The-Hold: Holly Bass's "Gleam"

Poet Holly Bass

Brought to you in conjunction with our partnership with Coffee House TV, Holly Bass performs her poem, "Gleam".

Holly is a regular poetical contributor to Coffee House TV, a poet and multidisciplinary performance artist. Her poems have been published in Callaloo, nocturnes (re)view, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World Press, 2002) and Cave Canem X (forthcoming 2005).

She has performed her poetry at numerous universities and art centers, including the Kennedy Center, the Whitney Museum, and the Apollo Theater. In 1995, Jesse Jackson commissioned her to write a tribute poem for Maya Angelou, which she performed alongside the esteemed poet at the Rainbow Coalition Convention in Atlanta.

She has written for the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and was the first journalist to put the term “hip hop theater” into print in a 1994 article for American Theatre Magazine.

She has been a writer-in-residence for public schools in DC as well as serving with Americorps/WritersCorps. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing, and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University.