Monique Franklin

Monique Franklin, known artistically as Verbal Oasis, is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, playwright, performer, educator, cultural practitioner, computer scientist, mother, and newly minted grandmother born and raised in Seattle’s Rainier Valley. For more than two decades, she has created work rooted in community, ancestral connection, and collective expression, exploring Black motherhood, healing, identity, ancestry, and Black culture through spoken word, theater, music, movement, and interdisciplinary performance.

Raised in a vaudevillian-style performing family, Franklin began performing with her family at age two, grounding her in communal artistic practice and a lifelong commitment to collective creativity and intergenerational storytelling. Music was her first love and dance her first art form. Steeped in blues, jazz, soul, and funk, her poetry carries that musical lineage into her work as a storyteller and performer.

Franklin has self-published three volumes of poetry and released three spoken word albums. She is the mother of the Mama’z Muezz Project, which includes Mama’z Muezz, a one-woman play and book of poetry; Mama’z Muezzic, a live show and album; and The Mama’z Muezzeum, an immersive ancestral and communal healing experience.

For more than a decade, Franklin has created, produced, and hosted poetry shows, open mics, and festivals supporting artistic expression and development.

Writing and performing as Verbal Oasis, she has been celebrated as “The Unofficial Poet Laureate of South Seattle,” “The Billie Holiday of Spoken Word,” “The Verbal Manifestation of Nina Simone’s Soul,” “The High Priestess of Prose, Poetry, and the Art of Storytelling,” “The Soul Seamstress,” and “The Ancestor Whisperer.”