The DeAf Jam performance is a recurring event hosted at the Bowery Poetry Club. It is a signature event for the Deaf community, the culmination of an intensive workshop in ASL poetics, and is being filmed as part of a major documentary (bearing the same title).

DEAF JAM workshops were designed both to showcase American Sign Language (ASL) teen poets in their own communities, and to bring the dynamic, dance like poetry of the Deaf to young, hearing audiences. The project’s planning (and implementation) drew on the remarkable talents of this nation's premiere sign language poets, Terrylene Sacchetti, Manny Hernandez, and Peter Cook (all of whom are deaf).

The Bowery Poetry Club has a screen, digital projector, and an excellent sound system.

The door price is $5; deaf students are admitted free.

Deaf Jam is part of City Lore and Urban Word’s initiative called The Poetry Dialogues, a series of intergenerational presentations that utilize contemporary and traditional forms of poetry to effect community transformation. Employing some of the oldest and newest poetry genres, the Dialogues explore themes of generational conflict and new ways of addressing critical issues faced by the participants’ own communities. The Poetry Dialogues got underway in 2002, with a grant from the Folk Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts along with the Animating Democracy initiative of the Ford Foundation and additional Funds from IBM, the New York State Council on the Arts, and PBS. The Poetry Dialogues created three intergenerations poetry “teams” —Muslim American, FilipinoAmerican, and African American. Each team was composed of young poets (ages 13-20), young poetry mentors, elder masters, along with a lead poet and a dialogue specialist. Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad led a Muslim-American team that brought four young hip hop poets with roots in the Middle East and the Muslim world together with poet Ishmaili Raishida and musician and Rumi chanter Amir Vahab. Filipino American poet Regie Cabico brought together a group of four hip hop poets all with Filipino roots with Frances Dominguez, a master of Filipino balagtasan (rhymed poetry debate) traditions in New York. Poet and renown freestyler Toni Blackman led a team of seven young African American rappers, working with jali (“griot”) poets led by Kewulay Kamara from Sierra Leone. The young poets were selected through an application process by the poetry organization aimed at teenagers, Urban Word. A series of performances/conversations/community dialogues took place at St. Augustine’s Church on the Lower East Side, the Jamaica Arts Center (with FAHSI, a Filipino youth organization) in Queens, and the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan.

A second round of funding from NEA for The Poetry Dialogues, along with matching funds recently received from the Rockefeller Foundation’s PACT program enabled us to create an intergenerational team comprised of deaf high school students and experienced American Sign Language poets on a poetry presentation designed to spark conversations in community settings, culminating in a full-scale production, with mentors and students, at the Bowery Poetry Club with the assistance of Bowery Arts and Science, Ltd.