A Kenyan Indian explosion on the national spoken word scene, Shailja Patel performs to standing ovations across the US and internationally. In 2004, she was invited to perform at the Lincoln Center, New York; to collaborate with jazz legend Jon Jang in the Asian American Jazz Series; and to participate in the Nautilus Institute's prestigious Scenarios Workshop, along with luminaries of the Left such as Daniel Ellsberg.

Recent highly-acclaimed appearances include keynotes at Yale and Brown Universities; London's Poetry Café, the Diverse Arts Showcase in Glasgow, Women Against War Northern California Tour; the San Francisco Dyke March, the Radical Performance Fest (a Bay Area Critics Choice Selection), and the groundbreaking Yoni Ki Baat. Shailja shared the stage with Holly Near, Michael Franti, and Ram Dass at Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War, the 9/11 anniversary concert at San Francisco's Justin Hermann Plaza; and performed for crowds of over 50,000 at Not In Our Name Rallies. Her words, aired on the National Radio Project and Pacifica Radio, have generated responses from activists and academics worldwide.

Shailja's work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, and the CD, Best of the Berkeley Slam Poets. Her poems featured in June Jordan's Poetry For The People program at UC Berkeley, have been translated into Gujurati and Italian, and are used in colleges, high schools and workshops across the country. Awards include an Outwrite 1999 Poetry Prize and a Voices Of Our Nations Arts Foundation Poetry Scholarship. She was semifinalist for the 2000 Emily Dickinson Award and the 2000 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and is a recipient of a Serpent Source Foundation For Women Artists Grant.

A 2001 Lambda slam champion, and 2000 Santa Cruz slam champion, Shailja is also the first featured artist on the South Asian Literature and Art Archive, thesala.com

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Shailja read Economics and Politics at the University of York, England, and then trained as a chartered accountant in London. She is a certified yoga teacher who has taught internationally. She currently lives in Oakland.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

My job as a poet is to awaken myself and others to the possibilities and complexities of truth, freedom and justice. My job as a spoken word artist is to move myself and my audience past the numbness and barriers we all put up against feeling, against seeing, in order to survive the brutality of daily life on this planet.

I remain enduringly grateful for the extraordinary privilege of a life as a queer political poet - a life made possible by my ancestors, family, community historical and current, and all the warriors for equality who have gone before me. In these dark times when, to quote Tony Kushner, "hope battles constantly with despair", I hold fast to the belief that our words can inspire us with the courage to change the world.

Links to Shailja's work online:
thesala.com/feature.html

www.rubberchickenpoetry.com/Slammers/ShailjaPatel.html

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