Suburban poet shines bright deep in the heart of Texas

What do you call a Texas A&M Aggie who teaches creative writing, is finishing up his Ph.D. in English, and made a name for himself by bringing poetry slams to Central Texas?

You call him Jeff Stumpo, the Schaumburg native now famous for founding the Javashock poetry slams in College Station, Texas.

As a 23-year-old grad student in 2003, Stumpo moved to the campus, about a two-hour drive from Austin or Houston, and was shocked there wasn't a local outlet for the creativity of the spoken word and other arts. Stumpo changed the arts landscape by starting his own festival.

After the first poetry slam (a competition rated by a handful of judges) five years ago, grateful spectators came up to him and said, "I've never seen anything like this before, and I don't have to go to Austin for it," Stumpo says.

"We've had some really amazing writers here, and some very good artists," adds Stumpo, a performer and regular emcee for the events. The A&M community sends teams to the national poetry slam competition and draws fans and competitors from well beyond College Station.

As a member of the Schaumburg High School Class of 1998, Stumpo dabbled in the creative arts.

"I wrote poetry, nothing that I would currently show to someone," he admits. "Although I was trying to do something more than the usual 'the world is black.' "

He was, however, interested in the form of poems, the way they were presented.

"I didn't really discover the spoken word scene until college," says Stumpo. He went to Illinois Wesleyan University as a history major.

"Poetry was just something I did on the side," he says. An advertising internship made him realize he liked "playing" with words.

"It's not as clear cut as this will make it seem," Stumpo says, paraphrasing a book he read in high school: "Children have their teachers; adults have their poets."

He no longer wanted to be a history teacher.

"I realized I was a writer who really liked history instead of a historian who liked to write," Stumpo says.

He also liked to hear the writings of other people -- from the famous to the unknown. While a student at Illinois Wesleyan, he brought them together.

"There was this local homeless guy named John Firefly," Stumpo says, recalling performances in the student center. "Sometimes he'd show up at that."

Working at a local Barnes & Noble bookstore, Stumpo brought Firefly in for a reading alongside a respected Irish writer.

"They start off by arm wrestling to see who got to read first," Stumpo says.

Things took off from there.

"The first poem he read was about watching himself in the mirror as he had sex," Stumpo says.

Graduating with a degree in English and a minor in Spanish, Stumpo, now 28, has published his poetry, short stories, translations and a bilingual chapbook of poems titled "El Oceano y La Serpiente/The Ocean and The Serpent." You can see his performance poetry online at www.youtube.com/user/JeFFStumpo.

Stumpo met his wife, Kate, when they were taking a karate class at Wesleyan. She's working on her Ph.D. in chemistry, where she deals with things such as "matrix-assisted laser absorption ionization." They both love books, their dogs "Apple" and "Stubby" ("His name was Dagwood, but he didn't answer to that"), and German board games such as "Settlers of Catan," where players design and build civilizations.

Stumpo and his wife both hope to teach, and to add to the civilization of wherever they go after their work in Texas is finished.

"Wherever we end up, I'll end up doing it again," Stumpo says, noting his artistic bend might take on a form different than a poetry slam. "I'll start something."