In this culmination of Mic Check Poetry Fest, Englert Wavelength and Iowa City Poetry welcomes to the stage renowned spoken word poet and creative scholar Javon Johnson, accompanied by talented teen poets from the Iowa City Area.
Javon Johnson is a three-time national poetry slam champion, a four-time national finalist, and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, BET’s Lyric Café, TVOnes Verses & Flow, The Steve Harvey Show, The Arsenio Hall Show, and United Shades of America with Kamau Bell on CNN. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of African American & African Diaspora studies and holds an appointment in Gender & Sexuality Studies in the Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Dr. Johnson’s first book, Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University Press 2017), unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces and argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His second project, The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (Northwestern University Press 2018) is a co-edited book that critically creatively explores Chiraq (a name that is an amalgamation of Chicago and Iraq as a way to call to the violence of certain parts of Chicago) as a space and as a term. Having published his first book of poems, Ain't Never Not Been Black (Button 2020), Dr. Johnson is also a creative scholar who has mounted exhibitions at the California African American Museum where he managed the History Department.