Live Performances
For more than two decades, Michelle has performed at hundreds of college campuses as well as at many distinguished venues around the country. Employing multiple poetic forms and delivery styles—including narrative, folk arts/storytelling, hip-hop-influenced rhyme, and song—Michelle attempts to harness the transformative power of spoken word poetry in the hopes of taking audiences on an unforgettable journey that educates, challenges, and inspires.
“Mudang Magic”
During the COVID-19 lockdown, The Angelica and Russ Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts on the Ramapo College of New Jersey campus produced a virtual performance series called Made in Jersey. Made in Jersey featured a series of New Jersey based performing artists sharing new works-in-progress.
In her performance memoir “Mudang Magic,” Michelle Myers explores how words can hang onto grief and how memory can create a landscape of both loss and healing. The vulnerability of her storytelling and performance allows Myers to meditate on the entwining of experience as both emotional departure and spiritual return as she shares her reflections on her relationship with her mother and of losing her mother to cancer. Myers’ performance plumbs the depths of memory and delves into the idea that, sometimes, to know who we are, we have to retrace our steps. Utilizing spoken word poetry, storytelling, and song, “Mudang Magic” joins her and her mother’s stories in a way that acknowledges that with loss comes not only deep pain but revelation and renewal.
https://www.ramapo.edu/berriecenter/made-in-jersey-michelle-myers/
“Listen Asshole”
In response to the escalated anti-Asian violence, Studio Revolt and Yellow Rage collaborated on this spoken word film based on the poem “Listen Asshole.” The collaborators felt an expression of rage by and for Asian American women is urgently needed because quiet vigils, private grief, and "nice" celebrity PSAs are not enough and continue to shroud our communities with a dangerous silencing.
In this short film, the Philadelphia-based poetry duo Yellow Rage perform their poem “Listen Asshole” against a backdrop of people who represent the community’s most vulnerable populations and to whom the words are ultimately meant to protect and serve. The poem, originally written 20 years ago by Michelle Myers and Catzie Vilayphonh, unapologetically challenges common misconceptions of gender and “Asianness.” It was originally written as a bold response to racist and sexist questions too frequently and easily thrown at Asian American women denying them of their complexities and full humanity. The poem also seeks to defy the stereotypes that many people perpetuate about Asian Americans and calls out the systematic erasure of Asian American history and experiences. Through the poem, the poets speak hard truths with focused anger, rage and undeniable resilience.
Meet the Artist Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWwBcmZ8yJo&t=2s
“The World After You Spoke”
The Statue of Peace Plaza Committee (SOPPC) is an Asian American and female-driven project to build a monument in Philadelphia that commemorates the victims of sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. The first survivor to break the silence, Kim Hak-soon gave her testimony on August 14, 1991 and the SOPPC commissioned poets Michelle Myers and Yolanda Wisher to create poems in her memory.This work is supported by The Korean Council - https://womenandwar.net/kr/
In October 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown, the Dodge Poetry Festival took place online. Michelle was selected as a feature poet.