This is a free Zoom event, no ticket needed! But your 2024 San José Poetry Festival Pass gets you into all of our ticketed night performances!
This is Day Three of our four-day festival! Check out the complete list of events that are part of the 10th Annual San José Poetry Festival! Our festival pass will get you into all live events and online events.
Click here to register on Zoom.
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Beautiful Black Books: Across the Ponds is a showcase of black poets and authors from the U.K. and the U.S. Hosted by Tshaka Campbell, 2022-23 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate.
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A lifelong poet, Donny Jackson also holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, and is an Emmy and NAACP Image Award-winning documentary television producer. As a spoken word artist, Donny has featured throughout North America, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, Northern and Southern California, and, internationally, Toronto, Canada. In print media, his poetry has been featured in multiple anthologies, including: The Border Crossed Us (An Anthology to End Apartheid), Skin to Skin: A Publication for Women of the LBGTQ Community, Incandescent Mind, La Bloga’s Best Poems of 2015 and -2017, Redshift 5, and In Isolation, where he was a prize winner for his pandemic poem, “history.” Donny’s one-man, multi-character spoken word play, One Man Shown, debuted at the Greenway Court Theatre in 2013. His spoken word play, salome: ten poems about one thing, premiered to a sold-out house at the L.A. Get Down Festival in 2019. Donny’s debut volume of poetry is boy (Silver Star Laboratory, 2020), the album of which is currently streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, and Amazon Music. On additional recordings, he is a featured poet on Tshaka Campbell’s spoken word album, Skin, and with Ursula Rucker on Jaidene Veda’s acclaimed deep house album, Wanderlust.
Black Atticus, a luminary of the burgeoning Southern hip-hop movement, emerges as a captivating force, celebrated for his unparalleled wordplay and lyrical prowess. As a prolific songwriter and dedicated hip-hop practitioner, he employs his verses not only to entertain but to elevate awareness, provoke critical thinking, and facilitate the healing journey between the mind and spirit, the head and heart. Currently reigning as the Poet Laureate of The City of Knoxville, TN, Atticus is also the visionary founder of “Poboys & Poets,” a platform that unites poetry and hip hop to create profound, socially conscious art. Moreover, he stands as a co-founding member of the influential Good Guy Collective, a dynamic group dedicated to artistic excellence and community engagement. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/black.atticus/
Jemilea Wisdom-Baako Jemilea Wisdom-Baako is a British-Jamaican poet, writer, facilitator, and creative director. She founded Writerz and Scribez CIC in 2013 an arts company that disrupts the meaning of art, where it belongs and who it belongs to. A London Writers Award recipient, she was shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women's Poetry Prize and The Bridport Poetry Prize. Alumni of The Watering Hole in South Carolina and Callaloo, she has continued to hone her craft, most recently as the holder of the MA Poetry Scholarship from The Poetry School. Her work has been commissioned by Google UK and appears in Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize for her debut "Grey Coats and Nokia Phones," which is an ode to teenage hood, detailing friendship break ups, first crushes, pirate radio stations and msn. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jemileawb/
Tolu Agbelusi is a storyteller and an artist working across poetry, theatre, film and photography. Author of Locating Strongwoman, published in 2020, she hosts the Unlearning Strongwoman Podcast. Films directed by Tolu have been selected and screened at Toronto Food Film Festival (2022) Museum of Food and Drink, New York, and Forecast International Festival Berlin (2021). Alongside lecturing at London Southbank University, Tolu supports the development of emerging writers through mentoring, editing and has designed and facilitated several creative writing courses. her work is concerned with the unperformed self and deconstructing received narratives, particularly on womanhood, race and social justice".
Instagram & twitter - @toluagbelusi
Tshaka Campbell is a husband and father as well as accomplished artist and performer. His appears in print and national commercials and he conducts lectures and facilitates workshops in creative writing and poetry. He was voted one of the 25 people to know in San Francisco, holds two Grand Slam titles and was a finalist for the 2020 Santa Clara Poet Laureate honor. Tshaka is an author of “STUFF - I will write more ”, “MUTED WHISPERS” and “TUNNEL VISION as well as collaborated on a number of musical projects in the House, Jazz and Blues genres. His literary work has appeared in journals and reviews such as 2 Bridges Review, Tribe Magazine and others. He currently resides in San Jose and continues to ask the world to ”Listen Different.” https://tshakacampbellpoet.com/
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Want more poetry? Check out the rest of the San José Poetry Festival lineup.
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