Cantab Feature for Wednesday, August 29, 2012: Tatyana Brown

Bay Area poet Tatyana Brown returns to Boston for a visit and a feature.

Bay Area poet Tatyana Brown returns to Boston for a visit and a feature.

Tatyana Brown is currently ranked fourth in the world of competitive performance poetry after participating in the 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam. She is also the founding Captain of The Lit Slam, a monthly live-audience curated literary journal, and a co-host of San Jose’s Oversocial Mofo Revue. She has toured both coasts as a poet, read poems to teenagers on the mountaintops of British Columbia, told tales to captivated Bay Area audiences and on NPR’s hot new true-life narrative storytelling show, Snap Judgment, and sold instant literature ranging from short fiction to wedding vows as a street vending freelance writer in New York City. She holds the distinct honor of winning the longest consecutive string of XXX Haiku Deathmatch Championships at Oakland’s own Tourettes Without Regrets.

Most recently, Tatyana has begun guest lecturing in university classrooms (including the University of Indiana Bloomington and Yale University) on the subject of poetry slam as a contemporary American literary tradition specifically, and the rich, vibrant, vital nature of American oral tradition more generally. She also teaches workshops on poetry (writing as well as performance), storytelling, and the use of shock-value comedy as a tool to interrupt and dismantle systemic oppression.

This show in our weekly Wednesday series takes place at the Cantab Lounge, 738 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Doors for the show open at 7:15. The open mic begins at 8:00 and the feature performs at approximately 10:00. An open poetry slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.