’t sound like most slam poets. She’s a lot less in-your-face than the typical slammer and her poetry portrays a kind of sensitive inward –looking vulnerability that is also not the slam norm.

Her first chapbook Fail-Safe was published in 2014, the year she was a semi-finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. She’s an active performer around Chicago and beyond including places like SPACE in Evanston and the Joffrey Tower as part of the Dance Chance Redux: 6.0 show.

When Andy’s not writing or performing, she’s photographing portraits, being schooled by her 7-year-old son, Noah, or chasing her chihuahua, Humphrey.

Her interest in themes of parenting, mental health, sexuality and gender result in poems that get to the heart of important life issues anyone can relate to. She recently signed on to tour with Cometry, a poetry/comedy/education ensemble. The schedule is on her FB page. To hear her read, check out her appearance on our podcast, click here

Maria Mazziotti Gillan on Poetry Spoken Here

With twenty books published, Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of our more extensively published featured poets. Her most recent are the poetry and art collection, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Redux Consortium). Ancestors' Song (Bordighera Press), Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica) and the bi-lingual poetry collection, In a Place of Flowers & Light (poems in English & Italian with a preface by Elisabetta Marino, edited by Osvaldo Marrocco (San Mauro and Mia Mama).

She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam), Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).

Maria also does important work for the larger poetry community as the Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Each year a number of prestigious poetry contests are sponsored by the Poetry Center. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

Gillan has received many awards for her poetry and her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.” She has been interviewed and read her poems on National Public Radio’s (NPR) “All Things Considered,” “The Brian Lehrer Show,” and “The Poet and the Poem.”

Her winning style at the podium and her highly personal poems make her popular with audiences of all types as a reader and workshop leader. To hear her talk about the importance of growing up Italian-American on her identity and her work, listen here for our special home and family podcast.

Poet Laureate’s Project in Poetry Spoken Here Holiday Podcast

Juan Felipe Herrara recently announced his major Poet Laureate project, La Casa De Colores (The House of Colors), a public poetry project aimed at creating “an epic poem of all our voices and styles and experiences” made up of monthly submissions by citizen-poets. The project is intended to extend through the entirety of his Laureateship with a new theme for submissions announced each month. The first month’s theme is La Familia, and so we include some of the submissions in our special holiday podcast about Home and Family. Poet Laureates are appointed for a one-year term, but they typically accept the option of continuing for a second year.

Participation in La Casa De Colores is through a submission form on the Poet Laureate’s section of the Library of Congress website. To submit you must affirm you are at least 13 years old and agree that your writing may appear without attribution to you. You also agree to let your writing go immediately into the public domain. This doesn’t mean you can’t publish it yourself later, but it does mean that others can use it as well, a policy that makes it possible for us to include submissions in our podcast.

All of the first month submissions have been posted under the title “Family Words and Story Poems.”

Anja Notanja Sieger: Performance Typist, Poet, and More

You have to stay alert to keep up with Anja Notanja Sieger of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She’s an active writer, visual artist and performer who consistently gets gigs in all of her areas of expertise.

Among her recent activities are a literary installation, "Hats and Their Uses," for the Bayview Historical Society, a reading at the Pfister Hotel for Gallery Night in downtown Milwaukee, as well as numerous art exhibits in and around southern Wisconsin.  She also hosts Anja Notanja Asks, a weekly series of arts and culture interviews with inspiring creators, Thursdays at 4, Central, on Riverwest Radio. Each program includes art assignments for listeners to try.

She recently gave a TED Talk at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee with the theme of “Act Differently.”

Anja is also often booked for live typing performances. At the Racine Wisconsin Art Museum in her Live Radiowave Messages from Space performance she created poems in response to people’s questions directed to outer space. As she described it: “The whole universe would not only receive the question, it would then send back an answer and my hair antennae would pick up the radiowave signal.”

To listen to Anja read from her work and discuss her many projects, click here.

Poet-Painter Emily Calvo

Emily Calvo. Poet, painter, and creative writer.

A visit to Emily Calvo’s website will quickly tell you she’s a successful multi-genre artist. She works as a creative director who can develop distinctive marketing campaigns, a writer/author who can put together a press release that gets the column inches, a visual artist whose watercolors have been exhibited throughout the Chicagoland area.  As a poet she’s a dynamic performer who has featured at the Uptown Poetry Slam at Chicago’s Green Mill, the original home of the slam. She also spent three years as a poet-in-residence in the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanza program.

Of course, Emily is featured on Poetry Spoken Here because of her poetry. In our podcast she talks about her creative process and the role of poetry in her daily life..  She also reads from her new book Lending Color to the Otherwise Absurd as well as poems that chronicle her recent successful bout with cancer.  To learn more about Emily, read her introspective, prose account of her diagnoses, treatments, and personal reactions on her blog

To listen to Emily's appearance on Poetry Spoken Here, click here.

Giving Sorrow Words: Poetry Therapists Respond to Tragedy

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Association for Poetry was inundated with poems written by people who felt the need to express and share their feelings of shock, grief and loss.  So great was the outpouring that the association decided to publish an anthology, consistent with the organization’s goal of offering poetic resources for comfort, healing and growth to all who need them.

The resulting collection, Giving Sorrow Words, included unsolicited poems sent to the organization as well as others written or translated by invited poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Billy Collins, Ellen Bass, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov, and others

The books were then distributed to New York state victim’s assistance counselors and other helping professionals around Manhattan. They were used at the Boston Trauma Center with families of victims on flights from Boston on 9/11. Giving Sorrow Words was also distributed for use in grief and loss support groups in cities around the country, and the Red Cross distributed copies through its organ and tissue donor program.  In Coral Springs, FL, members of the police and fire departments read the discussed the book and in Chicago a theatrical production was developed based on poems from the book.  Copies were also distributed to families of the seven astronauts who died aboard the Columbia space shuttle.  First published in 2002, the collection has gone through four printings.

For more information about poetry's therapeutic applications, click here to give a listen to our special episode about poetry therapy.