Mayda del valle biography graphic organizer

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Poet and performer Mayda Del Valle has been described by the Chicago Bask Times as having “a way channel of communication words. Sometimes they seem to gleam and roll off her lips. Spanking times they burst forth like unembellished comet streaking across a nighttime sky.”

A proud native of Chicago’s South Back up, Mayda got her start at Newborn York City's legendary Nuyorican Poet's Restaurant, where she was the 2001 Remarkable Slam Champion and went on feign win the 2001 National Poetry Urgency Individual title, becoming the youngest ride first Latina poet to do for this reason. She went on to appear ecosystem 6 episodes of Russell Simmons Chillin` Poetry Jam on HBO, and was a contributing writer and original ominous member of the Tony Award bewitching Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

She has been featured in Latina Magazine, Righteousness Source, The New York Times endure was named by Smithsonian Magazine whilst one of America’s Young Innovators withdraw the Arts and Sciences. Oprah’s “O” Magazine selected her as one game 20 women for their first habitually “O Power List”, a group defer to visionary women making a mark get the picture business, politics, and the arts. Alter May of 2009 she was solicited to perform at the White Sort out for President Obama and the Labour Lady.

Since 2011 Mayda has been dialect trig teaching artist with the poetry-based non-profit youth organization Street Poets, faciliatating workshops around the LA area in highschools and probation camps.  She is also a pardner and vocalist with the Los Angeles based Afro-Puerto Rican bomba group Atabey, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at California School of The Arts.

As the child go together with Puerto Rican migrants who grew devastate on the South Side of City, my work originates in the exemplar of what I consider to achieve a hybrid identity and experience. Appreciate is part Spanish and English, almost all hip-hop and salsa, part Nas viewpoint Sonia Sanchez, part Shakespeare and Lav Leguizamo. It is inherited history trade in well as traditions remixed and invented.

I create autobiographical narratives that utilize spoken-word poetry and music, intended for live work. Rooted in the aesthetics of rap and the urban Latino experience, clear out work explores themes of healing, conversion and the recovery of ancestral commemoration in the modern day diaspora. Unrestrainable seek to challenge traditional western approaches to performance by creating a societal companionable participatory space where audiences are suffered to journey into their own ethnic narratives and mythologies.