Art

More young people reading, buying poetry

FLORIDA COURIER — People are clicking on poetry on Twitter.

Published

7 years ago

January 27, 2019

By Jenna Ross

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People are clicking on poetry on Twitter. They’re listening to poems on podcasts. They’re buying poetry collections on Amazon.

But on a recent Monday night in St. Paul, they were hearing poetry in person. A diverse, mostly 20-something crowd snapped and purred as friends and strangers read their verses from Park Square Theatre’s lower stage during Button Poetry’s monthly slam poetry competition.

Many were drawn by YouTube. (Button’s YouTube channel boasts more than a million followers.) By Instagram. By the changing world of poetry.

“We’re seeing astronomical growth,” said Sam Van Cook, who founded Button, a Minneapolis-based company that straddles poetry’s in-person and online worlds. “Friends who work in book sales … we joke that for the first time in any of our lives, poetry is a growth industry.”

National bump

More people — especially young people — are reading and buying poetry. About 12 percent of adults read poetry in the past year, a bump of 5 percentage points over 2012 and a 15-year high, according to a new survey by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sales of poetry books have swelled over that time, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks book sales in the U.S., “making it one of the fastest growing categories in publishing.”

Social media are driving the trend. Among the top 20 bestselling poetry authors in 2017 were a dozen so-called “Instapoets,” who attract readers by sharing short, photogenic verse on Instagram and Twitter.

Their queen is Rupi Kaur, an Indian-born Canadian poet who boasts 3.4 million Instagram followers, sells out theaters and claps back at her detractors.

New, ‘b-side poems’

But poets published by traditional presses and praised by critics use those platforms too, sharing one another’s work and changing the notion of a poet as an old White dude.

Minnesotans Danez Smith and Hieu Minh Nguyen are among those sharing new and “b-side” poems on Twitter, letting their thousands of followers in on whom they’re crushing on, poetry-wise and otherwise.

“There’s a myth around who a poet can be — or who can be a poet,” Nguyen said by phone. “People are seeing that those archetypes, those barriers, aren’t true.”

More diverse

As the slate of bards becomes more diverse, so do their audiences. Some of the biggest gains in that NEA Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, released last year, came from people of color. About 15 percent of African-Americans reported reading poetry, up from 7 percent in 2012.

Some 13 percent of AsianAmericans had read poetry in the past year, compared with 5 percent in 2012.

Minnesota-based Vietnamese-American poet Bao Phi compared it to the shift in Hollywood, where “we’ve seen that representation can actually pay out huge dividends.”

Spoken word success

For decades, many marginalized people have hustled to diversify the slate of poets performing and publishing, especially by connecting with students and young people, said Phi, who crafted his reputation as a spoken word artist in the 1990s.

Performance-based poetry finally shed some of the scene’s chauvinism. Spoken word artists broke through the glass ceiling of publishing. (Phi didn’t publish his first poetry collection, “Sông I Sing,” until 2011.)

“This didn’t happen overnight,” Phi said. “All that work adds up to what we’re seeing now.”

‘Political poetry’ hot

Erika Stevens, poetry editor at large for the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Coffee House Press, pointed to “Indecency,” by Justin Phillip Reed, which tackles White supremacy with intimate, sometimes confrontational poems.

Last year, that collection, published by Coffee House, won the National Book Award in poetry, showing “how far the institutions have come in terms of what they recognize as innovative and groundbreaking and worthy of award attention,” Stevens said.

U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith recently wrote in the New York Times about why “political poetry is hot again,” arguing that poetry “has become a means of owning up to the complexity of our problems.”

Reaching women

Poets and readers have debated the success of Kaur, who turned a viral Instagram post into bestselling books, a tour and, now, printed canvases.

A recent poem, paired with a pen drawing, nabbed more than 200,000 likes: “i am water/ soft enough/to offer life/tough enough/ to drown it away.”

Whether Kaur’s hugely popular poetry is “for me or not is not the question,” said Van Cook, of Button Poetry. “But I can tell you, if I talk to people about poetry at a wedding or a coffee shop, people — especially young women, women of color — she’s one of the first names on their lips.”

Those young women recognize themselves in her work and find solace in her books, he said.

‘Little less magnificent’

Van Cook founded Button because he believes poetry is “most vibrant read aloud, and read by someone who loves it.” Its YouTube videos of readings by well- and lesser known poets often amass tens of thousands of views.

Composers talk about how film took classical music, which was being relegated to the sidelines, and gave it a new, more prominent home, he said. “People are going to look back and talk about social media that way for poetry,” Van Cook predicted. “What poetry needed was to be a little less magnificent.”

At “Button Poetry Live” on Monday night, a few newbies and some spoken word veterans took the stage, reading from iPhones and journals and memory. Many of their poems grappled with tough topics: micro-aggressions, breakups, coming out. Then, the special guest took the stage: poet, performer and podcast host Franny Choi.

For one poem, titled @fannychoir for her Twitter handle, she took racist, misogynistic tweets and Google-translated them into other languages and then back again, to English.

In short, she garbled their words and made them hers.

“Mrs. Great Anime Pornography, the fruit of the field,” she began with a smirk.

Making them think

Outside the theater, three friends in their 20s perused Choi’s chapbooks, selling for $12 and $15. They started attending Button’s live events after hearing about them from a friend, finding them to be an inexpensive, fulfilling way to spend a night together.

“It’s thought-provoking,” said Katie Snell, 26, of Minneapolis. “I cried.” Snell owns “Milk and Honey,” a book of Kaur’s poetry, she said. But that wasn’t her introduction to the form.

Years back, she said, she came across a book of sonnets at a used-book store and brought it home.

This article originally appeared in the Florida Courier.

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Oakland Museum Presents Landmark Retrospective Celebrating Beloved Bay Area Artist Mildred Howard

“Poetics of Memory” coincides with a year of major recognition for Howard. In 2026, she received the California Arts Council’s 50th Anniversary Award, honoring artists whose work has shaped California’s cultural and civic life, as well as the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Artist Impact Award. In 2025, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her transformative contributions to American cultural life.

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1 week ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Mildred Howard. Photo by Christine Cueto for the Oakland Museum of California, 2025.

Special to The Post

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) opened “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory,” the first major museum survey of Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, on June 12.

The exhibition spans five decades of Howard’s influential work, bringing together immersive installations, found-object sculptures, archival materials, and new commissions that explore memory, identity, and power in American life.

Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945 and raised in the East Bay, where she went on to study Afro-Haitian dance, make and sell clothing, and experiment with collage and sculpture.

Her multimedia art practice emerged from these experiences, later becoming associated with West Coast conceptual art, San Francisco funk, and a vibrant community of artists like Oliver Jackson, Betye Saar, and Raymond Saunders. Since the 1970s, she has used found materials and family stories to explore memory—both individual and collective.

At OMCA, visitors enter “Poetics of Memory” through a series of intimate galleries featuring Howard’s early mixed-media pieces and sculptures, along with a large video projection of a number of her public artworks.

Together, they emphasize Howard’s interest in everyday objects as powerful carriers of individual and shared stories. Highlights include collages that remix images of the artist herself; found-object sculptures like The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007) that address omissions in dominant narratives; and public works like “Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges” (2001) that transform urban space into a meditation on access and labor.

This culminates in a richly detailed “studio” environment, where works in progress, archival exhibition flyers, historic photographs of Howard and her community, postcards from fellow artists, and other materials offer insight into her creative process and daily life.

The exhibition then opens into a high-ceilinged, dramatically lit space that brings together Howard’s signature immersive installations. On one end, “Crossings” (1997/2026) – a field of hundreds of ceramic eggs leading to an ornate mirror – suggests cycles of birth, motherhood, and transition, while drawing on the emotional echoes of the Middle Passage. On the other end, “Blackbird in a Red Sky” (a.k.a. “Fall of the Blood House”) (2002) – a red glass shack bordered by a pond – also uses reflection and transparency to draw viewers into the work and prompt consideration of themes of identity and home.

Howard’s newest video installation, “Moving Stills” (2026), repurposes never-before-seen family footage she took as a teenager on a train trip to the American South. Projected onto cascading layers of translucent fabric that stretch across an entire gallery wall, the piece immerses viewers in a layered meditation on memory, migration, and time.

The “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” exhibit will be on display through Oct. 11 at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, CA 94612. Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Fridays to 9 p.m.

This story is sourced from the Oakland Museum of California press office.

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Oakland Director Boots Dazzles Once Again in ‘I Love Boosters’

Riley’s creative output is influenced by progressive ideals. His work, which includes six albums, the 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You,” and the 2023 comedy series “I’m a Virgo,” always shows that the alienation working-class people feel is inevitable under capitalism, he recently told The Guardian.

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3 weeks ago

June 10, 2026

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Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Keke Palmer star in “I Love Boosters” playing now in theaters. Directed by Oakland resident Boots Riley. Image courtesy of Neon.

“I feel lonely,” Keke Palmer’s character Corvette says in the first few minutes “I Love Boosters,” the new comedy adventure film from Oakland-based director Boots Riley.

“I wish I could feel lonely,” Naomi Ackie’s character Sade responds. “Try having kids.”

“I Love Boosters” teems with kaleidoscopic colors, sharp playful social critique, otherworldly plot twists, and fast-paced action, but it’s grounded in its main characters’ simple and relatable motivations: They want to be less isolated, and more free to pursue their own creative endeavors.

They’d like to design clothes and run a fashion boutique, but, unfortunately, they’re mostly busy surviving. Corvette and Sade, along with Mariah, played by Taylour Page, hustle and scheme through their brilliant scrappy organized crime group, the Velvet Gang. The gang regularly boosts clothes in the Bay Area and sells them at discounted prices.

Riley portrays the gang in a positive light in “I Love Boosters,” echoing the sentiment and title of a song he recorded 20 years ago with his hip-hop band, The Coup, where he praises boosters for providing poor communities with nice clothes they can afford: like a Robin Hood of the ’hood. But while morally righteous, materially, the gang is troubled. Corvette is haunted by unpaid bills and fears getting kicked out of the building where she squats, a shuttered fast-food chicken joint.

One thing that separates Riley’s film from most others about criminal gangs is that the Velvet Gang’s members work for a living. Theirs isn’t a greedy fantasy of becoming filthy rich, or for one last hit: Boosting is a job that still doesn’t pay nearly enough.

Visually, the film is a mix of psychedelia, afro-surrealism, noir, and perhaps a comic book.

The villain, Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore, an evil genius billionaire and fashion designer who runs the expensive clothing company the gang boosts from. She repeatedly appears on the news to put a target on the Velvet Gang members’ backs. When the gang ends up connecting with those who Christie directly exploits –workers here in the Bay Area, but also those in sweatshops overseas– the fight against Christie can commence; and uncoincidentally, Corvette starts to feel less lonely.

I don’t want to say much about that fight, but it’s delightful. Sci-Fi elements (which appear connected to Marxist theory) enter into the narrative to tie what’s become a pretty scatterbrained story together. Grounded by Palmer’s acting, “I Love Boosters” is a total joy and a refreshing break from the typical narratives we see these days. It’s totally over-the-top, but it knows it is.

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After 10-Year Wait, Fillmore Heritage Center Reopens in San Francisco

After serving as the economic and cultural hub of the Fillmore’s historically Black community for more than a decade, the center’s closure ended what was called the “Rebirth of the Cool,” referring to the neighborhood’s role during the height of Black Jazz in the United States.

Published

3 weeks ago

June 10, 2026

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Rev. Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church addresses community members at the Fillmore Heritage Center ribbon cutting. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

By Linda Parker Pennington, Special to The Post

Last Saturday morning, the cloudy skies cleared just as the highly anticipated ribbon-cutting ceremony began, marking the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore and Eddy.

The complex – which had once included Yoshi’s Jazz Club, the Lush Life Art Gallery, the Koret Heritage Lobby, a 54-seat microcinema, and the Black-owned 1300 On Fillmore restaurant – shuttered in 2015.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announcing the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center. Erika Scott, owner of Honey Art Studio, looks on with pride. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

“The Fillmore is the most important neighborhood in San Francisco’s history for centering Black culture, music, business, and community, and has shaped this City and influenced the entire country,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to the gathering of more than 100 community leaders, business owners, and public officials. “This building reflects the deep roots of the Fillmore. Urban renewal left deep scars that are still felt today. This Center celebrates a strong Black community that continues to shape San Francisco. I am proud to join the community as we reopen the Fillmore Heritage Center.”

Although the previous stakeholders will not be returning to the center, spaces are available for nonprofit organizations and ventures, such as Fillmore native Ericka Johnson’s Honey Art Studio.

“This Center will be an economic engine and a thriving venue that shines a light on the Black-owned businesses in this neighborhood and lifts the entire district,” Lurie continued. “Our City is committed to this community for the long term.”

“We’re excited to collaborate with the City to finally reopen these doors,” said Ken Johnson, a videographer and community leader who’d been lobbying for the reopening of the center. “It’s an opportunity to showcase the entrepreneurship and creative spirit of this ‘Harlem of the West’ and the ‘Rebirth of the Cool,’ grounded in our uniquely gifted Fillmore community.”

This month, through its Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the city will begin renting the building’s noncommercial spaces for pop-up events celebrating local talent, arts, and entertainment primarily centered in the Fillmore.