Spoken Word Poetry and Resistance: 1990's-Present

In the 1990's the Spoken Word movement exploded onto the public scene in multiple forms. The decade marked the birth of the Poetry Slam movement, the 'Golden Age' of rap, and the re-emergence of Poetry as Performance. In the contemporary moment Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize-winning album, 'DAMN', Mahogany Browne's anthemic poem 'Black Girl Magic', and the rise of online Spoken Word platforms like 'Button Poetry' are all evidence of a similar present-day uprising in the centuries-old Spoken Word tradition. This course will combine workshop and seminar approaches to provide students with space to read and examine the Black Spoken Word tradition from the 1990s to the present, and to write and perform their own work.