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Artists In Residence
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Monday, June 5, 2006
Closing Performance
Americans for the Arts continues our tradition of welcoming artists to attend and reflect on the convention proceedings. This year’s artists-in-residence are poets from across the country who use their young, vibrant voices to promote positive social dialogue. They will engage you—throughout the sessions and in a closing performance—with the people and perspectives gathered in Milwaukee.
Paul S. Flores is a published poet, novelist, and one of the nation’s prominent spoken word performers. Raised on the Tijuana/San Diego border, issues of immigration, border experience, and Latino identity are central to his work. For the last 10 years, Mr. Flores has resided in the Bay Area, where he is the program director of Youth Speaks, the largest youth poetry program in the country. A versatile artist and a key collaborator in many groundbreaking theater projects, he is also the co-founder of the Latino poetry performance ensemble Los Delicados, the former program director of La Peña Cultural Center, and will debut at the Hip-Hop Theater Festival Bay Area 2007. He is the creator and artistic director of Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word and the author of the novel Along the Border Lies, which was awarded the 2003 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Mr. Flores was featured at the 2002 National Hip-Hop Festival in Havana, Cuba, and on Season 4 of Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry on HBO.
Laura “Piece” Kelley has been participating in Seattle’s slam scene from its beginnings. She has earned her way to the National Poetry Slam competition two years in a row, and was crowned the Seattle Grand Slam Champion 2004–2005. She is currently a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and was cast in Underground Poets Railroad, a national tour and cinema verite style documentary. Ms. Piece has shared the stage with some of the forefathers and mothers of spoken word and at the age of 14 started freestyling at the Broadway Performance Hall with world renowned D.J. Vitamin D. She is the founder of Jumbalaya, a Seattle-based improvisational music ensemble that has earned her a permanent place in the archives of The Experience Music Project. In 2004, she independently released her first full-length self-titled album. Ms. Piece is also an arts educator for several local and national nonprofit organizations and has developed progressive curriculum around the culture of Hip Hop and Spoken Word.
A leader in his Milwaukee community, spoken word artist Kwabena Antoine Nixon’s powerful words have mobilized youth to voting booths, inspired detainees in juvenile lock up, and rocked crowds at sold out concert halls. His current effort, the Campaign Against Violence, seeks to curb inner city violence. He has shared the stage with many of hip-hop’s biggest names, including Puff Daddy, Talib Kweli, and Common, and has performed for the Congressional Black Caucus at the request of Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Today he is one of the emerging leaders of the nation’s growing spoken word movement, but not long ago this veteran wordsmith wasn’t sure he was going to survive the Chicago neighborhood where he was born and raised and lost his father to street violence at the age of 11. “You can’t let the hood define who you are. You have to have vision,” said Mr. Nixon recently to an audience of incarcerated youth at the Milwaukee Juvenile Detention Center. After finishing a poem for the teenaged boys, he picked up a pen and triumphantly said, “I survived because I had an outlet. What’s your outlet going to be? Mine is poetry.”
Ishle Yi Park is the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. Her first book, entitled The Temperature of This Water, was the winner of the 2005 PEN America Beyond Margins Award and the 2005 Members’ Choice Award of the Asian American Literary Awards. Her work has been published in more than 30 anthologies, including The Best American Poetry of 2003. Ms. Park has performed at more than 300 venues in the United States, Cuba, New Zealand, Singapore, and Korea. She is a regular on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, was featured on the NAACP Image Awards, and was a touring cast member of the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry Jam. As arts-in-education director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Ms. Park worked to bring Asian American artists into New York City public high schools. She also worked as a writer in residence at the Youth Speaks Literary Arts Center in California. The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star.” Ms. Park currently lives in New York.