Deborah D E E P MoutonBorn in Riverside, California, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-recognized performance poet and the first African-American Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked #2 Female Performance Poet in the World, she is a founding member and executive director of VIP Arts Houston, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy and the arts in underserved populations. Her genre-bending poetry has engendered unconventional collaborations with groups as disparate as the Houston Rockets and the Houston Ballet. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and the TEDx circuit. An opera about the life of Marian Anderson, for which she wrote the libretto, premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2020. Mouton lives and teaches in Houston. Read More Read Less