2008: Joaquín Zihuatanejo

2007: Ed Mabrey

2006: Mike McGee

2005: Buddy Wakefield

2004: Buddy Wakefield

2008: Joaquín Zihuatanejo

Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a poet, spoken word artist, and award-winning teacher. In 2005, Joaquín was featured on season five of Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry for HBO. For seven years Joaquín was an award-winning public high school English teacher for ninth and eleventh grade students inspiring a new collection of poems from the classroom entitled Stand Up and Be Heard. For the last three years Joaquín has taken a break from his teaching position to tour North America and Europe teaching workshops and performing his one man spoken word show at hundreds of colleges, universities, conferences and poetry slams. In his extensive journey as a professional performance poet, Joaquín has shared a stage with Billy Collins, Saul Williams, E. Lynn Harris, Alicia Keys, and Maya Angelou among others. He recently co-wrote and produced of fire and rain, a CD that is a spoken word collaboration with natasha carrizosa. The project has been described as a testimony of life/love that spans from the barrios of East Dallas to the ghettos of the West Indies. Selections from of fire and rain were selected by Poetry in Motion to be published on posters on buses, light rail, and trains in major U.S. cities. The current Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, Joaquín recently represented The United States at The World Cup of Poetry Slam Championship in Paris, France and won that title as well. The book of fire and rain has been picked up by Wordsmith Press and is due for release this fall. He currently lives just north of his hometown of Dallas with his wife and two daughters. Joaquín has two passions in his life, his wife, Aída, and poetry, always in that order.

www.artspeakstalent.com/artist_joaquin.html

www.facebook.com/joaquinzihuatanejo

2007: Ed Mabrey

Ed Mabrey is the founder and CEO of Black Pearl Poetry, one of the most successful poetry shows in the country.  He has been a member of and coached several winning Rust Belt Regional Poetry Slam Teams out of Columbus, Ohio.  Ed has toured across North American in slam venues and universities.  His work has been published numerous times including in the National Best Selling anthology Spoken Word Revolution Redux by Sourcebooks. Ed tours internationally as a full time poet and conducts lectures, workshops, seminars, and performances for Fortune 500 Companies and Universities from coast to coast. A voice-over performer and actor of both stage and film, he has directed and stared in many productions.  He is the only minority to direct and star in a play in Columbus for a major non-minority theater company.  Ed has released two books, From the Page to the Stage and Back Again to critcal acclaim and Revoked:My GhettoPass(ivity) which was a limited release item.  His work has been used in art exhibits at The Whitney Museum, is in the library of several colleges and universities as resource material, and has been turned into a play. He won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in 2007.  He was also the National Poetry Slam Head-to-Head Haiku (H2HH) Champion of 2004 and 2002.

www.myspace.com/edmabrey

2006: Mike McGee

“Mighty” Mike McGee is an international spoken word artist, writer, performer, speaker, slam poet and comic. He has performed in thousands of venues all over North America, and was one of the first Americans ever to perform poetry at the University la Sorbonne in Paris, France. McGee began performing comedy and poetry to audiences at home in San Jose, California in 1998. As a Poetry Slam competitor in the U.S., Mike has competed at the National Poetry Slam on team San José several times. In 2003, McGee won the coveted National Poetry Slam Individual Grand Championship, besting over 300 nationally ranked poetry slammers. He has since toured over 300,000 miles throughout the United States and Canada where fellow National Poetry Slam Indy Champ, Shane Koyczan and beat-boxer poet extraordinaire C.R. Avery (of Vancouver, B.C.) joined him to form the group Tons of Fun University in 2004. They have since headlined music festivals across Canada, bringing their unique blend of poetry-laden “talk rock” to massive audiences all over the great north. In 2006, McGee became the first person to win two separate individual titles by being crowned the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, besting over 70 of the world’s best ranked slam poets. His “stand-up poetry” has been written about in Writer’s Digest magazine, and been featured on NPR, HBO and CBC. Mike McGee books internationally and is on tour damn-near 300 days a year.

www.mikemcgee.net

2004 & 2005: Buddy Wakefield 

Buddy Wakefield is the two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion featured on NPR, the BBC, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and signed to Strange Famous Records. In 2004 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals then successfully defended that [arbitrary] title at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands against the national champions of seven European countries with works translated into Dutch. In 2005 he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship again and has gone on to share the stage with nearly every notable performance poet in the world in hundreds of venues internationally from The Fillmore in San Francisco and Scotland’s Oran Moore to San Quentin State Penitentiary, House of Blues New Orleans and CBGB’s. In the spring of 2001 Buddy left his position as the executive assistant at a biomedical firm in Gig Harbor, WA, sold or gave away everything he owned, moved to the small town of Honda Civic and set out to live for a living, touring North American poetry venues through 2003. He still tours full time and considers recent tours with Ani DiFranco and The Junkyard Ghost Revival to be the highlight of his career thus far. Born in Shreveport, LA, mostly raised in Baytown, TX, now claiming Seattle, WA as home, Buddy has been a busker in Amsterdam, a lumberjack in Norway, a street vendor in Spain, a team leader in Singapore, a re-delivery boy, a candy maker, a street sweeper, a bartender, a maid, a construction worker, manager of a CD store, a bull rider and a booking agent. Wakefield is a growth junkie, elated son of a guitar repair woman, wingman of Giant Saint Everything, and remembers Kirkwood, NY. Buddy, a Board of Directors member with Youth Speaks Seattle, is honored that his work is published internationally and has been used to win national collegiate debate and forensics competitions. An author of Write Bloody Publishing, Wakefield is known for delivering raw, rounded, high vibration performances of humor and heart.

www.buddywakefield.com