Recorded as part of Young Chicago Authors’ 9th Annual Louder Than A Bomb Teen Poetry Festival, the organization honored its roots with a reading and roundtable discussion featuring poetry slam founder Marc Smith and Third World Press founder Haki Madhubuti. As LTAB cofounder Kevin Coval pointed out, without these two men, Louder Than A Bomb wouldn’t exist.

Marc Smith is best known for helping create a new style of poetic presentation that spurred one the most important social and literary arts movements of our time. As stated in the PBS television series, The United States of Poetry, a “strand of new poetry began at Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the Poetry Slam.” Since then, performance poetry has spread throughout the country and across the globe to hundreds of cities, universities, high schools, festivals and cultural centers.

Haki Madhubuti is a poet, essayist and editor. He attended the University of Illinois and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He is the author of more than twenty books and directs the Institute of Positive Education. Among his honors and awards are an American Book Award (1991) and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a professor of English and Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University. A proponent of independent black institutions, Madhubuti is the founder, publisher and chairman of the board of Third World Press (established in 1967). He also cofounded the Institute of Positive Education/New Concept Development Center in 1969 and the Betty Shabazz International Charter School in 1998 here in Chicago.

Recorded Saturday, February 28, 2009 at Columbia College Conaway Center.