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.

Nate Marshall

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015) and author of the chapbook Blood Percussion (Button Poetry, 2014). His book Wild… MORE

Blood Percussion

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J. Scott Brownlee

Originally from rural Texas, J. Scott Brownlee is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class.  His poems appear in The Kenyon… MORE

Highway or Belief

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Aaron Coleman

Aaron Coleman is the author of the chapbook St. Trigger, which won the 2015 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow from Metro-Detroit, Aaron has lived and worked with youth in locations including Kalamazoo,… MORE

St. Trigger

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Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, writer, and dessert enthusiast from Columbus, Ohio. He is the editor of Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart, an anthology forthcoming from Freezeray Press. His work has been published in Radius, Stirring, Muzzle, Vinyl,… MORE

The Crown Ain't Worth Much

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A Little Devil In America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

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Jacqui Germain

Jacqui Germain is a poet, writer and student organizer currently living in St. Louis, MO. She has featured at Young Chicago Authors in Chicago, IL, at the #BlackPoetsSpeakOut event in St. Louis and several other venues around St…. MORE

When the Ghosts Come Ashore

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Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is currently a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He has represented the Bay Area at multiple national poetry slams and is on staff at Muzzle Magazine. He is the author of Transit (Button Poetry… MORE

Transit

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Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. They are the author of Homie (Graywolf), Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf), “[insert] boy” (YesYes Books, 2014), one of the Boston… MORE

Black Movie

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Homie

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sam sax

sam sax is an NEA Fellow and a Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers where he’s the associate poetry editor at Bat City Review. He’s the two time Bay Area Unified Grand Slam Champion + author of… MORE

A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters

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Madness

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Aziza Barnes

Aziza Barnes is a brown woman poet from Los Angeles currently living in New York. She is a senior at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, pursuing her BFA in theater, creative writing and Africana… MORE

me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun.

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Sam Van Cook

Sam Van Cook is the Founder and President of Button Poetry. He is a recipient of the 2012 Verve Grant, a National Poetry Slam champion, a decorated College Slam coach. Sam has worked with students nationwide as a… MORE

Mill, Railway & General Castings

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