Ishle Park is coming to East Meets Words!

Ishle Park, poet extraordinaire, songstress, activist, is coming to town. She’ll be here on June 8 for the East Meets Words feature (check the calendar for more info), and we’re super excited to be bringing her.

Here’s a snippet from her profile on pbs’s “searching for america” program. You can see the whole thing here.

GROWING UP IN THE U.S.
I grew up in Whitestown, Queens–a small suburb of New York. When I was growing up, it was a predominately Italian neighborhood, and it was pretty difficult to live there as a Korean kid. My family was one of the few Asian American families living there at that time. It also made me aware of race politics early on in life, because the racism was so blatant. I ended up hanging out a lot outside of my neighborhood. My boyfriend lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which became the neighborhood that I grew up in. It is more Puerto Rican and black. So my childhood was very interesting.

SPOKEN WORD BEGINNINGS
I was invited to this reading called “Tongues Afire: Asian and African-American poetry.” A lot of people I admired were reading that night, such as Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Regie Cabico, and Roger Bonair-Agard. I read these two short literary poems. And then I read this one that was more like a rant, you know. And people were kind of going crazy over it. So that was my first taste of the whole performance poetry scene. Then I went to a couple local open mikes and I started to read.

Eventually, people asked me to do features and it kind of blossomed from there. The first year that I slammed was 2001. And then things went crazy. From 2001 to 2003, everything kind of happened. I competed in New York at Bar 13. I slammed and I won. I won the LoudPoet of the Year and Grand Slam Championship for that actual venue. Then a talent agent signed me and I went to nationals representing my team. So, it was kind of crazy like that. In terms of getting national visibility, I think it all happened within one year. It was pretty surprising.