Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in PEN American, Muzzle, Vinyl, and other journals, and his essays and criticism have been published in The New Yorker, Pitchfork, The New York Times, and Fader. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.


Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program. A recipient of numerous awards including the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Elgin Award for speculative poetry, she co-hosts the poetry podcast VS alongside fellow poet Danez Smith. Franny has taught creative writing for over ten years in various contexts, including Williams College, the University of Michigan, Project VOICE, and Inside Out Literary Arts.
She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

A former Chicago social worker, Peter Kahn has been an English teacher since 1994 and a Spoken Word Educator since 2003 at Oak Park/River Forest High School. His students can be seen in Louder Than a Bomb and America to Me. A founding member of the London poetry collective Malika's Kitchen, he co-founded the London Teenage Poetry Slam and, as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths-University of London, created the Spoken Word Education Training Programme. Peter was a featured speaker at the National Council of Teachers of English's annual convention and runner-up in the NCTE and Penguin Random House Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry. Along with Patricia Smith and Ravi Shankar, he edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, reviewed in the New York Times by Claudia Rankine. Peter's 2020 poetry collection, Little Kings, has poems featured in the London Guardian and The Forward Book of Poetry. 

A founding member of the Oak Park & River Forest High School Spoken Word Club, Dan "Sully" Sullivan is a three-time Chicago poetry slam champion and author of The Blue Line Home (EM Press, 2014). He is a recipient of The Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, the Earl J.S. Ho Creative Writing Teaching Award, and the Writer in Southeast Asia Award. Sully holds an MA/MFA from Indiana University. His work has been featured on National Public Radio and HBO's Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry.

Timba Smits is a curious, multidisciplinary graphic artist and lifelong member of the Daydream Club. His work--often characterized by nostalgia and childhood memories--stretches across both analog and digital mediums and combines a recognisable blend of illustration, typography, satirical humour, and pop-cultural references. Notable clients include AirBnB, Apple, Canon, Coors (Miller Lite), Disney, ESPN, Faber, Laurence King, Playboy, Popular Science, & Wired. Learn more about his work at https://timbasmits.com/