Over 40 poets from around the country will gather this Sunday, May 28, at the Cantab in Cambridge to honor and remember and celebrate poet Lisa King who passed away in February. King was, according to the Center for New Words announcement of the event:

Poet, writer, spoken word artist, National Poetry Slam champion and Amazon Super Slam repeat champion, Lisa produced and hosted the first National Queer Slam for the 1995 OUTWRITE conference in Boston MA.

A trailblazer of the slam poetry/spoken word movement of the early 90’s, Lisa was a punk renegade, activist, rabble rouser, butch dyke, creative, passionate & an inspirational force.

Lisa King was born in Boston and began writing poetry at age 11, inspired by her fourth grade teacher. At the urging of friends, she began reading her work publicly in 1988 and became a force in the burgeoning slam scene, both locally and nationally, in the early 1990s. She was part of the Boston Slam Team that captured first place at the 1993 National Poetry Slam in San Francisco and was an individual Boston Slam champ. King was the first winner, in 1996, of the Amazon Slam, an all-women’s competition that regularly drew standing room crowds to Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge. King was also interested in nurturing other performance poets, particularly in the queer community: In 1995, she founded the OutWrite Slam, a national competition for LGBT slam poets. Her work inspired countless others to grab the mic and let it rip: “Lisa King made me a poet,” wrote local performer Jaclyn Friedman to the weekly e-newsletter Boston’s Queer Agenda. “I still remember the instant I laid eyes on her, at a benefit for Boston NOW in 1995. She was on fire with truth and I thought, ‘I could do that.’ A month later I entered my first slam and came in third. She won.” (from BayWindows)

King”s influence in the Spoken Word community extended from coast to coast, and her words influenced some of the best-known names in the Slam and Spoken Word world. Many of those poets will gather on Sunday at the Cantab to remember Lisa and celebrate her life in a Memorial for a Warrior Poet, hosted by Friends of Lisa King.

More information, photos and audio recordings of Lisa reading her work can be found at Truth Serum – Lisa King Memorial.