1971-Present

Marc Kelly Smith, an American poet born in 1949 in Chicago, is considered the founder of the slam poetry movement. A graduate of James H. Bowen High School, Smith spent his early years as a construction worker…

New Narrative is a literary and aesthetic movement that originated in San Francisco in the late 1970s with writers and novelists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone that moved toward a hybrid aesthetic.

A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points.

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics.

Defined variously as a reaction to modernism or merely the movement that followed it, postmodernism tends to refer to an intellectual, artistic, or cultural outlook or practice that is suspicious of hierarchy and objective knowledge and embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, and diversity.

Giannina Braschi wrote United States of Banana (Amazon Crossing, 2011), Yo-Yo Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998), and Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994).

Bruce Boone was born in Portland, Oregon in 1940, and he earned a BA at Saint Mary's College. He is the author of many books, including Bruce Boone Dismembered: Poems, Stories, and Essays, Century of Clouds…

One of the preeminent poets of her generation, Susan Howe is known for innovative verse that crosses genres and disciplines in its theoretical underpinnings and approach to history. Layered and allusive, her…

An essayist, poet, and novelist whose genre-bending work addresses feminism, sexuality, and queerness, Dodie Bellamy is a fundamental and active member of San Francisco’s literary avant garde. After attending…

Sam sax is the author of the poetry collections PIG (Scribner, 2023); bury it (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the James Laughlin Award; madness (Penguin, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series…

Poet, translator, and essayist Rob Halpern earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of the poetry collections Rumored Place (2004), which was nominated for the California…

Novelist, essayist, and performance artist Kathy Acker was born and raised in New York City. She was educated at Brandeis University and the University of California at San Diego, where she earned her BA. …

Poet, novelist, playwright, art critic, and scholar Kevin Killian earned a BA at Fordham University and an MA at SUNY-Stony Brook. Exploring themes of risk, iconography, invisibility, and vulnerability, Killian…

Emanuel Xavier is the author of Love(ly) Child (Rebel Satori Press, 2023), Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier (QueerMojo, 2021), Radiance (Rebel Satori, 2016), Nefarious (QueerMojo, 2013), If Jesus Were Gay …

Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix (2021, Haymarket Books), The Crazy Bunch (2019, Penguin), The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (2014, Penguin), and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (1996…

Poet, writer, educator, and activist Nancy Mercado is the author of It Concerns the Madness (2000) and editor of the children’s anthology if the world were mine (2003). She earned a BA from Rutgers University…

Dominican Boricua Nuyorican poet and artist Sandra Maria Esteves was born and raised in the Bronx. A founding member of the Nuyorican poetry movement, she writes poems engaged with themes of social justice…

Nuyorican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and raised in Manhattan. A few years after graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Army and served in the Vietnam War…

Miguel Piñero was a playwright, actor, and cofounder of the Nuyorican Poets Café with Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, and others. Born in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, he and his family moved to the Lower East Side of…

Poet and writer Miguel Algarín was born in Puerto Rico and raised in a culturally-minded household before moving to Manhattan in the early 1950s. He earned degrees in literature from the University of Wisconsin…