SheShe Slam is proud to welcome Tracy (T Spirit) Stanton as a Selection Jury member for its 2026 edition, a choice that reflects exactly what this platform protects: voice with purpose, craft with conscience, and storytelling that refuses to abandon the people it comes from.
T Spirit is an award winning international spoken word artist, trainer, workshop facilitator, community organizer, peacemaker, and certified well being coach whose work sits at the meeting point of art, healing, and justice. In her public profile, she describes her practice as rooted in transparency, vulnerability, resilience, righteousness, resistance, joy, and truth, a value system that feels less like branding and more like a lived commitment.
A voice built through lived experience
What makes T Spirit especially human, and especially necessary, is that her work is not abstract. She is open about being a survivor of layered harm, including incarceration, trauma, sexual violence, substance use, and oppressive systems, and she frames her life today as a deliberate turning of tragedy into service.
That honesty shows up in her art. Not as spectacle, but as responsibility. In a world that often rewards performance without depth, her storytelling insists on the full weight of the human being behind the microphone.
Building community, not just stages
Beyond the page and the stage, T Spirit is the founder and producer of Some Things Must Be Heard: Spitting and Politicking, a Black led initiative that merges art, advocacy, spirituality, and embodied organizing to ignite transformation. The platform uplifts currently and formerly incarcerated, system impacted voices, while mobilizing community members to shift narrative and dismantle systems of oppression.
She has also been a founding member of the Freedom Community Center, described as a Black led abolitionist organization building a movement of survivors intervening in interpersonal and systemic violence.
In short, she does not only create work. She builds rooms where truth can breathe, where people can belong, and where art can move from expression to action.
Craft with strategy, and healing with structure
T Spirit’s practice also extends into coaching and consulting through Spirit Led Coaching and Consulting, with offerings that include wellbeing coaching, artist coaching, and organizational health and strategic planning. Her work is explicitly framed as future focused and grounded in a body, soul, thought methodology, supporting individuals and leaders toward deeper healing and clearer direction.
This blend matters. She understands both the inner world and the public fight. Both the poem and the system around the poet. That is rare. That is valuable.
Recognition and momentum
In a recent profile, the St Louis arts community highlighted her role in elevating spoken word locally and beyond, including her work producing Some Things Must Be Heard and her commitment to using poetry and storytelling as tools for personal and societal transformation.
On her own platform, she also lists recent milestones including becoming a 2025 semifinalist for St Louis Poet Laureate, performing in a Black History keynote collaboration connected to KSDK and the Missouri History Museum, and directing her first poetic visual titled When We Speak, an ode to the voices and impact of Black womxn in poetry and social justice.
Why SheShe Slam chose her
SheShe Slam exists to honor women’s voices with dignity, safety, and artistic integrity. The Selection Jury is not a ceremonial role. It is a responsibility to listen deeply, to evaluate fairly, and to protect the standard of the platform.
T Spirit brings the exact kind of listening this moment demands: one that hears craft, yes, but also hears courage. One that respects performance, but also recognizes what a voice has survived to reach the stage.
Her presence strengthens the values at the heart of SheShe Slam, truth, protection, excellence, and community.
Welcome to SheShe Slam 2026, T Spirit.
