Described by Cornel West as an artist who “…speaks his truth with a power we desperately need to hear,” Bryonn Bain is Brooklyn’s own spoken word champion and hip hop poet. Wrongfully imprisoned during his second year at Harvard Law, Bain sued the NYPD, was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and wrote the Village Voice cover story, “Walking While Black”, which drew the largest response in the history of the nation’s most widely-read progressive newspaper. Bryonn currently hosts BET-J’s current affairs talk show, My Two Cents, airing weekly in 27 million homes worldwide.

At 18 years old, Bain produced Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf at the world famous Apollo Theater. Bain created the hip hop/spoken word remake of the Broadway hit The Wiz,  What It Iz: The Spoken Wordical, which won rave reviews at Yale, Longwharf and American Place theaters. Other credits range from a South African freedom fighter in My Children, My Africa to independent films such as Hunting in America (Roxbury Film Festival winner) and Filmic Achievement (Nolita Film Festival winner). Bain recently played a cult leader in Pig Hunt, directed by Academy Award winner Jim Isaac (Gremlins, The Fly, Star Wars) and slated for release in 2008. Beginning in December, look for Bain as the lead in the Off Broadway comedy From Auction Block to Hip Hop at the Florence Gould Theater (produced by the creators of the NYC Platanos and Collard Greens.)

A Nuyorican Grand Slam Poetry Champion, Bryonn has performed at over 100 U.S. colleges and universities, as well as in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. Featured in the documentary Urban Scribe, his acclaimed debut album Problem Child — laced by the producers of artists ranging from Jay-Z to Dead Prez — fuses hip hop and spoken word with reggae and other world music. The grassroots organization Bryonn founded in 1997, Blackout Arts Collective, has organized workshops and performances reaching prisons and public schools in twenty-five states, and works regularly with teenagers incarcerated at Rikers Island prison.

Having taught hip hop and spoken word at NYU and Columbia, this Fall Bain follows the footsteps of legendary Black Arts pioneer Sekou Sundiata as “Poet-in-Residence” at the New School University.