Featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, crowned "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" by the New York Daily News, Bob Holman has performed his poems with a punk band in Kiev, a griot in Timbuktu, a ballet company in San Francisco. As the original Slam Master of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world's first spoken word record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word and slam poetry movements of the last several decades.

He is the author of 17 poetry collections, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, a collaboration with Chuck Close), and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. A co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman's study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages.

He is the producer/host of films including "The United States of Poetry" and "Language Matters with Bob Holman," both nationally broadcast on PBS.