“I grew up learning how to protect men who hate me.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button Playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the Button YouTube channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Crystal Valentine, Aaliyah Jihad, and Ellyn Touchette. Congratulations poets!
Danez Smith’s new chapbook, Black Movie, is now available for order! Check it out in the Button store. Get it by midnight CST tonight for a signed copy!
“I used to be something. Someone wrapped in entirety. I used to be answers, semesters of filled-in bubble sheets.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Shavontae Patrick and Zev Verdoner. Congratulations poets!
“My Spanish is an itchy phantom limb. It is reaching for words and only finding air.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Kelsey Warren, and Carrie Rudzinski. Congratulations poets!
“Tell her to take a good long look at love. Her father gripping the throat of a pay phone, her mother slamming the screen door until the door flinched.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Sierra DeMulder, Gabriel Green, and Saidu Tejan-Thomas. Congratulations poets! Make sure to check out Sierra’s book in the Button Shop!
“Depression wasn’t an endless grey sky, it was no sky at all.”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Neil Hilborn and Victoria Morgan. Congratulations poets!
Sierra DeMulder’s new chapbook, We Slept Here, is now available for order in The Button Shop. Check out this video of Sierra performing a poem from the book!
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 Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2014, & two chapbooks– “black movie” (Button Poetry, 2015), winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, & “hands on ya knees” (Penmanship Books, 2013).
Smith is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. Their writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Narrative & elsewhere. They were featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Emerging Poets Series by Patricia Smith. They are a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural collective Dark Noise. Danez placed second at the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam and is the two-time Rustbelt Regional Champion. In 2014, they were the Festival Director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam. Danez holds a BA from UW-Madison where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They live in Minneapolis, MN.
“She says, ‘funerals are like birthday parties, except better. No one wastes money on presents, and everyone dresses up for the theme.’ ”
Don’t miss this week’s Best of Button playlist, featuring the hottest recent videos on the channel. Updated every week! Today’s additions: Maxine Wright, Phil Kaye, Darius Simpson, Scout Bostley, and Matt Coonan. Congratulations poets!
Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley’s poem, “Lost Voices”, from this year’s College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational Finals, has gone viral, with write-ups from The Huffington Post, Mic.com, DailyKos, APlus, Seventeen, and more! Congratulations to the poets and their team, Eastern Michigan University, who placed third at the tournament!