Regie Cabico is a poet and spoken word pioneer, having won the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam in 1993 and taking top prizes in the 1993, 1994 & 1997 National Poetry Slams. Television appearances include 2 seasons on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He co-edited Poetry Nation: A North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry (Vehicule Press, 1998). He is a recipient of a 2008 Future Aesthetics Arts Award Regrant from The Ford Foundation/Hip Hop Theater Festival, 3 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multidisciplinary Performance, Larry Neal Awards for Poetry 2007 (3^rd Place) and 2008 (1^st Place), a 2008 DC Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. He received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He is a former Artist-In-Residence at NYU's Asian Pacific American Studies Program and has served as faculty at The Banff Centre's Spoken Word Program and Kundiman, an Asian American Writers Retreat. As a theater artist he has directed 2 plays for the 2007 & 2008 Hip Hop Theater Festival, Elegies in the Key of Funk and The Other Side. He received 3 New York Innovative Theater Award Nominations for his work in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. The Kenyon Review recently named Regie Cabico the "Lady Gaga of Poetry."

He is the Youth Program Coordinator for Split this Rock Poetry Festival and is the artistic director of Sol & Soul, an arts and activist organization. He is the co-founder of Sulu Dc, a monthly Asian American Performance Series and is the co-director of Capturing Fire: A Queer Spoken Word Summit. He is pleased to be returning as part of The Banff Centre's 2011 Spoken Word Faculty.

I Got It Bad
For Nina Simone

nina look at the sky  april clouds hang a fat
sappy syrup on my saddest day
played you  monday night
my day unbearable as a wool coat in april
came back to find my bed empty as a tire swing in winter

nina in my saddest hour
you have crooned me over a cruel block
of loneliness when unrequited love
is an italian bartender who flirts with you
from the torso and offers you
more lies than a tiramisu

yes nina, monday night i was so terribly sad
sadder than  a parlor of long veils,
carrying groceries up too many flights of stairs

& the sound of your voice so full & broad-shouldered
made the day with all its drama into bangles & diamonds
nina you made me a culinary priestess
you placed a bojangling spell on me

crooning to the sizzling oil as i pranced like a tiger
among the tambourines & tin cans
the raindrops applauded & the single wine glass wept

because i found my inner nina
nina nubuan mona lisa woman painted
with egyptian mascara 

you use silence the way a woman’s figure
made jesus bend at the knees bend ache break
to the will of your beautifully blessed contralto

crackling bittersweet as you held a phrase
long enough for green finches to fly out the winter gloom
nina, the storyteller, nina a river lonely as hell,
nina tossed like an ark full of sparrows

you can honky tonk the bones of kali
& steal the lightning from her toes
listen nina, i think its gonna rain again
human kindness is overflowing, flowing harder
even in the cruelest time