I am Kro, aka The Traveling Typist. I am a typewriter poet and creative facilitator. I’ve been a full-time poet since 2021, devoting my life to my art. I typewrite and recite bespoke poems in two minutes or less.

An infamous beginning…

It all began with the Poetry Brothel.

Well, I’ve been writing for over 20 years. I started as a page poet and then became a stage poet. I fluttered between various Chicago open mics but didn’t think I could go to the professional level.

But that changed when I became part of the Poetry Brothel.

The Brothel is an immersive literary cabaret. In the main room, a floor show delights and titillates attendees. Live music, drag, burlesque, you name it! Meanwhile, the Poetry Whores (such as yours truly) circulate amongst the johns, luring them upstairs for private readings.

Quite the character!

To become a Poetry Whore, the poet must create an alter-ego. A persona. A larger-than-life character that they can inhabit, that will both shield them from rejection and give the poet permission to play. The character I invented was Catarina Crowe, a mysterious woman who was picked up by a trucker on the side of the road in Appalachia.

She was gibbering mad because you see…

Catarina had been abducted by the fae and had just managed to escape. Only six months had passed for her, but in the real world, it had been over 200 years. She escaped the goblin kingdom, but as she fled, the Goblin King cursed her. She was doomed to slowly transform into a bird. She acquired a typewriter and tried to write down all her stories before the transformation was complete. She is still desperately searching for a cure.

An ethos of play

Playing Catarina Crowe gave me permission to play like I never had before. Suddenly at age 29, I got to be a weird theater kid!

As Catarina, I got to invite people to play. I had something they wanted—poetry! And they had something I wanted—money! And we got to act out this fun little game, and we both got satisfied. Win-win!

Post-Brothel

The Chicago chapter of the Poetry Brothel only put on two shows. The last show was in October of 2019. And then, the world went into lockdown, and we all had a lot of time to think for a year and a half.

During this time I left my corporate job and started my own business. I realized I hated the industry I had gone into as much as the office I had just left. When lockdown lifted in early 2021, I was given a crazy proposition: what if I became an on-demand typewriter poet?

I bought my first typewriter from Kathleen Rooney and Eric Plattner of Poems While You Wait. PWYW is the fundraising arm for the nonprofit Rose Metal Press. They sold me a Brother Charger 11 in exchange for some volunteer hours.

Then my former Brothel compatriots (who were also members of PWYW) got an idea…

And the Typewriter Tarts were born!

Those of us who had previously been Poetry Whores became Typewriter Tarts. We each had a typewriter, and someone got tray tables. The tables were either thrifted or picked out of the trash, it remains unclear.

In May of 2021, we took the tables, set up shop at the base of the Logan Square Monument, and started selling our poems for cold hard cash. We got gigs at the Willis Tower, EXPO Chicago, and NeoCon. We appeared on NBC5.

At the beginning of 2022, poetry became so lucrative that I made it my full-time job.

Becoming “The Traveling Typist”

The Typewriter Tarts lasted until the end of 2022 when the Tarts disbanded. In January of 2023, I coined the name The Traveling Typist and became a solo act.

I wanted to take this show on the road, so I put “traveling” in my name. It’s not just Chicago that needs a poem. The whole world needs poems! To date, I’ve typed poems in five states, though the list grows every year. Soon, we’ll be going international!

I wndr…

January of 2023 is also when I began my time as poet-in-residence at the WNDR museum. The WNDR museum was Chicago’s first fully interactive art museum. You can find me there on weekends for your own on-demand poem.

Education

I am currently working on my MFA (eta 2025) in Creative Writing at DePaul, on a full-ride scholarship. I am also the Editorial Assistant for the DePaul Publishing Institute. You’d think getting my MA in linguistics (2016) would have satisfied my need for language, but you’d be wrong. My MA thesis studied Navajo slam poetry and the indigenous-language codeswitching therein. I also studied Apsaalooke as well as the sociolinguistics of identity performance in slam poetry. I graduated summa cum laude, no big deal.