Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Known as "The Nomad Junkie" due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic restlessness, Dennis Leroy Kangalee is a NYC-based poet and dramatist who sees the world's injustice in an everyday observation. Kangalee's early theater work was a ferocious cocktail of American tragedy and revolutionary polemic. Between 1997 and 2002, he directed plays throughout NYC - from Soho to Harlem. Urged by the Last Poets to continue writing prose during the creation of his 2001 NYC-based movie about racism and its consequences, As an Act of Protest, (written & directed under his stage name, Dennis Leroy Moore) a powerful Avant-garde drama that has now earned status as a cult film, Dennis Leroy Kangalee's writing is both political and personal. Inspired by the Black Arts Movement, punk, and Theater of the Absurd, Kangalee draws inspiration from his own life as opposed to Literary History or knowledge of the classics. He writes for the little man caught in the snow and beneath the corporate avalanche, those who draw lines in the sand--the losers, the rebels, the tormented, and the romantic rovers hovering on the margins of the mainstream who dare to try to make sense of "life in society" and the doorway of 21st Century-Brave New World-ethos. His poems are published in the Outlaw Poetry Network, CounterPunch magazine, and small independent presses like the Nerve Lantern. In 2011, he returned from a self-imposed exile to appear on stage for the first time in over a decade in his performance-piece "Gentrified Minds," a spoken word poem about gentrification, globalization, and the suburbanization of NYC. It was directed by Nina Fleck and premiered in the NY Downtown Urban Theater Festival.