Cyrée Jarelle Johnson always brings raw fearless truth and the realest crip insight fully embedded in absolute lyrical lounge. This is exactly who you want on every talk show and who you wish would write, read, and touch tour your biography, your bedtime story of revolution and preservation, or your grandmother’s dance party. This Jersey cyborg makes Siri seem so early aughts while reminding us all that intelligence is artificial. You ought not sleep on this poetry.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a writer and librarian living in New York City. His first book of poetry SLINGSHOT will be published by Nightboat Books in 2019. He is currently an Undergraduate Creative Writing Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where he is also a candidate for an MFA. His work has appeared recently in The New York Times and WUSSY. He has given speeches and lectures at The White House, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The University of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, Tufts University, and Mother Bethel AME Church, among other venues. He is a founding member of The Harriet Tubman Collective and The Deaf Poets Society.

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There is photography, video and audio documentation of this performance, available below. The video is captioned in English and features live American Sign Language interpretation.

All documentation is released under Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike (CC BY-SA)