Gabriel Ramirez
Knicks Poetry Slam Champion
Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo and Callaloo. Gabriel’s electrifying writing and performance are catalysts towards healing and brings awareness to mental health, Afro-Latinidad, the African Diaspora, self love, masculinity, and social change. Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre and other venues & universities around the nation. Gabriel was featured in Huffington Post, VIBE Magazine, Blavity, Upworthy, The Flama, and Remezcla. Gabriel’s work has also appeared in anthologies like Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020) Follow Gabriel @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com.
An international and award winning poet, Gabriel’s performances change people.
Gabriel also leads a Poetry Workshop:
I am Here: Affirmation as a form of Resistance
“Not being who I am is unacceptable.” – Nikky Finney
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde
A catalyst to choosing oneself through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth “I Am Here: Affirmation as a form of Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to that which has made us feel small, invisible and impossible throughout our lives. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from your childhood, someone who told you that you can’t or a country with systems that has showed you it doesn’t care whether you are alive or not, it’s time to become bigger. It’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth. In these workshops we will be reading texts by Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin, Jericho Brown, and Ocean Vuong in conversation with visual artists like Frida Kahlo, Kehinde Wiley, Flying Lotus and Nick Cave all of whose work remind us to speak our truth, love and survive.