Poets

By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, Button Poetry hopes to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.

Taylor Mali

TAYLOR MALI is a spoken word poet, teacher advocate, and game designer from New York City. His poetry is both accessible and literary, and even though he was once told he was “just like Billy Collins except even… MORE

Poetry By Chance

Sierra DeMulder

Sierra DeMulder is the author of five collections of poetry (Ephemera, The Bones Below, New Shoes on a Dead Horse, We Slept Here, Today Means Amen) and the co-host of the relationship advice podcast Just Break Up. She… MORE

Ephemera

We Slept Here

Sean Patrick Mulroy

Sean Patrick Mulroy is a writer, actor, visual artist, and musician from the American South, who now lives all over the world. A nationally recognized writer in the US, Sean is a performer, an award winning professor, and… MORE

Hated for the Gods

Usman Hameedi

Usman Hameedi is a Pakistani-American scientist, poet, educator. He also serves on Mass Poetry’s Board of Directors. Since 2008, he has competed in and coached for collegiate, national, and international level poetry slams. Usman has been featured on… MORE

Staying Right Here

Junious ‘Jay’ Ward

Junious “Jay” Ward is a poet living in Charlotte, NC, and the author of Sing Me a Lesser Wound (Bull City Press). Jay is a National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam champion, and Charlotte’s inaugural… MORE

Composition

Button University: Junious 'Jay' Ward Workshop

Robert Wood Lynn

Robert Wood Lynn is the author of How to Maintain Eye Contact (Button Poetry 2023), runner-up in the 2020 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press 2022), selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner of… MORE

How to Maintain Eye Contact

Siaara Freeman

Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren & a teaching artist for Center For Arts Inspired Learning and The Sisterhood Project in conjunction with the Anisfieldwolf Foundation. She is a 2021… MORE

Urbanshee

Button University: Siaara Freeman Workshop

Blythe Baird

At only 25 years old, Blythe Baird is already one of the most recognizable and acclaimed names in spoken word poetry. Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, the viral writer has garnered international recognition for her stunning… MORE

Sweet, Young, & Worried

If My Body Could Speak

Darius Simpson

Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make… MORE

Never Catch Me

Topaz Winters

Topaz Winters is the author of the full-length poetry collections So, Stranger (2022), Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (2019) & poems for the sound of the sky before thunder (2017). She is the… MORE

So, Stranger

Button University: Topaz Winters Workshop