Emily XYZ

Born in upstate New York, Emily XYZ is an American writer and performer who creates works for multiple voices, which she describes as “music without the instruments, where the words do the work of both rhythm and melody.” After moving to New York City in 1982, XYZ was active in the downtown performance art and music scene. Since 1992, XYZ has extensively performed in the United States and abroad with her reading partner and actress Myers Bartlett. The pair has joined seminal New York-based spoken-word collectives including the Nuyorican Poets Café Live! and Real Live Poetry. XYZ was featured on the PBS series The United States of Poetry that aired in 1996. Collections of her poems for both single and multiple voices have been published in several anthologies, including Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene 1974-1992 (2006: NYU Press), Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (1994: Holt), and in vol. 2: Poetry of a three-volume textbook Literature: Craft and Voice by Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse (2010: McGraw-Hill). A book and audio CD collection of XYZ’s two-voice poems entitled The Emily XYZ Songbook was published in 2004. In 1996, XYL and Edwin Torres curated poetry-performance series at The Kitchen entitled Texty the Clown: The Inner Workings of Language in the Poet-Modern Ear and she performed as part of its first evening. For more information please visit: http://www.emilyxyz.com/