To speak truth to power is to tell what has happened with no apologies and no shame. For the poet, the challenge becomes how to make the hard stories into beauty and magic, how to connect the personal to the universal, how to turn truth into power. Join us and witness the powerful voices of Surviving the Mic as they speak truth and invoke their own power. Featured this evening will be Mojdeh Stoakley, Edith Bucio, Nazirah P. Mickey, Sherina Rodriguez, and Nikki Patin. Learn more atwww.survivingthemic.org.

Nikki Patin has been writing for over two decades. She has taught hundreds of workshops on performance poetry, body image, sexual assault prevention and LGBT issues. Patin has performed, taught and spoken at elementary schools, high schools, colleges and universities such as the University of Chicago, Adler School of Psychology, Northwestern University, Nancy B. Jefferson High School (located within the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center), University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and many others. Patin was featured on the fourth season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, was voted one of 30 under 30 most influential LGBTQ people in Chicago by Windy City Times and took the gold medal in the 2006 Gay Games International LGBT poetry slam. Patin was voted “Best Standout Performer” in the Dunedin Fringe Festival while headlining a tour of her one-woman show, “The Phat Grrrl Revolution” throughout New Zealand and Australia. She has released several chapbooks, a full-length collection of writing and design, two EPs and a full-length album entitled “Bedroom Empire.”

Patin designed and maintains www.nikkipatin.com and www.phatgrrrlrevolution.com. She is the creator of Surviving the Mic (www.survivingthemic.org), an organization dedicated to creating safe space for the creation and telling of stories of survivors of all kinds of trauma, with a special focus on Black- and female-identified survivors of sexual and domestic violence who also identify as performing writers. Nikki Patin is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.