Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, edited by Alix Olson with a foreword by Eve Ensler, brings together new and signature poems as well as personal essays by some of the performance poetry world's most exciting female voices.

Published by Seal Press, $15.95

Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Published by Soft Skull Press, $17.95

Author Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz tells the story of slam's origins in the roofless, unheated Nuyorican Poets Café and then traces the explosive growth of slam as the media pick up on the trend—MTV's Unplugged begins to feature slam poets; PBS runs the mini-series The United States of Poetry, produced by then-Nuyorican impressario, Bob Holman; Lollapalooza adds a spoken word tent; and Holman also launches a spoken word label with Mercury Records.

Aptowicz shows how, rather than depend on the fickle media for continued support, Slam instead deepens and broadens organically, avoiding the flash-in-the-pan flame-out of, say, the grunge scene. The author also establishes a relationship between the poetry slam world and the academic poetry world, encouraging interaction between academia and slammers, especially the poets of color, the youth slammers and the burgeoning hip hop poetry scene.

She also shows how the scene has created the only non-academic way to make a living as a poet, as many poets are able to quit the day job through the opportunities created from touring, publishing, performing, audio downloads and matures to where it is a key component of educational initiatives and political campaigns.