Words and Shit

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Meccamorphosis to the Words and Sh*t stage! Streaming Live, tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Mecca Verdell is a Baltimore-based poet and performer of Dewmore Baltimore. When she started her poetry career in 2016, Mecca won Brave New Voices, an international youth poetry slam. She’s also been a radio show host for two Baltimore-based radio stations, interviewing nationally and locally known poets and writers. She has been dedicated to providing youth with safe spaces to express their creative voices with free open mics, showcases, and competitions. Mecca is the former Youth Poet Ambassador of Baltimore (2017), opening performer for Aloe Blacc at the National Education Association conference in 2017, Southern Fried Poetry Slam winner of 2017 and 2018, Top 10 finalist of the Woman of the world poetry slam 2018, and top 3 finalists for Texas Grand Slam. Outside of competition, she has taught the importance of using poetry as a tool for social justice and healing for middle schools, high schools, and colleges.

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Buddy Wakefield to the Words and Sh*t stage! Get to know the person behind the poetry!

Buddy Wakefield is an actor, writer, producer, and three-time world champion spoken word artist featured on the BBC, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, ABC Radio National and has been signed to both Sage Francis’ Strange Famous Records as well as Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. In 2004 he won the first Individual World Poetry Slam Finals thanks to the support of anthropologist and producer Norman Lear, then went on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world in over 2000 venues internationally from The Great Lawn of Central Park, Zimbabwe’s Shoko Festival and Scotland’s Oran Mor to San Quentin State Penitentiary, House of Blues New Orleans and The Basement in Sydney, Australia.

He is the founder of Awful Good Writers, and the producer and host of Heavy Hitters Festival 2020, a summer-long series of online shows and workshops featuring thirty of the most beloved performance poets alive. The inaugural author released on Write Bloody Publishing, and an original Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle, Buddy is published in dozens of books internationally with work used to win multiple national collegiate debate and forensics competitions. His first short film, Farmly, directed by Jamie DeWolf, won Best of Texas at the Literally Short Film Fest, and the USA Film Festival.

Wakefield, who is not concerned with what poetry is or is not, delivers raw, rounded, disarming performances of humor and heart. He is now based in Los Angeles, CA, where he lives as a free agent pursuing acting and screenwriting for both television and film.

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Kevin Kantor to the Words and Sh*t stage! Streaming Live, tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Kevin Kantor (they/them) is a trans-non-binary poet and theatre-maker working to deconstruct and reimagine the semiotics of gender on stage and in performance.

Kevin has toured nationally with their poetry, performing & leading workshops at colleges & universities across the country. Kevin’s writing, which aims to explore survivorship & trauma, challenge rape culture, interrogate gender’s role in storytelling, and raise queer voices, has been featured in Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, & in the anthology We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out (Holt Paperback). Their collective work has garnered over 18 million online views. Their debut full-length collection ‘Please Come Off-Book’ is now available with Button Poetry.

We’re doing something a little different tonight: with the season almost done, we want to take a moment to check in with each other and with you! Tune in tonight to ask your own questions to our hosts! Get to know Chibbi and Raqui a little better, hear some of their work, and talk about life.

Akeem Olaj can be called a modern day Renaissance man. He was one of the founding members of the New Orleans Youth Slam and Slam New Orleans (Team S.N.O.), winners of the 2010 National Group Piece Competition, the & the 2012 and 2013 winners of the National Poetry Slam Competition. Other Titles that he won with Team S.N.O. include the 2016 Southern-fried Team poetry champion, the 2016 And the 2017 Southwest regional poetry slam, the 2017 Red Stick Regional Poetry champion, and he was one of the winners in a three-way tie at the 2019 Individual World Poetry Slam Competition.

Join hosts Chibbi and Rooster as we welcome Claude Cardona (she/ they) to the Words and Sh*t stage! Tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Claude Delfina Cardona is a poet born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She received her BA from St. Mary's University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. In 2013, she co-founded Chifladazine alongside Laura Valdez, a zine that highlights creative work by Latinas and Latinxs. In 2019, she co-founded Infrarrealista Review, a literary journal for all types of Texan writers, with Linda Rivas Vázquez. Cardona loves music and films as much as she loves poetry. She is an aspiring DJ and cultural critic.

Winner of the Fall 2020 Host Publication Chap Book Prize, Claudia's book, WHAT REMAINS, is a collection of poems propelled by impulse, desire, and an ancestral sense of longing. These poems are experiential; they exist within the dark and splendid catacombs of the body, in dusty moonlit Texas nights, and invite us into their own glittery mythos of what it means to be a young woman falling in and out of love in San Antonio.

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Asia Samson to the Words and Sh*t stage! Streaming Live, tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Asia Samson is a professional spoken word artist from Florida and has toured over 1000 colleges across the country since 2006. He’s been seen on HBO Def Poetry Jam, Ted Talks, Button Poetry, NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest and So Far Sounds. He has worked with companies like Disney, To Write Love On Her Arms & most recently, Nokia Mobile.

Join hosts Chibbi and Rooster as we welcome Josh Nguyen to the Words and Sh*t stage! Streaming Live, tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Joshua Nguyen is a bisexual Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He is the author of the chapbook, "American Lục Bát for My Mother" (forthcoming, March 2021, Bull City Press) and has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, Wildness, American Poetry Review, The Texas Review, PANK, Auburn Avenue, Crab Orchard Review, and Gulf Coast Mag. He has also been featured on both the "VS" podcast and Tracy K. Smith's, "The Slowdown". He is a bubble tea connoisseur and works in a kitchen. His debut poetry collection, "Come Clean" (forthcoming, fall 2021, University of Wisconsin Press), was the winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.

Joshua Nguyen began writing with the Meta-Four Houston Youth Slam Team from 2008-2012 and competed in Brave New Voices. He is an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin and was part of the UT Spitshine slam team from 2014-2016. He placed #1 in the nation in 2014, won ‘Best Writing as a Team’ in 2015, and was the 2015 CUPSI Haiku Champ. In 2016, he traveled to Washington D.C. as a member of Future Corp to organize the 2016 Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival. He was a featured poet in a commercial for the National Education Association's 'Do You Hear Us?' campaign.

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Natalia Trevino to the Words and Sh*t stage! Streaming Live on The Blah Poetry Spot's page, tune in to get to know the person behind the poetry!

Born in Mexico City, Natalia grew up in Texas where her mother taught her Spanish, and Bert and Ernie gave her lessons in English. Her work captures the voices and lives of women who emerge despite everything that works tirelessly against them.

Natalia has won several awards for her poetry and fiction including the 2004 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio.

She graduated with a BA in English when she was 21 from The University of Texas at San Antonio. Two years later, she received her Masters of Arts in English from the same university. After almost two decades of teaching, she went back to school to study fiction writing. She graduated from the University of Nebraska’s MFA program in Creative Writing in 2010. Her jobs have included teacher, stay-at-home mom, a single mom, small business owner/book-keeper, and now, assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College where she works with students of all levels.

Natalia's poems appear in several publications including Bordersenses, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, The Houston Literary Review, Sugar House Review, Sliver of Stone, burntdistric, Voices de la Luna, and North Texas State’s, Inheritance of Light.

A member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Natalia has been working to increase young adult literacy since 1992 in her teaching career and through programs sponsored by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Gemini Ink, and the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center.

Join hosts Chibbi and Raqui as we welcome Jay Ward to the Words and Sh*t stage! Get to know the person behind the poetry!

Jay Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018) and an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019). Jay currently serves as a Program Director for BreatheInk, where he facilitates writing and performance workshops and coaches youth poets attending Brave New Voices each year. He has attended Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Crabfat Magazine, Lackadaisy Lit Mag, and on Button Poetry.