An evening of poetry in conjunction with the Bryant Park Summer 2008 Word for Word Series featuring Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, John Yau and Shanxing Wang.

Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 275 performances at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and three seasons of the award-winning “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.” The author of Inside Outside Outside Inside (2004) and Thought Crimes (2005), Tsai has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, and many more.

Shanxing Wang is the author of Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoems 2005), which was awarded the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, sponsored by The Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Imperial Citycombines Wang’s unique past experiences as a Mechanical Engineering student and an activist at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Imperial City has been described by Lyn Hejinian as “a work of genius” and by Brian Kim Stefans as “a brilliant gem dropped through the keyhole from an alternate universe.”

John Yau is a leading art critic, poet, essayist, and prose writer, the author most recently of Borrowed Love Poems(Penguin, 2002), The United States of Jasper Johns (Zoland Books, 1996), and My Symptoms (Black Sparrow Press, 1998). In addition to his work as a poet, Yau is the publisher of Black Square Editions and the art editor of The Brooklyn Rail. A teacher at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Yau has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.

FREE and open to the public