Robert Brown is a writer, performance artist, and educator from Kansas City, Missouri, where he has twice held the title of Last Poet Standing. He is based in Chicago, IL, where he lives and studies poetry at Columbia College, which granted him the unique Recognition Award for Achievement in the Arts. A distinguished teaching artist at the American Jazz Museum, Robert has garnered a reputation for himself as a prodigious innovator of the jazz poetry tradition, since former ambassador of Mali to the United States, Abdoulaye Diop, said of his premiere spoken word performance “just like the griot, breath-taking.”

Certainly, Robert continued in this manner throughout his formative years as one of his city’s Brown Bombers, which the Pitch said to be “as famous as poets get in Kansas City without going national,” as a panelist on the hottest teen talk show on the planet Generation Rap (shout out), and as a mentor to young poets sprinkled around North America. Currently, Robert works as a Writing Consultant by day, and a broom flying instructor by night. He is blessed to have been a featured reader for many wonderful audiences, from that of the historic Green Mill, to the internationally renowned Encyclopedia Show. Upcoming publications? His work is forthcoming in the Chicago in Verse Anthology. He is working, prayerfully, on his first full-length book of poems, tentatively titled Grapevine.