When Peter Kahn became an English teacher at the Chicago-area Oak Park and River Forest High School, he was terrified of teaching poetry. "Poetry was my least favorite subject as a student, and my ...

INTO THE MYSTIC Rumi’s Caravan evolved from a spoken-word group assembled some 30 years ago in Sebastopol. (Photo courtesy of Rumi’s Caravan) Born in Persia in 1207 C.E., Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi ...

GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. --A Golden Valley teenager is a national champion - because of the powerful way she chooses her words. Armstrong High School senior Stella Wright put together a poem about ...

In the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination in the winter of 1965, Black and brown poets like Amiri Baraka, Miguel Algarin, and Sonia Sanchez consciously rejected effete paper poems for those that sought ...

"We had a similar start,” Dillon Brown said, amused to compare his own initiation as a poet with that of Langston Hughes, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance and a frequent visitor to Long ...

I hate sharing my poetry with people. I don’t mean that I get all sheepish and a little red in the face, but bashfully and begrudgingly do it anyway. No, I mean that I abhor it. It’s counterintuitive, ...

What do the poems “Cartoon Physics part 1” by Nick Flynn, “England in 1819” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and “Sweet Tooth” by Russell Edson all have in common? Well, actually not very much. But that’s why ...

Maya White, a Pittsburgh native and a spoken word artist, won the grand prize of more than $1,000 at Queen Sheba’s Poetry vs. Hip-Hop event at City Winery in the Strip District. The show, part of a ...

IOWA CITY — For Rudy Francisco, one of the most widely known spoken word artists in modern poetry, it started with a feeling. When he first saw a spoke word poem performed, he knew exactly what the ...