World-Class, Prize-Winning Performance Poets at the White Plains Public Library

As part of its annual poetry series, The Power of Poetry, the White Plains Public Library will feature three award-winning performance poets on the fourth Monday of the month at 7:00 pm, from February through April. Following each performance, the audience is invited to interact with our guest poets and participate in a poetry Open Mic.

On February 23rd, Roger Bonair-Agard will be the featured poet. Bonair-Agard was named the Nuyorican Poet Café’s Fresh Poet of the Year in 1998 and was the 1999 National Individual Slam Champion. He has been seen on HBO’s Def Poetry (2002 season), the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and CBS’ 60 Minutes. His work has been commissioned for performance at Lincoln Center through the collaborations of Vision Into Art and he is co-founder of the louderARTS project (www.louderarts.com), which runs poetry reading series in Manhattan and The Bronx. Bonair-Agard is co-author of Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's National Poetry Slam Champions (Soft Skull Press, 2000), has been widely anthologized and has published in Black Issues Review. He is a native of Trinidad and Tobago and currently lives in Brooklyn. Additional information available at www.bonairagard.com.

National Slam Team member t’ai freedom ford will perform on March 22nd. t’ai freedom ford was a well-known star on the Atlanta poetry scene when she moved to New York in 2000 to attend graduate school. She is now seen at venues all over the city, and earned a spot as a member of the 2003 Union Square/Bar13 National Slam Team. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (fiction) from Brooklyn College in 2002 and has self-published two books of poetry, Ghetto Reflexes and Self Conscious. Her latest poetic endeavor is a spoken work CD entitled the “Raw Word Project.” Additional information available at www.taifreedomford.com

Spoken Word Artist Taylor Mali will be featured on April 26th. Mali was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO original series “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.” He was also the “golden-tongued, Armani clad villain” of Paul Devlin’s 1997 documentary film “SlamNation,” which chronicled the National Poetry Slam Championship of 1996, the year of Mali’s first national team championship (he went on to win three more). He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2001 to develop “Teacher! Teacher!” a one-man show about poetry, teaching and math, which won the jury prize for best one-man show at the 2001 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. Mali also works as a voiceover artist, recording audio books and TV commercials for Burger King. He is the author of several books and CDs of original poetry and spoken word. CONVICTION, his first live CD in eight years, was released in September 2003. Additional information available at www.taylormali.com