Poets & Writers Theater

“What does it mean to write something urgent right now?” Don’t Be Nice is a 2018 documentary directed by Max Powers that follows a group of poets from the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City’s East Village who grapple with the political climate punctuated by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements as they prepare for the National Poetry Slam championship during the summer of 2016.

“There are two types of survival, there’s a kind that eats people alive and the kind I’m lucky enough to do by default.” Mason Granger, executive director of Bowery Poetry, reads his poem “Two Types of People” at the 2019 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon.

“So why not / make a soup / of what’s left? Why / not boil & chop / something outside / the mind...” Kevin Young reads “Ode to Gumbo” from his poetry collection Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.

She was fourteen years old when she took the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City's East Village. Sarah Kay, now twenty-four, is a cofounder of Project V.O.I.C.E., a national organization that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression, and a leading spoken word poet.