Shivram Gopinath is an award-winning poet and spoken word performer who wears his heart on his sleeves with his mesmerising performance of My First Kiss in the Singapore Writers Festival last year. He has also performed at the Singapore Heritage Fest, Singapore Literature Prize Awards, Lit Up Festival and many more. Being actively involved in the local spoken word scene, he has helped to organise and host monthly poetry slam competitions, workshops and readings, and has performed alongside internationally acclaimed spoken word artists like Sarah Kay, Phil Kaye and Luka Lesson. A poetic force in the industry, he was also the Singapore National Poetry Slam Champion two years in a row.

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Stephanie Dogfoot Chan celebrates her quirky internet name Dogfoot in her portrayal of her unique poems and her poetry experience stretches back to her childhood when she started writing at 11 years of age after her first gerbil died. Ever since then, she has been pouring authenticity and vulnerability into her powerful poem collections like Roadkill for Beginners and spoken word performances in international poetry slams like the Melbourne Spoken Word Festival and Glastonbury Festival, and she emerged as champion of the 2010 Singapore and 2012 UK Poetry Slam competitions. She refers to her poetry as one that questions the absurdity of the world, being absurdly angry, making fun of at what makes her angry, humans (the joys and horrors of interacting with them), and growing up with a lot of animals.

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Jennifer Anne Champion has been a household name in the local spoken word scene for a while now with her sardonic humour and quirky style that are present in her performances like Paradise City and in her published works like Caterwaul and The History of Clocks—which comprise of poems that need be read and performed. Her work specifically tackles the social and cultural challenges of the Singaporean fabric, whereby Caterwaul is a poem that charts the dreams and challenges of the middle class suburbia population in Singapore. She effortlessly integrates the local experience and sentiment in her spoken word that certainly draw the attention of the listener who seeks to find themselves in the performer. You will also find her gatekeeping the poetry.sg website which celebrates local poetry with fervor.

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This young Singaporean poet uses the pronouns they/them and has many awards and publications under their belt. At the age of 21, they are already the author of three poetry collections—So, Stranger and Button Poetry—and the founder & editor-in-chief of the publishing house, literary journal, & arts organisation Half Mystic. An outstanding scholar and homegrown poet, their work covers the issues of gender identity, sexuality and race such as in their peer-reviewed research on poetry, identity, & the sociopolitical underpinnings of queerness in Singapore is published in the Journal of Homosexuality, making them the youngest ever scholar to be published in this journal. They also love to write periodic love letters to a worldwide audience of thousands on their blog A Clock That Follows the Shadows of Cats.

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The Singapore Literature Prize nominee Hamid Roslan is definitely one to look out for in the SingLit poetry scene with his debut poetry collection parsetreeforestfire—which is a bilingual book of poetry in which poems in Singlish occupy one side of the book, and poems in English on the other. This combination of the local patois and English language highlights an irreplaceable boldness and authenticity in his writing, and his mission to champion local culture and anxieties in the international literary scene is one that refuses to look down on locality, but rather elevate it to the world stage. Having graduated from Yale-NUS College in 2017, his many awards include Outstanding Capstone Prize in Arts and Humanities and he also placed second for his non-fiction and an honourable mention for his poetry for the Yale-NUS Writers' Centre Literary Awards in 2016 and 2017.

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