Join us for an evening of slam poetry hosted by former Fresno poet laureate, Bryan Medina. Not familiar with slam? We will introduce you to the roots of this oral performance through the voices of 10 poets connected to the California Central Valley. Five judges from the community will vote on their favorite poets and choose a winner.

Bryan Medina has been a fixture of the Fresno literary community for over 19 years. A former student of California’s Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, his poetry has graced stages in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. He founded the Inner Ear as a way to free poetry from the confines of academic institutions, making it accessible to all. Bryan has been awarded two City of Fresno Commendations for contributions to Fresno’s rich artistic and cultural heritage and has been featured as one of the four “Fresno Poets” from writer Nick Belardes’s Distinguished Valley Writers series as well as appeared in journals such as Poetry, Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, In The Gove, The San Joaquin Review, Jubilee, and Invisible Memoirs and was an Honorable Mention in the ‘06 Larry Levis Poetry Prize. He is a recent graduate of Fresno Pacific University and plans to teach Special Education.