The Guild is a collage of renowned, Michigan-based artists that have collectively performed throughout the country. Approaching spoken word with an unapologetic style of storytelling, these artists are best known for their honest and original spoken word poetry, which centers around the principles of social consciousness, scholarship, diversity, love, community action, and education.
Incorporated in 2017, The Guild has remained steadfast to its mission of promoting education, empowerment, and unity through poetry. With each poet bringing their unique style and coming from a diversity of backgrounds, The Guild is like no other poetry collective, creating a voice of their own.
Our Mission
The mission of The Guild Inc. is to create and promote an atmosphere that is conducive to the political, cultural, social, spiritual, and educational growth of our audiences internationally through spoken word. We will conceptualize and perform socially conscious events in order to fulfill this mission, and to uphold our three pillars of creating community change: to educate and enlighten, to empower disenfranchised communities, and to inspire unity. Each individual pillar is defined as follows:
(1) Educating and Enlightening
Over the past 10 years, the public education system budget has continuously reduced. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), out of 34 countries, the U.S. population ranks 27th in math, 17th in reading, and 20th in science.
Because of the shortcomings in the public education system, we, The Guild recognize the responsibility to step in as artists. We perform spoken word to educate the youth in an engaging and relatable way, in order to serve as a catalyst for conversations and dialogues that center around policy change and other tangible systemic actions to promote education reform.
(2) Empowering Disenfranchised Communities
From using our voices to support gender, sex, and race equality, to spreading awareness of police brutality and poverty, The Guild addresses social issues in a constructive way to stimulate critical conversations. Our head-on approach to spoken word keeps our audiences engaged and leaves them inspired to work towards attaining sustainable changes for themselves and their communities.
(3) Inspiring Unity
As humans, biologically, we are nearly 99% similar.
Thus, outside the veils of racism, classism, cultural differences, and social constructs, we are all much more alike than different. As a result, The Guild chooses to celebrate and highlight what we collectively share with our audiences, while also appreciating our differences in ideology and identity, in order to build coalitions and unify communities beyond all boundaries.
A History of Success
From emceeing on the stage of HBO’s Lexus Verses and Flow to competing at the CUPSI Finals National Competition to delivering TEDx Talks and being published in the Huffington Post, Forbes, and countless university publications, the artists of The Guild have extensive experience publishing as well as performing poetry. A biography of each individual artist can be found below, which illustrates the diversity of talent and identities that make The Guild, and details our portfolio of performances.