Tenth Annual LA Get Down Festival Opens in April at Greenway Court Theatre

The 10th Annual L.A. Get Down Festival is a celebration of Los Angeles' arts communities through spoken word in honor of U.S. National Poetry Month. The Festival runs from April 10 through April 26, and the last three weekends of April will be jam-packed with spoken word performances, workshops, competitions, poetry slams, and appearances by famous artists, emerging performers, and future talents in the world of hip-hop and spoken word.

Friday, April 10, 2026 8pm - Wordsmith Achievement Award

The Wordsmith Achievement Award honors an artist whose mastery of language has made a lasting impact on spoken word, poetry, and storytelling. It celebrates voices that use the power of words to inspire community, elevate truth, and influence the next generation of artists.)

This year's awardee is PAM WARD. LA native Pam Ward recently released her poetry anthology, BETWEEN GOOD MEN & NO MAN AT ALL,( World Stage Press) and is the author of novels, WANT SOME GET SOME,(Kensington) and BAD GIRLS BURN SLOW, (Kensington). A UCLA graduate, California Arts Council Fellow and Pushcart Poetry Nominee, Pam is also a founding member of the Leimert Park Book Fair. Published in numerous publications, including Voices of Leimert Park, New York's Renaissance Noir and the LA Times, she was recently honored by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2025 as the city's Trailblazer writer. In 2024, Pam participated in the first Poetry Olympics in Paris and has been writer-in-residence and a board member of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation as well as The World Stage in Leimert. Her poetry/multimedia production, I Didn't Survive Slavery for This!, was featured throughout Los Angeles and appeared in the Leimert Park Theater Festival. She's the program director for the feminist political poetry troupe, THE OVARY OFFICE which showcased at the LA Festival of books in 2019. Pam recently completed a YA novel, STOVES DON'T CRY and the historical novel, I'll Get You My Pretty, based on her family's contributions to Central Ave and their role in the Black Dahlia Murder. She's recently been anthologized in Catch Fire, which documents the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton Fire. She was formally hired to write a commemorative poem for UCLA's Black Alumni Association which she just performed at Royce Hall.

Saturday, April 11 at 8 pm - Tyne Daly in American Voices

A poetic collaboration presented by Greenway Arts Alliance and Tasty Words Productions with director Alan Myerson

Tyne Daly loves poetry. And she wants you to love it too. American Voices is a curated collection of Ms. Daly's favorite poets, directed by Alan Myerson. Please join us as this iconic award-winning actor reads them to us.

Tyne Daly appeared in eight Broadway shows, winning the Tony Award for Gypsy. She won six Emmy Awards for her work in television (Cagney and Lacey, Judging Amy, Christy). She is an inductee in the American Theatre Hall of Fame and the recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sunday April 12th 12pm - Brian Sonia-Wallace (Workshop- Our Words are Our Monuments)

We write ourselves into being. The typewriter insists on permanence. Every mistake -- evidence of a real person behind the keys. Join former Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace in this generative workshop that asks: What can it mean to belong? In the city, in the body, in relation to each other. In an age that threatens erasure, how can our words become a monument to our communities that survive? You will leave with a new poem and ideas for how it might live beyond the page -- in music, on walls, and in conversation with the public.

Brian Sonia-Wallace is the former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, a City of Los Angeles Master Artist, and an Academy of American Poets and LA County Public Artists in Development Fellow. He is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (HarperCollins) and Maze Mouth (Moon Tide Press), with writing appearing in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, LitHub, Rattle, and American Poets, and performing from Walt Disney Concert Hall to the Kennedy Center. He founded RENT Poet, a ten-year poetry enterprise that has generated over half a million dollars in revenue, employed dozens of poets, and brought thousands of custom poems into trains, malls, national parks, Pride festivals, corporate campuses, and city streets-treating poetry as a portable commons. He teaches at UCLA Extension and leads outreach for Get Lit, building unlikely bridges in a world that keeps insisting on borders.

Friday April 17th 8pm - The Joy Who Lived festiva; presents The Joy Who Speaks Up

A night of storytelling and improv with featured guests from LA's theater and comedy scene along with UCB's all trans/nonbinary improv team, QTs! Our monologists will share stories of trans joy and improvisers will bring those experiences to life in spontaneous scenes.

Maddox Pennington (he/they) is a performer, director, and playwright; a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. Their work for the stage has been developed with LA's Native Voices, the Moving Arts MADLab, and currently, CTG's LA Writer's Workshop. Readings have been presented by NYC's FRIGID Queerly Festival, the Theatre Viscera Podcast, the 2023 T/GNC Reading Festival, the 2024 Creative Nations First Storytellers Festival in Boulder, CO and the Kayenta Arts Center 2025 New Plays Festival in Ivins, Utah. He's performed in The Fountain Theater in White Rabbit Red Rabbit (Nassim Soleimanpoor) and with Native Voices in Haunted and Antikoni. In 2024, he received a Trans Arts Initiative grant from the City of West Hollywood for The Trans Conversation Project, which produced a workshop and showcase with LA Get Down, 30 intergenerational interviews, and a new devised work, A Third Space, which premiered at the Hollywood Fringe, directed by Elisawon Etidorhpa. As Gaybones Productions, Pennington produces and directs work with majority nonbinary/trans casts and messy queer family dynamics. He facilitates writing and performance workshops for The Joy Who Lived as the Director of Education.

Saturday April 18th DAYTIME 12-3pm - Youth Slam Show with Get Lit (Sofia D'Annunzio)

The Classic Slam is one of the largest youth poetry gatherings in the country, an electrifying stage where young voices rise to share their truth, stories, and power.

Presented by Get Lit - Words Ignite, and Greenway Arts Alliance, the Classic Slam is the culminating event of the organization's in-school literacy programs, bringing together school teams from across Los Angeles for bold performance and storytelling. Students perform original spoken word pieces alongside responses to classic literature, embodying Get Lit's signature approach of connecting canonical texts to contemporary lived experience.

This year's theme, If I Awaken in Los Angeles, invites students to reflect on the city that surrounds them and the many realities it holds.

Now in its 15th year, and marking Get Lit's 20th anniversary, the Classic Slam brings together hundreds of students, educators, and community members for a powerful celebration of youth voice, creativity, and fearless expression.

Diane Luby Lane is the Founder and CEO of Get Lit - Words Ignite, a global nonprofit dedicated to increasing youth literacy and engagement through spoken word poetry. Guided by the belief that young people's voices are essential to cultural conversation, she has grown Get Lit into one of the most influential youth arts organizations in the countr

Diane is the author of Get Lit Rising (Simon & Schuster) and has led workshops at universities including Yale University, University of Southern California, and University of California, Los Angeles.

EVENING 8pm (Workshop Ayanna Florence) - "Synesthesia and the Art of Imagery"

Through the use of metaphor, creative language, and pure imagination, "Synesthesia and the Art of Imagery" gives the poet tools to create work that is tangible, sensory, and visceral. The writer will draw from their senses to capture and convey their personal experiences on paper and paint their writing as colorful as possible. Workshop participants can expect to leave inspired and enlightened on how to captivate audiences and pull readers into their world.

Ayanna Florence is a spoken word poet, author, and creative from Chesapeake, VA. Ayanna is the 2023 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam champion, the 2023 and 2024 Slam Charlotte Grand Slam champion, the 2023 and 2024 Queen of the South, the 2024 Slam Madness Champion, a 2x Southern Fried Poetry Slam Finalist, and much more. As a queer black woman, Ayanna exists on the fringes and outside the box, and her artistry reflects this reality. Last year, Ayanna released her debut chapbook, Oceans, and above all she is passionate about using her poetry as a method of healing for herself and others.

Sunday April 19th 5pm - Wendy Hammers Title:Poems Tasty Enough To Eat

An Inspired Evening of Eclectic and Electric Poets

Curated and hosted by Wendy Hammers

After delighting Greenway audiences with the wildly popular Singing in the Shower with 100 People last season, Tasty Words producer Wendy Hammers is over the moon giddy to be doing a collaboration with Greenway Arts Alliance

Friday April 24th 8pm- (Remixing Shakespeare Workshop) "From Shakespeare to K. Dot: Remixing the Classics" invites poets, performers, and storytellers to use Shakespeare as a launchpad for bold, modern expression. In this dynamic workshop, participants will explore how verse, rhythm, imagery, and emotional truth can be translated from classical text into the language of today-through spoken word, hip-hop poetics, and contemporary performance. Rooted in the belief that the classics still pulse with urgency, this workshop shows how Shakespeare's themes of love, power, betrayal, identity, and survival remain deeply relevant to modern audiences, especially when filtered through the lived realities, voices, and vernacular of Los Angeles. This is a space to honor the classics while flipping them into something fearless, personal, and powerfully now. This workshop is open to all level of writers, poets, and performers.

Alex Alpharaoh - Alex Alpharaoh is a multi-disciplined, Award-Winning Performance Artist from Los Angeles, CA by way of Guatemala City, Guatemala. Alpharaoh is a formerly undocumented citizen who earned his reputation as an Emcee and Spoken Word Artist by honing his skills in various venues throughout Los Angeles including Da Poetry Lounge, Project Blow'd, A Mic and Dim Lights, Sunday Jump, and True Story.

Alpharaoh has founded several ensembles in his over 20 year career as a theatre maker and spoken word artist including SP!T: Spoken Word Theatre, a Los Angeles based Ensemble that combines elements of Hip-Hop Culture, Spoken Word, Acting, and Dynamic Movement in order to tell original stories that are centered around societal issues with the city of Los Angeles as its backdrop. He then founded the No Fronts Actors Workshop alongside Blanca "Moon Chola" Espinoza as part of the Chola Vision Productions educational wing where he continues his personal mission of telling stories rooted in Los Angeles and inner city cultures.

As a writer, Alpharaoh has had his work produced at Antaeus Co., The Los Angeles Theatre Center, EST/LA, Urban Theatre Movement, and Casa0101, where he World Premiered SP!T: Don't Talk About It, SP!T About It"in the fall of 2016, which then was presented at Greenway Court Theatre as part of the 1st annual LA Get Down Festival. His work has been published in anthologies including LATINX SHAKESPEARES, SEEKING COMMON GROUND, and ENCUENTRO DE LAS AMERICAS.

Alpharaoh autobiographical Solo Show titled WET: A DACAmented Journey, earned him the LADCC 2018 Solo Performance of the year award along with a Stage Raw award for best solo performances when he remounted it at Greenway Court Theatre in the fall of 2022.

His first poetry anthology titled: I'll Leave When I'm Good and Read: is out now on paperback and digital.

Saturday April 25th 8pm- InkSlam Invitational Organizer/ Ayanna Florence- (see her bio and photo above).

The InkSlam Invitational features eight of the nation's best Slam poets in a three-round battle of lyrical supremacy with $2500 in cash prizes.

Sunday, April 26 (Time To Be Announced) - Typewriter Poets @MTP