MARC KELLY SMITH is creator/founder of the international Poetry Slam movement for which he received the nickname Slam Papi. A “strand of new poetry began at Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the Poetry Slam.” Performance poetry has spread throughout the world, to over 1000 cities in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.
After more than a 3000 performances in nightclubs, concert halls, libraries, universities, Smith continues to host and perform every Sunday night at the Green Mill Jazz Lounge in Chicago. He has staged poetry events such as Chicago’s National Poetry Slams, Slam Dunk Poetry Day at Chicago’s Field Museum, Summer Solstice Poetry Shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Poetry Hot Dog Cart for Chicago’s “Stirring Things Up Festival,” Ted Talks, the Kennedy Center, and numerous high school and college events Author and editor of The Spoken Word Revolution series, two of the most important and best-selling book/CD anthologies of spoken word artists and performance poets, Crowdpleaser, and his CDs It’s About Time, Quarters in the Juke Box, and Love & Politics. His new book, Ground Zero: Poems from Chicago, is due out in 2015.
According to Smith, “We need people to talk poetry to each other. That’s how we communicate our values, our hearts, the things that we’ve learned that make us who we are.”