Union Square Slam is excited for our Summer reading series, featuring an extended open mic and a phenom featured artist.

We have been committed to exposing all the poetry this city has to offer. We want communities to merge and form into bigger communities. For this show we are happy to have the great literary organization Brooklyn Poets.

Brooklyn Poets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization celebrating and cultivating the poets, poetry and literary heritage of Brooklyn, the birthplace of American poetry. Since our inception in 2012, our core program of small, intensive poetry workshops taught by award-winning poets in their own homes has served over 300 students and employed over 30 teachers, and we’ve grown to host 22 events per year attracting over 1000 attendees annually, fostering a more close-knit, homegrown, diverse community of poets and readers than what we see traditionally offered by graduate writing programs and the American literary community at large. Our community extends through The Bridge, a unique online network connecting poets and mentors throughout the world.

Click here for more about Brooklyn Poets
 

6;00pm: Free Workshop with I.S. Jones
7:30pm: Sign-ups and Socialize
8:00pm: Open Mic
8:45pm: Brooklyn Poets

All Ages // Wheelchair Accessible
Open Mic // $5
 

About our Features:
 

Candace Williams is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Bennington Review, Lambda Literary Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She earned her MA in Elementary Education at Stanford University and has taken workshops at Cave Canem and Brooklyn Poets. She lives with a pit bull named Madonna and tweets a little too often (@TeacherC).
 

Jonathan Clarence is a performance poet and actor living in Brooklyn. The Wisconsin native has appeared in Lime Hawk Journal. He recently completed his undergraduate in advertising at St. John’s University in NYC and is currently a freelance writer for thisismelo.com. With a desire to write poetry and fiction about overcoming oppression, emotional trauma and discrimination of all types from all backgrounds, he’s found his poetic voice and is developing a manuscript.
 

Jason Koo, named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the author of two collections of poetry, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. He is also the editor of Poems for Kobe, a private limited edition of poems presented as a retirement gift to Kobe Bryant by the Brooklyn Nets and Brooklyn Poets, and coeditor of the forthcoming Bettering American Poetry anthology and Brooklyn Poets Anthology. An assistant teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge. He lives in Brooklyn.