Langston Kerman
Langston Kerman is an LA based stand-up comic, actor and writer originally from Oak Park, IL. Langston’s first half hour special aired in September 2018 as part of Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents. This past month, Langston wrote and starred in a Broadway Video produced presentation for Hulu, "Bust Down", which also featured Chris Redd, Sam Jay, and Jak Knight. Additionally Langston released his first comedy album “Lightskinned Feelings” which was recorded at the historic Punchline Comedy Club in San Francisco. In TV Langston recurs as ‘Jared’ on the HBO hit series “Insecure” from Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore. He appeared on the third season of “Adam DeVine's House Party” (Comedy Central) and his other on credits include “High Maintenance” (HBO), “Strangers” (Facebook) and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” (IFC).
Langston was a part of Chris Rock's writing staff for the 2016 Oscars and also wrote for Comedy Central's show “Problematic With Moshe Kasher”. Langston is also a co-producer and recurs on the Comedy Central narrative series, South Side Stories, created by Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin set to premiere in the spring. He has also written for and appeared in digital content from Comedy Central, Above Average, Refinery29 and IFC.
In 2015 Kerman was honored as a 'New Face'at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, and chosen as a finalist for the NBC Diversity Standup showcase at the Hollywood Improv. He has toured all over the country including dates at The Bridgetown Festival in Portland, The Red Clay Comedy Festival, The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, the RIOT LA Comedy Festival on the comics to watch lineup and as a co-headliner at the New York Comedy Festival. In September 2016 Kerman co-headlined a month long tour with Jak Knight including a week of dates at the Just For Laughs Festival in Toronto. He can currently be seen on the road opening for Daniel Tosh.
Kerman graduated from the University of Michigan and has an MFA in Poetry from Boston University.
The impact of poetry and the spoken word club
Poetry is, without a doubt, the art form that has had the biggest transformative influence in my life. What began as an activity to “just try” after I was cut from the high school basketball team, soon became a discovery of my voice on paper, on stages and even in my personal relationships. Poetry gave me what no school assignment or extracurricular activity had ever given me in the past, the feeling that my voice mattered.
I’m not sure that I ever thought I needed Spoken Word. I never struggled academically as a student: my grades were solid, my schedule was consistently filled with basketball practice and girl chasing, and I generally stayed out of trouble. However, if poetry has taught me anything, it’s that life is less about being generally solid, and instead finding something that inspires you to excel. I spent so many of my high school years silently floating between meaningless classes and empty lessons. It wasn’t until I learned to write for myself that I began to see value in the information I had been trained to recite. It was no longer just a history course, but a collection of stories and details that could be blossomed into rich metaphors. Trigonometry was not a holding cell anymore, but more a way to calculate my experiences and translate them in a new way on the page. In a very short time, performance poetry helped me begin to master my own sense of belonging. It helped me grow from a person who merely received the world as it was offered, and who instead took things into my own hands to change it. I give Mr. Kahn and the Spoken Word Club almost all of the credit for this.
Writing Prompts
Imagine someone else with your same name and write to that person.
Write a letter poem to someone you’ve never met that tells them some details about your life and ask them some questions.
Start a poem off with, “I am nearly positive there are no…” or “I am nearly positive…” and see where your imagination takes you.
Write a poem that imagines another version of yourself or a poem about an alternate reality.
Write about a moment you experienced a feeling that belonged to someone else.
I spent two years as a member of the Oak Park and River Forest Slam Team where we competed in Louder than a Bomb, the Chicago youth poetry slam. In my second year, I was awarded the opportunity to travel to San Francisco and compete as a member of the Chicago All-Star team at the national competition Brave New Voices. I continued to slam throughout college, representing University of Michigan, a school I chose, in part, because of its excellent poetry program, at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. As I began to transition out of the slam world, I went on to earn a Poetry MFA at Boston University where I studied with former poet laureates Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck. I have since spent over 6 years teaching poetry and English literature in various places and forms. It was during my time as an educator where I discovered my greatest thrills with poetry. On a number of occasions, I watched my students face a similar transformation as the one that shaped so much of who I have become. To see a student begin to love themselves and what they have to say is more encouraging than anything I have ever put on paper. As someone who has since moved out of education, I can’t say I’m currently dedicated to shaping the future poets of the world; however, it continues to be my greatest hope to help people find what it is that makes them feel valuable. As it stands, poetry remains the best tool I have ever seen for this discovery.
I currently work full-time as a stand-up comedian, writer and actor. Although, poetry is no longer my primary artistic outlet, the practices I learned as a poet continue to influence nearly every part of my writing. My scripts, my jokes, my stories are all shaped by the voice I discovered as a student of poetry, and I am certain without this influence so much of it would just be meaningless wandering across the page.
Top favorite poets or lyricists
It’s hard to really pare down my favorite writers in a single list, and so I thought it might be easier to pick out some writers who motivated me to find my voice at a young age. (Feel free to just take the list if this breaking the rules):
Li-Young Lee was the first poet to publish a book that I read front to back. I was still in high school (I believe Mr. Kahn suggested his work), and he really moved me to explore the way imagery can take place of emotive words and still have the same effect.
Andre 3000 has been and remains my favorite rapper. Obviously his writing and rhyme schemes are insane, but I think what really attracted me to him was his ability to blend sometimes super complex, existential feelings while talking about girls and partying and fancy cars. He’s a master at exploring the full spectrum of the human experience in just a few lines.
Sharon Olds has a unique talent for getting to the core of a hard truth. She never winces on the page, even when things, I can imagine, are sometimes difficult to read back. In that way, she drives me to find my most deeply honest self when I’m doing my own writing.
Dan Sullivan taught me that poetry could be lively and joyous and funny and it doesn’t just have to sound like boring library talk, even when you’re reading it in a boring library. I think in some ways watching and reading his work encouraged my discovery of stand up comedy.
Zora Neale Hurston taught me that even in traditional literature there is space to break form. She makes the page speak the way humans actually speak, which is very different than the sometimes lofty language you might find from other writers, and yet that’s what makes her writing so powerful. She is proof that all of these grammatical structures are truly just a template for us to consider more than hard fastened regulations that keep us constrained.