Like all genre-tweaking geniuses, Rachel Kann’s work adds a perspective to the aesthetic landscape we didn’t even know was missing. And like all great new artists, now that she’s here she seems obvious, even essential.-Kotori Magazine --
Rachel Kann, winner of the LA Weekly Award, Backstage West Critic’s Pick Garland Award, and, most recently, the James Kirkwood Award in Fiction, brings her work to stages as diverse as Disney Concert Hall, Royce Hall, and California Plaza in Los Angeles, The San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts, and the Vans Warped Tour, to name just a few. She also features at poetry landmarks like The Nuyorican Poets' Café, Beyond Baroque, and The Green Mill. Her newest foray into the world of fiction has proven quite fruitful. In addition to her recent Kirkwood Award, her first collection of short stories, 10 for everything, hit the streets June 2007.
Rachel appears in the new anthology from Seal Press, Word Warriors, the first-ever anthology of female performance poets, edited by Alix Olson, foreword by Eve Ensler.
She's working within the confines of page poetry, spoken word, and hip hop, and then breaking down those boundaries to do something genuinely different, all the while laughing in the face of tired old gender roles. She brings the poetry solo, with her co-lab:ORATION musicians, and with DaKah 70 piece Hip Hop Orchestra. She has toured nationally and in Europe and Canada, collaborating with beatboxers including Rahzel (The Roots), MC Squared, Joshua Silverstein, and Kid Beyond, and appearing with Sage Francis, Mike Watt, Tre (Pharcyde), Nikka Costa, Kim Hill, Medusa, Antipop Consortium, Sole (anticon), Alias (anticon), and more.
Her hip-hop laced poetry appears on 100.3 The Beat, 90.7 KPFK, Sirius Stars, College Stations, and Underground Radio and Podcast Shows worldwide. Her track, “Familiar Taste of Blood” receives airplay in Europe, and the video for the track is gaining recognition.
She's performed for HBO's Def Poetry, BET's The Way We Do It, ABC’s Eye On L.A., and is a part of Higher Vibration's upcoming Spoken Word DVD, and the Special Edition Belly DVD (Artisan).
She's produced 3 cds, "PoeTTrY MOUTH" “word to the WHY?S” and her latest one, "ptomemaeic complex", and appears on the two latest DaKah cds, the two latest Enduser cds, the latest Tack-Fu cd, and numerous poetry compilation cds. She also performs her own one-woman poetry performance piece, "Haunted by want/guided by Don't-need", and has produced the four-year success, "co-lab:ORATION" at The Temple Bar in Santa Monica, CA. She's the winner of various invitational slams, including the “Different Type of Groove” $1000 slam and the "Urban Graffiti 4" $1000 Invitational Slam. She's been a member of the Los Feliz Slam Team, the Long Beach Slam Team (West Coast Regional Champs) and the Hollywood Slam Team.
In addition to her new fiction collection, she's published 4 books: glistening, glittering., another sad atlas, Idolizer/atrix and Haunted by want/guided by Don't-need, and appears in anthologies like So Luminous the Wildflowers, The 2006 edition of Rip Rap, PoeticDiversity’s LA Melange and the upcoming Tebot Bach Anthology.
In Spring 2008, Rachel will teach a performance poetry workshop at the prestigious UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She workshops poetry in High, Middle and Elementary Schools, Youth Detention Facilities for both males and females, and Rehabilitation Centers for teens. She was recently commissioned to create poetry curricula for K-5th graders throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District.
She has also made her mark in the world of podcasting with Eat Bird, which she co-hosts with Ragan Fox, and appears in award-winning experimental theatre in both LA and NYC.
“Dryly Funny. Radiant”
LA Times
“Exceptional”
LA Weekly
“Veteran poetry slammer Rachel Kann has a knack for punching lines into our guts as our pierced narrator of sorts… she's like a one-woman Greek chorus”
Backstage
“Kann reveals a knowledge of male/female dynamics, far more cruel and raw than anything Hemingway ever found out from screwing prostitutes, as in her story “Do It All the Time” (which would make for a more useful high school curriculum than The Sun Also Rises)”
Poetic Diversity
“Standing out as a hip-hop/goth-poet hybrid, Rachel Kann became synonymous with proud, funny, riot-inciting feminist ranting, and the rest is poet-girl history… If you’ve never seen her in action, she has the heart of a California Central-Coast hippy, the mouth of a Brooklyn working girl, and the energy of a Buddhist monk hopped up on pixie sticks and rum. Needless to say, over the years Rachel has become a beacon of good-vibes and sanity in the LA artistic wasteland.”
Kotori Magazine
“As befits a unique voice, Kann’s poetry is not easy to classify. It straddles the line between hip-hop and coffeehouse. From hip-hop she draws a sense of both wordplay and rhythm, an emphasis on how her poems sound. She works very well with the various musicians and producers on these CDs, fitting her words smoothly and tightly around the beats they provide (and vice-versa, the beats are also fitted around the words). At the same time, her own rhythms are organic, and tied to her own speech patterns. She never submits to the tyranny of the beat and the rhyme which often dominates hip-hop poetry.”
Poetix
“Rachel Kann…is probably somewhere teaching poetry workshops to incarcerated teenage girls and in general being bad-ass. If she were here, she would be performing some inspiring poem that takes a shout out to the broken and unwanted in all of us, a poem that calls us to celebrate the genius gift of the body—“tiny titties and all.” She is in so many ways the anti-Hollywood starlet. She is what is missing tonight.”
.ism Magazine
“Rachel Kann is one of my favorite female spoken word artists in the nation. The passion in her work is one of the first things that strikes, before you get seduced into her brilliant use of language and a voice like silken steel.”
Live Poets
A very impressive poetry reading by Rachel Kann on "Lie Down Beside You" flows in the vein of Ursula Rucker's beat-backed spoken word.
Iowa State Daily
Tack-Fu…enlists the sexy vocals of Rachel Kann for the twisted lovesick ode “Lie Down Beside You.”
Soundslam
