Bronx-based poet Roya Marsh is writing who she wants you to be

Roya Marsh Facebook Email Share Bronx native Roya Marsh stumbled into her slam poetry career in 2011. Marsh, a student at the time, was a juvenile poet still developing her cadence at infrequent trips to open mics in college. Marsh’s July date night outing to the Lower East Side’s Nexus Lounge was one such trip, she thought. So when famed slam host Nathan Pearson told the young Marsh, outfitted with rhyming verses fit for an open mic, that her pieces weren’t suited for the slam stage, Marsh scrambled. Marsh, unschooled in the slam style and surrounded by frequent slammers, relinquished her rhyming verses opting for a pre-written experimental piece titled “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Against the exposed brick of the Nexus Lounge, Marsh performed a reworking of the original ballad by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. Instead of the Dorothian desire for a land of opportunity though, Marsh’s four-minute piece was an indictment of the police brutality of the late aughts and early 2010s . Dorothy’s privilege to dream was too fanciful a freedom for Black boys and girls: “Somewhere over the rainbow I wonder how many colored boys have considered suicide while continuing on to the ends of their own rainbows. It seems that all our hard work and Black men are invisible to everyone except the police,” Marsh spoke in deftly timed breaths and predetermined crescendos whose formula was known only to her. Whether it was this secret formula, the content of the piece, or both, the poet doesn’t know, but the impromptu performance led to the slam semifinals and eventually to the poet’s career as nationally recognized slam poet. Now, more than a decade later, after retiring from the competitive arena of snaps and curated verse well-accoladed (Marsh won the Nuyorican Grand Slam Championship in 2014, competed in the 2014, 2016, and 2017 National Poetry Slam and in the 2015, 2016, and 2017 Woman of the World Poetry Slam, and has performed in 23 states), the Bronx-based poet is writing her sophomore poetry book titled Savings Time to be released in February 2025. The book succeeds […]

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