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Artist
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
6+ albums
spoken wordpoetry
about
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word artist who fights for cultural pride and survival through how she spits and how she lives. As a teenager, Kelly developed a passion for spoken word at the birthplace of the international poetry slam movement, the Uptown Poetry Slam in Chicago. She also appeared as a series regular on PBS’ “Sneak Previews” and wrote weekly for the Chicago Tribune as a teen movie critic. Her love of poetry, politics, arts, and entertainment deepened as she flexed her skills as a founding member of Sirenz, an all female spoken word group that wove together experiences of the Asian, Black, and Latina American diasporas. Over the last ten years, she has become one of the country’s leading innovators of spoken word poetry. Touring extensively worldwide, she has featured at over 350 shows across the continental United States, Hawai’i, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Kenya, and the Netherlands. A highly sought-after performer on the college circuit, Kelly’s inciting, intimate, and entertaining poetry performances have rocked stages at venues like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and three consecutive seasons of the Peabody award-winning “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.” Kelly has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Erykah
