Slam Coalkan Performance Poetry: The Condor and the Eagle Meet Book Launch

June 21 at 7:00pm

Celebrate the launch of Slam Coalkan Performance Poetry: The Condor and the Eagle with an in-person and online event at Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto on June 21 at 7pm ET! The fabulous send-off on Indigenous People’s Day will feature contributor and editor Jennifer Alicia Murrin, and will be moderated by Tyler Pennock.

In 2021, 17 Indigenous spoken-word artists from Abya Yala (South America) and Turtle Island (North America) were invited by the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) in Toronto, Canada, and Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to participate in a virtual edition of Slam Coalkan. This project, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, was created to allow Indigenous poets from across the Americas to meet and share ideas, dreams and aspirations for the future, through two slam performances and a series of roundtables around the importance of storytelling. TIFA then reached out to Kegedonce Press to have the performers’ works published in an English-language anthology.

Slam Coalkan is curated by poets Jennifer Alicia Murrin of Toronto and Renata Tupinambá of São Paulo. The festivals’ directors, Roland Gulliver (TIFA) and Julio Ludemir (FLUP) have each contributed an afterword reflecting on this extraordinary cross-continental collaboration. Digitally enhanced with QR codes, Slam Coalkan links readers to videos of the poets’ performances at the FLUP and TIFA festivals.

Learn more!

From these pages the poets sing their hopes and their dreams. These are the voices of resistance, voices that speak out against the evils of colonialism, racism, transphobia, and genocide. Voices that cry, shout, whisper and roar passionate messages to the world.

Don’t miss your chance to see and hear this remarkable international collaboration of slam poetry and performance!

Get the book!