Rachel McKibbens is a total Capricorn . She has been writing poetry for six years and just can't seem to stop. She was a member of the 2001 West Coast Regional Poetry Slam championship team, was voted "Best New Poet" by OC Weekly her first year slamming. McKibbens has made six consecutive National Poetry Slam teams and has kissed exactly six boys in her life. She recently led the 2006 louderARTS Poetry Slam Team to a third place finish in the National Poetry Slam competition in Austin, Texas, and her favorite color is pink. She appeared on the fourth and fifth seasons of HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and stars in the documentary Slam Planet: War of the Words . McKibbens is currently the SlamMaster for NYC/louderARTS and is an Urban Word mentor, teaching poetry through The Healing Arts Program at Bellevue Hospital. She collects butcher knives in her spare time.

 

Emily Kagan started performing poetry because she found it the perfect blend between her love of writing and her love for the stage. She competed on the UC Berkeley collegiate slam team (national champions 2001 and 2004), the San Francisco 2001 and 2002 slam teams, and was the coach and slam master of the UC Berkeley slam team from 2001 through 2004. Emily was a part of HBO's Def Poetry Jam seasons 3 and 4 and has been a featured artist and workshop leader at venues across the country including the California Institute for the Arts, the Commonwealth Club, the West Coast Convention for Teachers of English, and the Associated College Unions International Conference. In 2004, Emily graduated from UC Berkeley with an interdisciplinary degree in bio-behavioral science and was honored to have her poetry commissioned for the commencement address to the Class of 2004. In 2005, she received her master's degree from MIT's graduate program in Science Writing.

Lynne Procope is a poet from Trinidad and Tobago and co-founder of the louderARTS Project. In 1998, she was a member of the groundbreaking Nuyorican Poets' Café team which won the championship at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. She has been a member of three National Slam teams representing NYC/louderARTS. In 1999, she co-authored the Soft Skull Press poetry collection, "Burning Down the House." She is a poet in residence with VisionIntoArt, a multi-media/multi-discipline performance collaborative which seeks to marry prose, film, poetry, dance and music in organic collaborations engaging in socio-political and artistic discourse. Her writing and performances were commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts in 2003, 04, and 05. Her work appears in Drum Voices Review 2000 , Poetry Slam: the Competitive Art of Performance Poetry 2000 , From Page to Stage and Back Again Anthology 2003 , and she has appeared as a featured poet at colleges, universities and festivals internationally and across the United States.

Marty McConnell transplanted herself from Chicago to New York City in 1999, after completing the first of three national tours with the Morrigan, the groundbreaking all-female performance poetry troupe she co-founded. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, appeared on the second and fifth seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam , and competed in five National Poetry Slams with the NYC/louderARTS team. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader , Will Work for Peace, In Our Own Words: Poetry of Generation X , and the forthcoming Women of the Bowery anthology, as well as magazines including Rattapallax, Boxcar Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, Thirteenth Moon, 2River View, Lodestar Quarterly , and Blue Fifth Review . She has performed and facilitated workshops at schools and festivals around the country, including The Dodge Poetry Festival, Connecticut Poetry Festival, Cornell University, the University of Utah, James Madison University, University of Connecticut, University of Arkansas, DePaul University, and more.