A Cross-Continental Roar!

In 2021, seventeen Indigenous spoken word artists from North and South America performed their works at Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) in Toronto, Canada. This anthology, featuring poems from each of the performers, is the result of this remarkable cross-border collaboration. Digitally enhanced with QR codes, Slam Coalkan  links readers to the poets’ performances at the festivals.

From these pages the poets sing their hopes and their dreams. These are the voices of resistance, voices that speak out against the evils of colonialism, racism, transphobia, and genocide. Voices that cry, shout, whisper and roar passionate messages to the world.

Don’t miss your chance to see and hear this remarkable international collaboration
of slam poetry and performance!

“This collection is an invitation, a re-focusing, and a collaboration long overdue. Persistent and affirming, the poets pull our gaze away from centered norms of power, empire, and colony. In this, every poem is a world, unique to the storyteller, diverse and full, maintained as living response to the brutality of oppression. Every page is necessary and compelling – an awakening, and a ‘body that transmutes hate in song.’”
—Tyler Pennock, author of Bones

“This collection breathes life into ancient dreams of Coalkan, a prophecy of the Condor of the South meeting the Eagle of the North brought forth by Indigenous peoples of what we currently call the americas. Born out of connection, it is striking to read and witness work of slam poetry—poetry created for the stage to reach from the blood of the poet into the beating hearts of the audience, come together to honour the deeply rooted Indigenous identities of the poets offering their work to us in this collection. Take the time to sit with these words, to scan the QR codes and listen to the voice and breath of the poets as they honour a prophetic call. Imagine what futures can come of these threads of energy pulling us over continents, connecting us to each other, just as the water of the earth reaches from rivers to lakes to oceans and back again, just as the migration of great winged creatures teaches us. We are not separate from our Indigenous siblings and kin throughout the world, and this collection, importantly the first of its kind, allows us to witness the calls from brilliant Indigenous voices across time and space to come together in this changing world and become the dreams our ancestors dreamed for us.”
—Smokii Sumac, author of you are enough: love poems for the end of the world.

Slam Coalkan is edited by Jennifer Alicia Murrin and Renata Tupinambá.
Cover art: Philip Cote III, “Flood Story” (top) and Gustavo Caboco, “Returno à terra” (bottom).

Kegedonce Press is grateful to Toronto International Festival of Authors and Festa Literária das Periferias for their collaboration on this publication!