BEST OF THE BEST – Day 25: Kelli Stevens Kane is a poet, playwright, oral historian and performance artist. The best description I can give you of her work is that it feels elementary, which is fitting since she was inspired to start writing poetry when she was a preschool teacher. Her poetry manuscript “Hallelujah Science” was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Four Way Books Levis Poetry Prize, and a semifinalist for the Persea Books 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She’s a 2011-2012 August Wilson Center Fellow, a 2011 Cave Canem Fellow, a 2011 Flight School Fellow, and the recipient of 2011 and 2013 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Grants. Her poetry has been featured in SPIDER MAGAZINE, DENVER SYNTAX, THE POETRY SUPER HIGHWAY, and other publications. She delivers spoken word performances and readings nationally, and serves as Poetry Director for RADIO FEEBS, a Europe-based internet radio station. Kelli’s one-woman show BIG GEORGE is a tour-de-force-of-nature about family and community - specifically, our own Hill District - and will kick off the New Hazlett Theater’s Community Supported Art Performance Series on August 10th at 8pm. If you can’t wait that long to see her (and I wouldn’t blame you), she is also teaching a Cave Canem Pittsburgh Poetry workshop, and the final reading with her and her students will be at the Kaufmann Center on July 31st at 6:15pm. Lastly, Kelli has also written two of my all-time favorite lines of poetry: “Take the lid off the blender while blending And know that a splatter is pending”
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 14:19:46 +0000