From Slam to Hiphop, from performance poetry to spoken word, Bob Holman has been a central figure in the reemergence of poetry in our culture. The series he produced for PBS, the United States of Poetry , features over sixty poets including Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, Czeslaw Milosz, Lou Reed and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as rappers, cowboy poets, American Sign Language poets, and Slammers. USOP lives on as an anthology from Harry Abrams Publishers (in its second printing), a home video from KQED, and soundtrack CD from Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman co-founded. He has appeared widely on TV: "Nightline," "Good Morning America," "ABC News Magazine," MTV's "Spoken Word Unplugged," and "The Charlie Rose Show," among others. The NEA has announced major preproduction support for his new poetry media project, the World of Poetry (worldofpoetry.org), the world’s first digital poetry anthology.

Ken Cormier is editor and producer of "The Lumberyard," a radio magazine of poetry, prose, and music broadcast on WHUS 91.7FM at the University of Connecticut. His first book, Balance Act, was published by Insomniac Press in 2000. He has released two CDs of original music, God Damn Doghouse (2000) and Radio-Bueno (2002), with Elis Eil Records.

Bio • Poem

Wanda Coleman is the author of Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. A former medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist and scriptwriter, Coleman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation for her poetry.

Poem • Workshop

Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution and Slam. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam, PBS' "In The Life" and MTV's "Free Your Mind" Spoken Word Tour. Regie is the recipient of three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Discplinary Performance. As a theater artist, his work has been presented at The Humana Theater Festival, CrossRoads Theater, Kennedy Center Play Lab, The Kitchen and Dixon Place, among others. He is an ensemble member of the NY Neo Futurist's production of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind.

Workshop

Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, Jimmy was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison. Once there he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer.

Jimmy is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir A Place to Stand the prestigious International Award. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. Jimmy is currently finishing a novel, a play and three poetry manuscripts to be published in 2007. He is also producing a two-hour documentary about the power of literature and how it can change lives.

Bio

Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall was born in New York City in 1936, but from early childhood the New Mexican desert has been her landscape. In her late teens she left home and lived in Spain for two years. In 1961 she went to Latin America, where she would live for the next quarter century—in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In Mexico City during the turbulent and creatively exciting 1960s, she founded and coedited the ground-breaking bilingual poetry journal El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn. Her involvement with the 1968 Mexican Student Movement caused her to suffer political repression, which forced her move to Cuba the following year.

In Cuba and Nicaragua Randall was involved in the movements for social change that characterized those countries throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In 1984, when she returned to the United States, the U.S. governmentordered her deported, invoking the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act and citing opinions contrary to U.S. government policy expressed in some of her books. Supported by writers and artists throughout the country and the world, she won her immigration case in 1989.

Randall is a poet, oral historian, essayist, photographer, teacher, and social activist. Among her more than 100 books are Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, This Is About Incest, Hunger’s Table: Women, Food, & Politics, The Price You Pay: The Hidden Cost of Women’s Relationship to Money, Where They Left You for Dead / Halfway Home, When I Look Into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror & Resistance, Narrative of Power: Essays for an Endangered Century, and Into Another Time: Grand Canyon Reflections. “The Unapologetic Life of Margaret Randall” is a documentary on the writer’s life by Minneapolis filmmakers Lu Lippold and Pam Colby.

In 2004 Randall was awarded PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of a lifelong commitment to advocacy of social justice at great personal cost, and also to Freedom-to-Write issues in the United States and abroad.” She has four children and ten grandchildren, lives with her partner, Barbara Byers, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and travels widely to read and lecture.

Poem

Lecture:
Andrei Codrescu
Friday, November 16
7 pm
Moving Image Lab
Followed by ‘Road Scholar’
$10 member
$15 nonmember
$6 student (with ID)

We end the very successful 2007 series with two great poets from opposite sides of America. From San Diego (recently transplanted from NYC) comes ‘Bring in da Funk, Bring in da Noise' writer and poet, reg e gaines, who joins one of Santa Fe's favorite poets (recently transplanted to NYC), Gary Mex Glazner, who will be joined by Adobe Gillis featuring Max Friedenberg on samples, loops and electronics, Carlos Santistevan on bass, and Milton Villarrubia on percussion. 

reg e gaines is a poet, playwright, musician and director of the poetry/theatre hybrids, ‘Straight/Out' by Regie Cabico, Marcella Goheen's, ‘BLAK', Jerry Quickley's ‘Live From The Front' and his own ‘Other Aspects', winner of the 2003 NYC Downtown Urban Theatre Festival's Best Play Award. He is a two time Tony nominee, a Grammy nominee and is currently working on the dance driven Hip-Hop musical, ‘Free'. reg has been Grand Slam Champ and has appeared on MTV's ‘Spoken Word Unplugged' with poems you'll find in his books 24-7-365 and Headrhyme Lines. Please Don't Take My Air Jordans, his CD release on Mercury Records, was the first rap-poetry crossover release for the label.

Gary Mex Glazner is the founder and director of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project. The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a “best practice” for their Arts and Aging initiative.  NBC's “Today” show, NPR's “All Things Considered” and Voice of America have featured segments on Gary's work. He is the Managing Director of Bowery Arts and Science, the nonprofit wing of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. He is the author of Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets published on La Alameda Press. The book chronicles a year abroad in Asia and Europe meeting poets, working on translations and writing poems. Soft Skull Press is issuing a three book series by Glazner featuring essays and interviews on creative poetry programming. The first book in the series How to Make a Living as a Poet was published in the spring of 2005, the second book How to Make a Life as a Poet was released in the spring of 2007. The third book in the How2Poet series is forthcoming. 

Click here for information about reg and Gary's Workshops