Tiny Room Poetry Series with Danez Smith and DVT

Tiny Room Poetry Series | Special Edition | Presented by Listen Different and Poetry Center San José

Join us for an intimate evening of poetry, music and community! This special edition offers a rare chance to connect with poets and musicians up close, meet fellow lovers of the art, and experience a vibrant local space in a fresh new way.

With performances by Danez Smith and DVT. 

Enjoy this event at a price that is comfortable for you! No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Tickets are priced as donations. There are a limited number of free online tickets, but more are available at the door. We ask that those who claim a free ticket to wait for available seating at show time.

SEATS RESERVED FOR DONATION-BASED TICKET HOLDERS

Danez Smith and DVT will also participate in a Q&A after the show.

Tiny Room Poetry Series is supported by SVCreates, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara, the National Endowment for the Arts, Recycle Book Store and Poetry Foundation.

Our featured performers:

Danez Smith

Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. As a poet, performer, and cultural critic, their work transcends arbitrary boundaries to present art that is gripping, dismantling of oppression constructs, and striking on the human heart. Smith is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Love, Time (2027), Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024), which won the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The collection is described as a book of “searching, stunning poems” where “Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives,” according to Nam Le at The New York Times Book Review; Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which won the Minnesota Book Award, the Heartland Bookseller Award, and was a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award; Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), which was a Finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Forward Prize; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They have also published two chapbooks, Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2014), which won the 2014 Button Poetry Prize, and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Most recently, Smith edited Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes (Hachette, 2024).

Smith’s writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry, Lit Hub, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and in many other outlets. As a spoken word poet and performer, Smith uses rhythm, fierce, raw power, and image to re-imagine the world as they take it apart in their work. They were Individual World Poetry Slam finalist in 2011 and received Second Place at Individual World Poetry Slam in 2014. Smith is a four-time Rustbelt Individual Champion and was festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam in 2014. They were a featured performer at Louisiana Literature Festival in Denmark (2024), London Literature Festival (2024), Poesia Barcelona (2023), and the Queer Contact Festival in Manchester, UK (2011); they were also a featured poet at Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2014), Split This Rock Festival (2014), FAMU Younger Poets Series (2015), and Brave New Voices (2014).

Smith has been featured on Forbes’s annual 30 under 30 list and has received a National Endowment for the Arts literary grant, a Princeton Arts Fellowship (2020-2022), a United States Artist Fellowship (2020), the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship (2014), and fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, and Voices of Our Nation (VONA). They are winner of the 2014 Paris American Reading Series and were a Finalist for both the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Debutlitzer prize in 2015. Smith was also featured in the Academy of American Poets’s Emerging Writers Series by National Book Award Finalist, Patricia Smith.

Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. From 2017 to 2021, they were a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS, and are a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective, a group which aims to help poets find common ground in their commitment to using art as a site for radical truth telling. Smith teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, and lives in Minneapolis with their people.

DVT

Poetry that doesn't wait for the music to stop. DVT is composed of bandleader Damani Rhodes, former San Francisco Poet
Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin and singer-songwriter VADIA. Rhodes creates the sonic landscape, Tongo brings to life the spoken word, and VADIA sings with the spirit of a revival. Apart, they are forces. Together, they are a frequency.

Damani Rhodes is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and entrepreneur whose music blends jazz, gospel, hip hop, funk, and soul. He produced, arranged, and toured with hip hop/soul band SOL Development and founded the jazz fusion group Mino Yanci. His diverse body of work includes the socially conscious releases with SOL Development, the fusion-driven explorations of Mino Yanci, and his debut solo project, R.E.A.C.H., recorded live during a residency at the Kennedy Center and released during the pandemic. Damani was the composer for the Emmy-winning documentary Dear Beloved and the Emmy-nominated When the Waters Get Deep. He is currently spearheading the musical foundation and direction of a new project featuring VADIA and Tongo, continuing his mission to create music that moves both hearts and minds.

VADIA is a native of Oakland, California who teaches perseverance through art. She is a singer/songwriter who has shared many stages with local and international artists. Her vocal ability allows her to easily adapt to practically every style of music, be it jazz, show tunes, r&b, or pop music–but with an unbridled spiritual power in the delivery of every song that she sings. In her writing, Her a song “No Graves” has inspired a growing movement that can be followed under the hashtag #NOGRAVES. Listen closely to her lyrics and you will discover that she not only wants to share the beauty of her mind with others, but she invites you to experience the joy and pleasure she feels as she vocally creates an environment of openness, personal reflection, love, and empowerment of artists everywhere.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. He was San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate (2021-2024), and is the author of three collections of poetry: Blood on the Fog (2021), selected by the New York Times as among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven is All Goodbyes (2017); and Someone’s Dead Already (2015). In 2020, Eisen-Martin co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. His curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. Eisen-Martin is the recipient of several awards including the American Book Award (2018), a California Book Award (2018), and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award (2018). He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University.

Keana Aguila Labra

Image and bio to come...

Curator and Host

Tshaka Campbell is the first black, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate and has authored four books of poetry entitled TARMAN, MUTED WHISPERS, STUFF, I will write more, TUNNEL VISION and is latest book published by El Martilo Press entitled BLOOD AT THE ROOT. His words have been featured in Bridges Review, BBC UK, Content Magazine, Speakeasy vol 1, Liminal Animals, Rigorous magazine, among others. A city of Milpitas and city of Sunnyvale commendation in the arts award recipient, Tshaka has also collaborated on projects with the World Health Organization (WHO), the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the NUMU and Triton museums, as well sits on the Board of Directors for Silicon Valley Creates arts council and Poetry Center San Jose. He has partnered with the Silicon Valley Transit Authority and community members to deliver youth programs centered around expanding poetry and literature. He has 4 spoken word albums entitled ONE, BLOODLINES, SKIN vol.1; and his most recent release NKISI is currently available on all streaming platforms.