The 6th Annual New York City Poetry Festival was held on Governors Island’s Colonel’s Row on July 30th and 31st, 2016. The Poetry Society of New York, invites attendees to come together for this free two-day festival to celebrate New York City’s vibrant poetry community.
Poetic Theater Productions Artists Sam LaRoche and Charan P. Morris presented excerpts from Poetic Theater Productions’ Breaking Our Silence program. Breaking Our Silence is a celebration of LBGTQ voices sharing their experiences of coming out, finding love, breaking the silence, and speaking out.
Sam and Charan performed on Saturday, July 30 at 4:30pm on the White Horse Stage. Click here for the full festival schedule, including Poetic Theater Productions’ artists Nkosi Nkululeko performing with Urban Word NYC and Jenny Pacanowski and Nicole Goodwin performing with Warrior Writers.
Sam LaRoche is a spoken word poet and rap artist out of Brooklyn. In college Sam was signed to an independent record label in Hartford and began touring the state as their spoken word artist. In 2007 Sam moved to NYC where she began frequenting open mic nights and entering in slam competitions. Sam has toured with Cupid Ain’t @#$%! poetry show over the past four years as well as being the featured poet at different venues and Universities. Still active in the spoken word community, Sam is currently working on her EP album as the follow-up to her mixtape.
Charan P. Morris is a poet/educator based in New York. A 2011-12 LAMBDA Literary Fellow, her work has been published in Sinister Wisdom, Kweli Journal, InDigest Magazine is forthcoming in The Mom Egg and Stand Our Ground anthology. She has performed for audiences throughout the Midwest and East Coast, sharing a stage with Gill Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Staceyann Chin, Ishle Park, Lemon Anderson, Climbing PoeTree, and others. In addition to being a public school educator for nine years, she has facilitated poetry workshops with diverse groups of writers including formerly incarcerated youth and graduate education students at Columbia University.