Rafael Casal

Rafael Casal (born August 8, 1985) is an American writer, performance poet, recording artist, educator, playwright and founding member of The Getback. Over his young career, Casal has been praised and awarded internationally for his poetry, featured by major print and web editorials for his music, has directed numerous theater productions and film shorts, and taught creative writing and performance to high school and University undergraduate students. His work has been featured by networks like HBO and MTV, and he has performed at hundreds of venues and University campuses throughout the country and beyond. Casal has shared the stage with the likes of Common, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, KRS-One, Floetry, Kanye West, Saul Williams, Alanis Morissette, De La Soul, Dead Prez, George Clinton, Carole King, Lauryn Hill & numerous others, performing in front of crowds of up to 30,000. His career in numerous different artistic mediums orbit his foundation in writing and storytelling, often documenting narratives and experiences from his origins in the Bay Area, California, and his travels.

Casal started writing Spoken word/Slam youth poetry scene in the Bay Area at age 14. He participated in Brave New Voices national youth poetry slam until 17, when he was asked to participate only as a coach to other students. He was a national finalist champion for 2 years, and then coached the Bay Area youth poetry slam team to a 1st place at BNV nationals in Los Angeles. At 19 he traveled to New York to compete against established adult poets as an unknown at the renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe slam night, and won. He was then featured on Season 4, 5 and 6 of Russell Simmons' Def Poetry on HBO, which gained him a much larger audience and recognition. His performance of his poems Barbie and Ken 101, "Abortion" and "First Week of a Break Up" on Def Poetry have been seen over 1.5 million times on YouTube. Casal toured heavily on the University circuit following his appearances on HBO, to Universities such as UCLA, Bates College, NYU, College of William and Mary, as well as numerous festivals and conferences. He then joined mentor Marc Bamuthi Joseph's theater company The Living Word Project, where he co-wrote The One Drop Rule – a theater piece about a hypothetical 40-day drought in the bay area, drawing parallels New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. The piece was written with his arts collective The Getback, in collaboration with tap-dancer Jason Samuels Smith, the San Francisco Jazz Ensemble, and directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The One Drop Rule premiered in San Francisco, and was featured at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. in 2009, Casal began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison as Creative Director of a new undergraduate diversity scholarship program called First Wave. There he began to develop his first solo show, titled The Limp, which was developed in residency at the university in 2010/11, under the direction of choreographer Chris Walker. The piece premiered and headlined at the university's annual theater festival Line Breaks, and in the fall of 2011 featured in excerpt at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Left Coast Leaning Festival. Casal was recently published as a guest writer in Bill Ayers's The Handbook of Social Justice.

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