Book a workshop, reading, or keynote with award-winning poets.

We started in 2017, running workshops — and we still believe the best poetry is local.

We began by teaching — gathering poets in rooms, running workshops, and learning what it actually takes to get a poet in front of an audience. Along the way we watched the poets we loved do the work of a writer, an event producer, a tour manager, a publicist, and a contracts attorney all at once. None of that pays. The writing, somehow, paid least of all.

The Speakeasy Project exists to collapse that into one job: poet. We do everything else. And we believe local is best — the strongest events grow out of real community, so we root our poets in the places they live and read, then bring them everywhere from there. Based in Los Angeles; our poets read everywhere.

Our poets

Our roster is majority BIPOC and queer — poets whose work is leading some of the most vital cultural conversations of our time, rooted in the histories, languages, and communities they come from.

We prioritize the safety and dignity of poets who've been historically and systemically marginalized: transparent, equitable rates, contracts that protect the artist, and the freedom for every poet to bring their whole self — identity, language, and politics — to the page and the stage.

And we love bringing artists and audiences together. We partner with universities, libraries, festivals, nonprofits, and mission-aligned organizations to build events where poetry can do what it does best — foster community and empathy, and widen our vision of a shared humanity.

How we think about this

Poetry changes rooms

A poem can turn a conference into something people remember. We put poets in the rooms where their words do the most.

Poets' time is worth it

Years of craft go into a single reading. We price that honestly and negotiate equitable rates, so poets are paid what the work is worth.

We carry the rest

Contracts, fees, travel, follow-through — we handle the logistics so poets can focus on the page and the stage.

We work with mission orgs

Nonprofits, poetry organizations, and community groups: we help you bring poets in at rates that work for your budget — and stay fair to the poet.

Masthead · Los Angeles

Tyler Tsay

Founder

Tyler Tsay is the former co-founder of The Blueshift Journal. His work, both past and upcoming, has been or will be published in The Offing, The Margins: Asian American Writers Workshop, DIAGRAM, Vinyl Poetry and others. He is the recipient of the Bullock Poetry Prize, awarded by the Academy of American Poets and judged by Camille Rankine, and has formerly worked at BEOTIS Creative and BOAAT Press.

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Jennifer Luo

Managing Director · Agent

Jen Luo is a Michener Fellow in poetry at the University of Texas, Austin. She has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University.

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Benjamin Del Vecchio

Agent · Bookings · Tour

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Land & labor acknowledgement

The Speakeasy Project is based in Los Angeles, on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Tongva (Gabrieleño), Kizh, Chumash, and Tataviam peoples, who have cared for this place since time immemorial and are still here today. We also recognize that much of the wealth and infrastructure our industry moves within was built on the stolen labor of enslaved and exploited people.

As an agency whose work is made possible by poets — many of them descendants of those histories — we hold a responsibility to name this, to pay the artists we represent fairly and on time, and to keep directing our resources back toward the communities our poets come from. This is a starting point, not a finish line, and we hold ourselves to more than words.