Tarishi Shuler, Michael Peterson, Phil C. Alexander & Yexandra Diaz. Photo Courtesy Verbal Slap.
Tarishi “Midnight” Shuler and Michael “Chief” Peterson stand at attention, eyes fixed on the audience. Their hands rest clasped at their waists, expectant. Shoulders roll back. Shuler takes a beat, and off screen, a fellow poet’s voice floats up from the audience. Go poets, good.
“The do’s and dont’s on how to write a group piece,” Shuler announces, and laughter rises from the crowd. “I wanna write,” the two announce in perfect unison, pointing at each other. “You write.” Another arm raised with conviction. “Who wrote it?” More laughter from the audience, this time stronger “We did.”
That poem—and many that came before it, written, edited, memorized and choreographed over months of rehearsal—catapulted Connecticut slam team Verbal Slap to the first in the country, a title that poets eked out after a narrow win at the Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico this spring. Now, the team is focused on spreading some of that literary love at home—and picking up another regional title at the Southern Fried Poetry Slam in Orlando, Florida and the Bigfoot Poetry Festival in Portland, Oregon in June.
In its current iteration, Verbal Slap includes Yexandra “Yex” Diaz, who is also the artistic director of The Word and New Haven’s 2026-28 Poet Laureate; Tarishi Midnight-Shuler, who like Diaz is also a teaching artist and educator and slam champion in Meriden (he also led The Word before Diaz); New Britain Poet Laureate Michael “Chief” Peterson; and Bridgeport-based poet Phil C. Alexander, who is also a teaching artist and recognized performance poet in the region.
Before the Chicharra Poetry Slam, the group placed first in the Southern Fried Poetry Slam Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee last June, and then second in the NorthBeast Regional Poetry Slam a month later ("they led in overall points but fell short due to penalty
deductions," clarified a statement from the team). In January, they placed first at New Haven’s Z Experience Poetry Slam, held at the Yale Peabody Museum to honor the life and legacy of the late Zannette Lewis.
At Chicharra, which unfolded in Albuquerque in March, the team ultimately won against the Las Vegas-based team (and reigning slam champion) Spotlight Poetry in a nail-biting tiebreaker. Diaz, who straddles the line between teacher and performer in her creative work, credited the victory to both the team’s extensive work together—members have complete trust in each other—and to the number of group pieces Verbal Slap has in its collective back pocket.
“I feel like we bet on ourselves,” Peterson added in a recent phone interview with fellow team members. “It was a great feeling, everyone pulling together. I can’t be more proud of my team, the way we relied on each other.”
That started long before the team ever arrived in Alberqueque. Last year, Verbal Slap came together twice a week to practice, each time for two hours. It wasn’t an easy feat for any of them: all four have full-time jobs, and responsibilities that range from parenting to coordinating open mic nights to mentorship work and performances. All also hail from different cities across the state, meaning that rehearsal was always a little bit of a trek. But “it’s a commitment that we make to each other,” Diaz said.
It paid off consistently: the team handily won the 33rd Annual Southern Fried Poetry Slam in Knoxville, Tenn. At that time, Verbal Slap still included poets GodIs Tymani Rain and Sharmont “Influence” Little as well; the two have since parted ways with the team.
This year, as poets built out their individual work, they also leaned into collaborating with one another, with an arsenal of group pieces that Diaz pointed to as a strength that sets the team apart. In slam poetry, group pieces are some of the most difficult to pull off, because they require shared timing, multiple voices, complex choreography, and behind-the-scenes editing before they’re ready to come to the stage.
In total, and even as members moved to once-weekly meetings, they created nine slam-ready group pieces, some with just two poets and others with the whole team. Even as team members wrote on cultural appropriation, police brutality, maternal mortality, and the idea of collective freedoms——all extremely heavy topics, and all pulled from their assorted lived experiences—they sought to weave in humor, wit and history as a balm.
“We’re serving as a model for how to shift how slam is done,” Diaz said. “All of our pieces are sparked in different ways,” and that’s part of what keeps the team fresh.
A listener can hear that in some of the finished work. Take, for instance, a duet from Peterson and Alexander that praises the beauty and meaning within a handshake, particularly one exchanged between Black men. Or as Peterson says early in the poem, “It’s about how Black men / learn tenderness / without ever being taught safety.”
In a video from Chicharra, the poets stand side by side, alternating lines with each other, voices sometimes overlapping. From the jump, they are so in sync it seems that they may just live like this, in a world where they finish each other’s sentences. No line misses: when they announce together that “Before a welcome / it was a weapon / We show our hands so we know we can be trusted,” it’s one of those bursts of language that makes a heart beat in time with the words.
The two press forward, adding rhythmic, synchronized choreography as they go. They do an elaborate, secret handshake—palms slap, fists bump, the sound clear and crisp, feet are airborne for a moment, knees bending over them as they land—and proclaim it their “entry fee into a secret society of Blackness / Which means we’re always doing too much.” In a video from Albuquerque, a person can hear the audience cheer them on as they keep going.
And then, with the precision of two dancers, they break it down, wrapping each movement in layers of meaning, showing in real time the love and trust—and the sharp edges of history—that exist within this physical intimacy. They pay homage to Black soldiers and veterans of the Vietnam War, tracing the origins of the Dap back to the mid 20th century. They take the audience back to the Civil Rights era, then move back into the present. They lay bare the joy and toil of simply living in a body that is Black and male, where emotional exhaustion is a constant.
“It started with a handshake / But / Too soft —” Peterson starts.
“Feels like insecurity,” Alexander chimes in, and the two press on together. Their voices rise and fall in perfect rhythm. “Too firm / Feels like intimidation / So we meet in the middle”—here, their hands clasp, the sound of them coming together audible—“To create trust. / This is how men learn tenderness / while holding masculinity.”
“Let’s go!” someone calls out from the audience, applause rising even as poets continue to speak.
“In that moment / We’re not suspects / Not statistics / Not strangers / We are proof / That touch / Is testimony,” the two continue. The poem rolls on, their voices strong and certain.
Group poems like that are part of how the group ultimately rose to an unlikely victory, both Diaz and Peterson suggested. At Chicharra, Verbal Slap went through two days of preliminary bouts, during which 12 teams from all over the country ultimately became four finalists. By the third day, they were facing Spotlight Poetry, the VA Boys, and the Phoenix-based group Ghost Poetry. To get to that final round, Shuler explained, the team had to come in first in a semifinal bout. They did, regrouping before the final competition.
“Going into the slam, we said, we can only do what we can do,” Shuler remembered. For months, they had been practicing for this moment, with lyrical and blistering critiques of police brutality, explorations of cultural misappropriation, and tight, witty takes on the act of writing itself.
They had perfected group pieces like “Make It Home,” in which Shuler and Diaz draw parallels between the violence of law enforcement and the violence of the American medical system on Black bodies, and “Overkill,” about the level of violence people inflict upon Black bodies even after they are gone. The second, Peterson said, grew out of reading that police still shoot at Fred Hampton’s gravestone, and that white supremacists frequently disturb and desecrate Emmett Till’s memorial site.
“When we say we want to make it home, what we mean is through the front gates, and not the pearly ones,” Peterson said in a recent phone call, quoting the first poem, and it was enough to make a person's heart squeeze tightly in their chest.
But when team members got to finals, it quickly felt like winning would be an uphill battle. For the first three rounds—each round includes one poem from each team, which judges scoring on a point system that drops the highest and lowest scores—Verbal Slap was in fourth place, and then inched into third. Only after the fourth round did members realize they had surged into second, and were tied to the percentage point with Spotlight Poetry.
“We had an option to split the winnings with the other team,” Peterson remembered. Instead, they opted for a tiebreaker.
In the “Do’s and Don’t’s of Writing A Group Piece,” Peterson and Shuler stand beside each other on stage, their sentences clear, clipped and neat. At first, they pull back the curtain on the inner workings of a group piece—how it comes together, who gets which line, the inevitable tension over who writes what. At first, the two are funny, personable; they lean into the strange intricacies of the process, because they know the audience is in on the joke. Peterson points to the fact that they are talking about a group piece within a group piece, and the meta-ness of it is brain-tickling good.
“It’s like a fourth wall break / Inside a fourth wall break / To the second power! / That’s 236 walls!” They announce, and the audience is laughing now. A few beats later, Shuler appears suspended in another universe, his arms windmilling around him.
“This is like the matrix—” the two mime the film’s most-memorialized and memed scene, in which Keanu Reeves bends time and space to dodge bullets—“Within the matrix! Two dudes / playing two dudes / Who happen to be two dudes / playing ourselves.”
More laughter from the audience. They’ve nailed it already, with just over a minute to go. As the poem continues to unfold, they rewind time, making the do’s and don’t’s about any group that has been othered in the U.S. It’s a hairpin turn, and they do it with such grace and speed that it takes a person a moment to catch up.
“This is how you write a Black group piece,” they announce, and the audience clocks the shift and explodes into cheering. On stage, the two don’t miss a beat. “Don’t commit crimes / You are one / Don’t reach in your pockets / Don’t have pockets / Don’t put your hands up / Don’t have hands / Don’t drive to work, your taillight’s busted / Don’t drive / Don’t wear black. Don’t be Black / Don’t be brown / Don’t have a tan / Isn’t this how you write a racist group piece?—”
The audience is feeling the poem, and even through a screen, we can too. Between the lines, there is a love song for every person in the audience—so many of them artists brimming with talent—who has ever been othered, and who still may feel othered or threatened under a federal administration that is anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ, anti-science, anti-education, and anti-history.
It worked its magic. The team won.
“I can’t speak for the fellows, but I will say that it is both validating and surreal,” Diaz said. “We know that Connecticut has amazing artists, we know that we boast amazing poets, and yet we aren’t recognized the way that we should be. To win back-to-back was really unprecedented.”
“We thank everybody in the community that supported us, that believed in us,” Shuler added.