Poet and spoken-word artist Marty McConnell earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a seven-time National Poetry Slam Team member and the 2012 winner of the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition. Her collections of poetry include wine for a shotgun (2012), awarded a silver medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and when they say you can't go home again, what they mean is you were never there (2018), which won a Michael Waters Poetry Prize. McConnell is also author of the book Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Workshop (2018).

Of working in both print and oral poetry traditions, McConnell states, “Once you are part of the slam community, I feel that there's a certain kind of pressure, be it internal or external, to compete anytime you have the opportunity to do so. And I think it's important to be able to pause, to say when it's appropriate, when it's a good idea to have your poems publicly scored. I feel this particularly acutely now that I've returned to writing more autobiographical or at least less persona-based work.”

McConnell is the recipient of a residency at Hedgebrook and a grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events for a collaboration and interactive performance with the artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro.

McConnell began her slam career in New York City, where she cofounded the literary nonprofit louderARTS Project and co-curated its reading series. In 2009, she moved back to Chicago and started Vox Ferus, a sister organization to louderARTS.