Spoken word poetry has a long history both in the United States and far beyond its borders. Oral traditions have been part of numerous cultures. Today, some people make a living as slam poets. Competing in poetry slams can be a rewarding experience. It may even lead some poets to full-time careers as poets, authors, or teachers. Part of the series They Do That for a Living?, Slam Poets explores the history of this unusual career, what it takes to join it, and where it can take participants in the future.

How do slam poets and their audiences reflect the politics of difference?

Slam poetry is a form of spoken word poetry. People write and perform it for others. But slam poets don't wear costumes or use props or music. Slam poets use words to express thoughts and make people feel something. Slam poetry is often about difficult issues that people face, or it can be fun and silly. Featuring TIME For Kids content, this 6-Pack includes detailed photos and sidebars, stimulating facts, and clear, informational text to engage students as they build their critical literacy skills and academic vocabulary. This 6-pack includes six copies of this title and a culturally responsive, shared-reading focused lesson plan.

Exploring the often difficult relations between hip-hop and schooling, Slam School builds a new and surprising argument: the very reasons teachers and administrators might resist the deliberate introduction of hip-hop into the planned curriculum are what make hip-hop so pedagogically vital.

Slam poetry is meant to be heard! Read about how the style started and how people are using it to say what they think and feel. Will you try to write a slam poem? This nonfiction book includes important text features such as a glossary, index, and table of contents to engage students in reading as they develop their comprehension, vocabulary, and literacy skills. The Reader's Guide and culminating activity direct students back to the text as they develop their higher-order thinking skills. Check It Out! provides resources for additional reading and learning. With TIME For Kids content, this book aligns with national and state standards and will keep grade 4 students engaged in learning.

Spoken Word in the UK is a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to spoken word performance in the UK – its origins and development, its performers and audiences, and the vast array of different styles and characteristics that make it unique. Drawing together a wide range of authors including scholars, critics, and practitioners, each chapter gives a new perspective on performance poetics. The six sections of the book cover the essential elements of understanding the form and discuss how this key aspect of contemporary performance can be analysed stylistically, how its development fits into the context of performance in the UK, the ways in which its performers reach and engage with their audiences, and its place in the education system. Each chapter is a case study of one key aspect, example, or context of spoken word performance, combining to make the most wide-ranging account of this form of performance currently available. This is a crucial and ground-breaking companion for those studying or teaching spoken word performance, as well as scholars and researchers across the fields of theatre and performance studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

The first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’ especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture. In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don’t Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the “transgender gaze,” as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities. Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.