VOCAB

Spoken Word & Live Music event VOCAB is a center for expression and community. We put on live events when we can.

As well as keep you posted on spoken word events and open-mics through out the city.

08/26/2026

We're back next month featuring !!!!

DeOnyae-Dior Valentina is a Black and Brown trans woman, poet, storyteller, strategist, and organizer whose been making something outta everything life handed her. The beautiful, the ugly, the s**t that made her, and the s**t that damn near broke her.

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, raised in Chicago, and a proud graduate of Lew Wallace High School in Gary, Indiana’s final graduating class, DeOnyae now calls Indianapolis home. And baby, it took some living to get here.

Her poetry comes from a life that was never gonna fit nice and neat into anybody’s little box anyway. She writes about Blackness, trans womanhood, foster care, family, survival, wanting and being wanted, grief, love, rage, softness, and all the complicated s**t that comes with becoming the woman you had to figure out how to be on your own.

DeOnyae knows systems because she has lived in enough of them. She knows what it feels like to have somebody with a clipboard, a title, and half the story trying to tell you what your whole life means. So yeah, she writes about systems. She writes about the ways they fail us, label us, study us, count us, and still somehow don’t know s**t about us.

But that ain’t all she got to talk about.

She writes about Black joy. About chosen family. About being loved loud and loving even louder. About laughing at s**t you probably should not be laughing at. About family business that absolutely should’ve stayed in the family group chat. About wanting more even when everybody around you got comfortable with you surviving on less. About finally realizing that “at least you made it” is a mighty low bar for somebody who knows she deserves a whole damn life.

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September 9th | 8pm | $10
Community Partners:

08/04/2026

The time has come! It's Founder's Night featuring

Tatjana Rebelle is an activist, writer, and spoken word artist based in Indianapolis, Indiana. They are the founder of VOCAB, a once-a-month open mic created to highlight marginalized people's music and poetry, and a member of the Looking Glass Alliance at Newfields. Rebelle has written her own chapbook, "This is America", as well as contributed to other publications such as Tamara Winfrey Harris’s book "Dear Black Girl: Letters From Your Sisters About Stepping Into Your Power". Inspired by her idol Bayard Rustin, Rebelle will always be an angelic troublemaker.

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August 12th | 8pm | $10
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07/03/2026

We're back next week! This month featuring

Auboni Essence is adaptable, agile and authentic. Auboni is the difference between writing about sadness and having the scars to prove it; the difference between pondering joy and having cheeks sore from smiling. Getting her start at TPOM, Auboni transitioned from attendee into organizer, incubating some of the best writers of Indianapolis for the last decade. Auboni has been a guest poetry lecturer at IU, is a 2026 Indy Art and Soul Featured Artist, and was part of a top 10 slam poetry team for the 2025 Southern Fried Poetry Slam.

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July 8th | 8pm | $10
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05/28/2026

We're back in just a couple weeks! Featuring and an open mic sure to be loud and proud!

SOMETIMES WORDS JUST AREN’T ENOUGH . . . . .

Vibrant. Laid back. Charming. Most important of all, talented. Those are a few words to aptly describe
the Chicago-born native now resident of Indiana who continues to entertain audiences with her poetry,
acting, and vocal abilities.

Shakisha “Mahogany” Duckworth is a poet first—one who moves language through the body before it
ever reaches the page. Her spoken word is intimate, incisive, and grounded in lived experience, earning
her stages across Indianapolis and a place among competitors at the Southern Fried Poetry Slam in
Kentucky. Her voice carries memory, healing, and truth—inviting audiences to listen closely and feel
deeply.

That same emotional precision fuels her work as an actress, where she brings layered humanity to both
stage and screen. Mahogany starred as the lead in The Cadillac Crew: Road to Racism by Tori Sampson,
directed by Dani Lopez-Rogue, and served as understudy for the lead role in Panther Women: An Army
for the Liberation by India Nicole Burton. Her screen credits include The Last Straw, the pilot SICK
(LCF Entertainment, dir. Stephanie Fields), and the feature film By Default.

On stage, she has performed at the historic Madame Walker Theatre in Sonnets for My Sistahs by Vernon
A. Williams, portraying multiple characters across five cities. She was also cast in Playing for Keeps and
delivered multiple roles in When He Pulls the Covers, written and directed by Alicia Sims.

A vocalist and songwriter as well, Mahogany’s artistry lives at the intersection of story, sound, and soul.

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📷:eye_of_ry
June 10th | 8pm | $10
Community Partners:

05/06/2026

We're back next week with our homey

Eric Glomez was assigned the scapegoat role at birth within his toxic family structure. He broke out of this role 34 years later by going no contact with his birth family and learning how to organize his coworkers to fight against the boss.

Eric’s favorite enemies are bullies because they are low-strategy opponents who over rely on inspiring fear, leaving them vulnerable to those who inspire courage.

To Eric, fear is the great paradox—simultaneously both the greatest obstacle to & most profound opportunity for uniting the working class worldwide. Fear holds us back from uniting, but also inspires courage. And without courage, there is no revolution—no better tomorrow in the history of humankind.

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April 8th | 8pm | $10
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04/02/2026

We're back next week and since every month is National Poetry Month for us, we gone stick to the script. Joining us this month will be !!!

Manòn Voice is a poet, storyteller, filmmaker, educator, and cultural worker whose work lives at the intersection of art and social change. Rooted in Hip Hop and spoken word, her practice explores identity, justice, and collective memory, creating spaces where storytelling becomes a vehicle for dialogue and transformation. A native of Indianapolis, she has performed on stages across the country and facilitated workshops with diverse communities. She is a Professor of Hip-Hop Music, History, and Culture at Butler University and the director of the IT WAS ALL A DREAM Hip Hop Ensemble, where she engages Hip Hop as a living tool for education, resilience, and cultural expression.

Through her creative practice, Manòn considers herself a poetic documentarian, attuned to the narratives that shape our social landscape. Her poetry has appeared in The Flying Island, The Indianapolis Review, The House Life Project: People + Property Series, Sidepiece Magazine, The World We Live(d) In anthology, Questions for a Resilient Future Series, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and Aesthetic Ethics: Towards a Moral Imagination, and more.

Her work engages urgent issues such as housing insecurity, environmental justice, food access, and systemic inequality, while also holding space for beauty, healing, and possibility. Alongside her artistic practice, she is committed to land stewardship and Afro-Indigenous approaches to farming, exploring the relationship between cultivation, culture, and community healing. Her documentary ROOT BLACK, centered on Afro-Diasporic agrarian heritage and Black farming in the United States, premiered at the Indy International Film Festival. She is also the 2025 PitchDox Award winner for her upcoming documentary, Barbara Boyd: On Top of the World, which chronicles the life and legacy of Indiana’s first African Amer

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DJs: &
April 8th | 8pm | $10
Community Partners:

03/09/2026

We're back this week for another trip around the sun! VOCAB is another year closer to 20! We'll have some open mic regulars and folks that have helped shaped VOCAB spend a lil extra time on the mic celebrating the open mic with memories from over the years, so please join us in the celebration!

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February 11th | 8pm | $10
Community Partners:

Address

Indianapolis, IN

Website

http://vocabindy.com/

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