Jasmine Mans

Jasmine Mans is an American poet, performer, and author whose work sits at the intersection of spoken word poetry, social justice, and the literary traditions of Black American expression. Mans grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and developed her voice as a poet in the slam poetry tradition, performing at venues and competitions around the country and building an online following through video performances that have reached millions of viewers. Her work is deeply rooted in the Black oral tradition and in the traditions of protest poetry, and she writes with the kind of embodied, performative energy that characterizes the best spoken word poetry even when rendered on the page.

Mans’s debut poetry collection for young adults, Black Girl, Call Home (2021), is a celebration and examination of Black womanhood in America — its beauty, its pain, its complexity, and its particular relationship to home, belonging, and the larger forces of racism and misogyny that seek to diminish and define it. The collection draws on personal experience and on the traditions of Black feminist poetry, and it was received with enormous enthusiasm from young readers, educators, and literary critics who recognized in it a voice of genuine power and urgency. The book became a bestseller and earned Mans recognition as one of the most important young poets writing for and about young Black women in America today.

Mans’s work is characterized by its emotional directness, its political clarity, and its beauty — she writes with the precision and craft of a serious literary poet while maintaining the accessibility and energy of a performer who knows how to hold an audience. Her poems move between celebration and elegy, between anger and tenderness, between the personal and the political, always grounded in the specificity of the Black female experience she is documenting and honoring.

Jasmine Mans continues to write, perform, and teach, her work reaching young people through schools, libraries, literary events, and the digital platforms where her performances have found their largest audience. Her contributions to poetry for young adults, and to the ongoing tradition of Black poetry as social witness and celebration, mark her as one of the defining voices of her generation.