PUP collaborates with a variety of artists, poets, musicians and actors to create dynamic poetic installations. Here are a few members of our squad!
GUEST CURATORS
JAYSON SMITH is a writer & choreographer hailing from the Bronx, NY. His work is published/forthcoming in various journals & anthologies, including Kinfolks Quarterly, MUZZLE Magazine, and FreezeRay Press. Jayson is on staff for Union Station Magazine. Find him on Twitter to talk Beyoncé & poems & other, less important things.
AZIZA BARNES is 22, blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Bedstuy, New York. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published July 2013 from Button Poetry. You can find her work in PANK, PLUCK!, Callaloo and other journals. She is a poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.A member of the divine fabrics collective, Aziza also performs poetry in high schools and universities around the country. She loves a good suit and anything to do with Motown.
THE TROUPE
DARIAN DAUCHAN is an award winning solo performer, actor, and poet who has appeared on both Broadway (Twentieth Century) and Off-Broadway Theatre (Jean Cocteau Rep., Classical Theatre of Harlem). TV credits include “Law and Order” and Nickelodeon’s “Bet the House”. He is the 2012 winner of The Jerome Foundation’s Stakeholder’s Choice Award and one of his most recent shows Death Boogie, A Hip Hop Poetry Musical, was the 2012 winner of two Edinburgh Fringe Festival Musical Theatre Matters Awards for BEST New Music and BEST Innovation of a Musical. His band The Mighty Third Rail are 2014 American Music Abroad Finalists for the U.S. State Department and in February performed at SPKRBOX, the first Hip Hop Theatre Festival in Norway. www.dariandauchan.com
RICO FREDERICK is a fun-loving Trinidadian transplant, a full-time Art Director for a major design agency in New York City, the Author of “Broken Calypsonian” a collection of poetry published by Penmanship books, a Graphic Novelist, & The founder of DizzyEngine Inc. (A one-man design shop). Rico loves gummy bears & pistachio ice cream, scribbles poems on the backs of maps in hopes they will take him someplace new. He calls Harlem home.
BOB HOLMAN, founder and artistic director of the Bowery Poetry Club, is a poet most often connected with the oral tradition, live voicings of poetry, and poetry in digital media: spoken word, performance, hiphop, slam, poetry films, endangered languages. Dubbed “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” (NY Daily News), “Poetry Czar” (Village Voice), and “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen Magazine. He has published sixteen books of poetry if you include CDs and DVDs, which he does, most recently: Sing This One Back to Me (Coffee House), which includes his first poem written in Welsh and translations of Griot songs of West Africa as sung by Papa Susso. Holman founded and ran the first major spoken word label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury; he produced the award-winning Public Broadcasting System series, The United States of Poetry; he’s run the show at the St arks Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; he teaches poetry at Columbia and NYU. For the past decade, he has devoted much of his time to endangered languages, including the two-hour PBS special Language Matters with Bob Holman, produced by David Grubin, which will air nationally in January, 2015. He has two daughters and a son and lives on the Bowery where he is a beekeeper, with three hives on the roof of the Bowery Poetry Club.
MARA JEBSEN is a performer, poet and Senior Language Lecturer for New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Public Policy. A New York Foundation of the Arts fellow and monthly contributor for the Literature column of 3quarksdaily, Mara is known for her unusual scholarship on culture, performance, and the pleasures of the English language. She has been working at the intersection of poetry and drama for 16 years, and hails from Philadelphia, and Togo, West Africa.
ABENA KOOMSON is a Harlem based performer, educator and writer. She is bandleader and composer for Abena Koomson’s Blacksmith Orchestra (AKBO) and a featured vocalist for funk rock band Van Davis and Afro-beat sensation Zongo Junction. After an eleven year teaching career, Abena originated the role of Fela Kuti’s mother to rave reviews in the Off-Broadway production of FELA! the musical directed by Bill T. Jones. Abena went on to become a member of the Original Broadway cast, where she also served as vocal captain. As part on One Big City, an innovative international program, she collaborated with Croatian visual artist Kristina Leko to create CEZNJA: BORN LONGING tales and songs from Croatia, a multimedia oral history project featuring Croatian natives and New York City artists. Recently, she appeared in Red Hot + Fela at Lincoln Center with Kronos Quartet, and is featured on the album of the same name. Abena holds a Masters in Education Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. She currently serves as Dean of Students at Harlem Village Academies High School.
NGOMA is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter and paradigm shifter, who lives in New York City and for over 40 years has used culture as a tool to raise sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought. A former member of the SPIRIT HOUSE MOVERS AND PLAYERS with Amiri Baraka and the Contemporary Freedom Song Duo, SERIOUS BIZNESS, Ngoma weaves poetry and song that raises contradictions and searches for a solution for a just and peaceful world. Ngoma was the Prop Slam winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT and was published in AFRICAN VOICES MAGAZINE, LONG SHOT ANTHOLOGY, THE UNDERWOOD REVIEW, SIGNIFYIN’ HARLEM REVIEW,BUM RUSH THE PAGE/DEF POETRY JAM ANTHOLOGY and POEMS ON THE ROAD TO PEACE (Volumes 1,2 & 3)-Yale Press. He was most recently published in the 35th Anniversary Issue of Blind Beggar Press and The Understanding Between Foxes and Light. He was also featured in the PBS Spoken Word Documentary, “The Apro-Poets” with Allen Ginsberg. His latest CD release is “Lessons from the Book of Osayemi”.
LAUREN ASH WILLIAMS is a Brooklyn-based poet and lover of people. She is a member of the 2013 louderARTS National Poetry Slam team and co-founder of The Heroes (a Seattle-based arts production company). Lauren has performed in poetry-dance collaborations at The Alvin Ailey School, the Moore Theatre and The Men in Dance festival in Seattle. She has had the privilege of leading writing and performance workshops for both youth and adults in Seattle, New York and Washington, DC. In the daylight hours, Lauren does strategic communications work with start-ups and non-profits.
THULI ZUMA was born in England, raised in South Africa and fell in love for the 2nd time in New York City. As a poet, actor, part time awesomeist (one who makes things awesome) and full time human being she has shared her work on screens, in theatres, schools, and subway cars both nationally and internationally her poetry has also allowed her the opportunity to compete in Slams around the globe, from Johannesburg the glittering city of gold, to Paris the glowing city of lights.