Kenyan Indian explosion on the national spoken word scene, Shailja Patel performs to standing ovations across the US and internationally. She has featured at venues from the Lincoln Center, New York, to San Quentin Prison. In 2004, she collaborated with jazz legend, Jon Jang, in the Asian Jazz series, and was named Featured Literary Artist for APAture, the nation’s largest showcase of emerging young Asian Pacific artists. Her current work-in-progress, a one-woman spoken word show titled Migritude, has already attracted considerable attention, and was the highlighted theatre presentation for Artwallah 2005.

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 NPR, KQED, Pacifica Radio, and the BBC (UK), 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.

A 2001 Lambda slam champion, and 2000 Santa Cruz slam champion, Shailja has featured at the Nuyorican, Chicago’s Green Mill, and slams across the country. She is one of 13 poets selected from across the nation to be showcased in the newly released anthology of queer slam poetry: Bullets and Butterflies (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005)

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, California.

Photo: Charles Ellik..

For more information about Shailja Patel, please visit www.shailja.com