This Spring quarter, the UC Santa Barbara MultiCultural Center will hold its quarterly spoken word event at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 21, 2016, at the newly opened Rebar Coffee near the Funk Zone.
Known as the “People’s Poet,” Kahlil Almustafa is the 2002 Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion and comes to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles to perform An Evening of Spoken Word.
Kahlil Almustafa is also an educator, mentor and author of four books of poetry, including Growing Up Hip-Hop, which is used in classrooms nationwide.
Almustafa is a recipient of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival as a grantee of the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant, funded by the Ford Foundation as well as the Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists grant, which receives funding from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund.
Currently, Almustafa is a doctoral candidate in educational leadership for social justice at Loyola Marymount University.
In addition to his performance at Rebar, Almustafa will also facilitate a free workshop for UCSB students called “We Get Our Power from the Sun: Performance Poetry and Hip-Hop” from 12-3 p.m. Thursday, April 21, 2016, in the MCC Lounge.
For more information about the People’s Poet, visit www.kahlilalmustafa.weebly.com.
— Carol Dinh is the publicist and marketing coordinator at the UCSB MultiCultural Center.