P4 Organizers

The Performance Poetry Preservation Project is an IRS 501(c)(3) non-profit, incorporated in the state of Massachusetts.  Our founders and Board members represent a wide range of experience in the slam and performance poetry world.

Wess Mongo Jolley, President.

Mr. Jolley is an information management professional with 30 years of experience in the field. He is currently the Records Manager at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and is the former interim manager of the Special Collections Library at the College. In these two roles, he has developed a keen interest and had extensive experience in historical preservation issues, as well as information technology, data system design, and digital record keeping.

Mongo is also a poet and poetry promoter, who has extensive experience in new media. He is the host of the IndieFeed Performance Poetry Podcast, which has produced nearly 900 shows and delivered 5 million downloads since 2006. Having worked with venue hosts across the country, as well as having networking connections with nearly 300 of the top performance poets and luminaries, he is very well connected in the performance poetry world. To visit Mr. Jolley's personal website, please click here.

Thomas G. Bouliane, Clerk-Treasurer.

Mr. Bouliane retired as a Senior Systems Engineer from General Electric in 2007 and resides in Boston, Massachusetts. His professional career dealt mainly with the design, construction and installation of sound systems for large audiences. These included music playback systems for discos in Buffalo, voice reinforcement systems for meeting spaces, convention centers and auditoriums in Boston and Providence, a sports arena system in Nashville, rail transit public address systems across the U.S. from Seattle to San Juan and Boston to San Jose, and even worship systems for the great mosques at Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia. The conceptualization, presentation, organization, management, documentation and training skills he developed while pursuing his engineering career are being applied to P4’s administrative aspects.  He is also the father of Gabrielle Bouliane, recently deceased, who was a performance poet, videographer, Slammaster, and a fervent advocate for performance poets and their art form. Mr. Bouliane continues his daughter’s pursuit through P4.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Secretary.

Ms. Aptowicz is the author of the Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press, 2010), which Billy Collins wrote "leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature." Aptowicz founded the NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam in 1998 at the age of 19, and the slam is still held weekly at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She is still active in the poetry slam community, hosting her local slam as well as national events, and was a competing poet at the 2010 Women of the World Poetry Slam (WoWPS) and the 2010 National Poetry Slam in St. Paul, MN. Most recently, Aptowicz was named the 2010-2011 ArtsEdge Writer-In-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded at 2011 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

For more information, visit her personal website.

Gerry Stacy, Director of Fundraising

In his day job, Gerry is the Administrative Director for the Institute of Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins University.  In this role he has gained extensive experience at grant writing and project management.