staceyannchin
Staceyann Chin is a working artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been a practicing poet since 1998. From the rousing cheers of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to poetry workshops in Denmark and London, to her critically acclaimed, Tony-Award winning performance in the groundbreaking Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin credits the long list of "things she has done" to her grandmother's hard-working history and the pain of her mother's absence.
NYU, Pace, Willamette, Holy Cross, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of New Hampshire, University of Miami, University of California at San Diego, Boston University, Grinnell College, these are only few of the "institutes of higher education" at which she has shared the stories surrounding her coming.Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner- up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam; winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television.
She has also been featured by cable access programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as many local radio stations including, WHCR and WBAI. The Joseph Pap Public Theatre has featured this young poet on more than one occasion, and Staceyann has enjoyed great success internationally, with much lauded performances in London, Denmark, Germany, and New York's own Central Park- Summer Stage. In 1999, Staceyann took the American Amazon Slam title in Aarhus, Denmark. Denmark so loved the young writer on her American Amazon Tour that her personal history, photo and work graced the cover of the national Newspaper The Politiken as well as the controversial, and spicy, Ekstra Bladet. Since then, many more Danish Newspapers have voiced their opinion of the poet from Montego Bay, Jamaica: The Information, Retorik Magasinet, and Berlingske. Various American publications, including the magazines A, Everybody, Mosaic, Curve, Venus, The New York Foundation for the Arts' (NYFA's) FYI, and Jane, as well as the newspapers, the New York Newsday, The Village Voice, and Drum Voices have featured Staceyann.
The myriad of journals and newsletters in which her work has appeared also include, The Shades Newsletter, GMAD magazine, the New York Blade, The Monsoon, and the Black women's magazine, Personal Personals.Her individual performances warranted her work being published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Pittsburgh Daily. Her work was also featured on 60 Minutes., and in February '05 on Showtime at the Apollo. Her poems can be found in her first chapbook, Wildcat Woman, as well as in the one she now carries on her back, Stories Surrounding My Coming, as well the anthologies, Skyscrapers, Taxis and Tampons (out-of-print), Poetry Slam, and most recently, Role Call:Hands Afire, Staceyann's first one-woman show ran for ten weeks at the 45 Bleecker Theater in the Summer of 2000.
The same Off-Broadway theater welcomed the 2nd Show, UNSPEAKABLE THINGS in the summer of 2001 before she took it to Copenhagen for a week long run. Next year, London, Helsinki, and Norway are in the pipelines for the show. Chin has also been the subject of on-screen ventures. The film Staceyann Chin was released in theaters in Denmark in 2001. It was also aired on the Danish National Television station. Between the Lines, a documentary that explores the notion of being Asian and woman and writer, is the latest to feature Staceyann. In 2002, Staceyann was nominated for the Rolex Mentor and Protege Art Initiative where she is being considered as a possible protege for Toni Morrison. In 2003, she completed a whirlwinf tour of South Africa, includeing Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, and Soweto.
She is currently internationally with Def Poetry Jam and will be doing colleges this spring upon her return.
"... giving off enough electric current to keep Manhattan in air conditioning for a century of summers. The hard working choruses of musicals like 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' and '42nd Street' can dance until their shoes lose their taps, but they still won't generate the energy found in this gathering of angry young poets.
"To quote Staceyann Chin, a rail-thin Jamaican with a fat head of hair: Imagination is the bridge between the things we know for sure and the things we need to believe when our world becomes unbearable. It allows Ms. Chin, who says that believing ''in any God takes guts,'' to create a liturgical, magically intoned credo of ''the smaller things" in which she can believe .
