Taylor Mali

Taylor Mali spent nine years teaching English, history, and math, including stints at Browning School, a boys' school on the Upper East Side of New York City, and Cape Cod Academy, a K-12 private school on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He now lectures and conducts workshops for teachers and students all over the world. In 2001, Taylor Mali used a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts to develop the one-man show "Teacher! Teacher!" about poetry, teaching, and math. He is a strong advocate for the nobility of teaching and in 2000 he set out to create 1,000 new teachers through "poetry, persuasion, perseverance, or passion." He finally reached the mark on April 1, 2012.^[12]

Reception

In 2015, Melissa Lozada-Oliva performed the poem, "Like Totally Whatever (after Taylor Mali)" on the final stage of the National Poetry Slam in Oakland, as a rebuttal to Mali's famous poem, "Totally like whatever, you know?". Lozada-Oliva criticized Mali's piece for lacking context, such as how patriarchy impacts women's struggles to speak up. Lozada-Oliva's poem received thunderous applause and secured her team, the House Slam Boston, the championship title that year at NPS. Shortly after the competition, the poem was posted to Button Poetry, which made Lozada-Oliva go viral overnight.^{[13][14][15][16][17]}

Published works

Books

• What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World, 2012 -
  ISBN 978-0399158544
• The Last Time As We Are, 2009 -
  ISBN 978-0982148839
• What Learning Leaves, 2002 -
  ISBN 1-887012-17-6
• The Whetting Stone, 2017 -
  ISBN 978-1931307345

• Poetry on Stage: At the Red Barn Theatre, Key West, Danne Hughes, ed. 1995
  ISBN 978-1-888036-00-8
• Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry, Regie Cabico & Todd Swift, eds. 1998,
  ISBN 1-55065-112-9
• Will Work For Peace: New Political Poems, Brett Axel, Ed. 1999,
  ISBN 0-9666459-1-X
• Bearing Witness, Margaret Hatcher, ed. 2001,
  ISBN 978-1-56976-130-4
• Freedom to Speak Anthology, Patricia Smith & Debora Marsh eds 2002,
  ISBN 1-893972-07-0
• The Spoken Word Revolution Mark Eleveld, ed. 2003,
  ISBN 978-1-4022-0037-3

• American Fairy Tales, audiobook, 1998
• Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, audiobook, 2000
• Hope Along the Wind: The Story of Harry Hay, documentary, 2002
• Blizzard!, audiobook, 2003
• The Great Fire, audiobook, 2003
• Revenge of the Whale, audiobook, 2005
• ESCAPE! The Story of the Great Houdini, audiobook, 2006
• Close To Shore, audiobook, 2007

Awards

• 1996, 1997, 2000, 2002 - National Poetry Slam winning team
• 2001 -
  U. S. Comedy Arts Festival
  jury prize for best solo performance, "Teacher! Teacher!"
• 2003 - AudioFile Earphones Award for The Great Fire.

See also

• Performance poetry
• Poetry slam
• Spoken word
• Voice acting
• Bowery Poetry Club

References