Bob Holman

Bob Holman is a leader of the spoken word poetry movement including slam and hiphop poetries. Holman also teaches at Columbia and NYU and is founder of the downtown New York spoken word mecca, the Bowery Poetry Club. For years he has been a public poet in the oral traditions of the skaldic bards, Homeric warblers, and West African griots, while publishing/editeding sixteen books, including Sing This One Back To Me (Coffee House), A Couple of Ways of Doing Things (a collaboration with Chuck Close), American Book Award winner Aloud!: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (co-editor), and Crossing State Lines: An American Renga (co-editor). Holman is a proponent of poetry-media collaborations: he produced five seasons of “Poetry Spots” for WNYC-TV, winning three Emmys, and his five-part PBS series, “The United States of Poetry”, which won an INPUT (International Public Television) Prize. He was the host of MTV’s “Spoken Word Unplugged,” appeared on “HBO Def Poetry Jam,” and created the first major spoken word record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury. In preparation for “Language Matters,” he spent two months in West Africa filming the West African griot traditions, spending time with Toumani Diabate and Vieux Toure, and the Tuareg and Dogon tribes. He is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. After the show premieres on PBS, the plan is for Bob to tour the globe in support of local language activists.

For more information, please visit Bob’s website.