SCOTT RAVEN lives in a brainforest made of word-PlayDough and silly putty. This true PENaissance man is a full-time poet with the internationally touring Mayhem Poets, an accomplished short fiction writer, and a professional actor, originally from Edison New Jersey.

The early loss of his mother Bonnie Raven at 15 years old locked Scott into his imagination. He’d keep a private journal hidden beneath his shin guards and socks, concocting short secretive poems-inspired by Street Signs and Shel Silverstein lines. A voracious reader throughout childhood, he’d devour everything from MAD magazine to Milk Cartons, joke books to juice boxes. At first too shy to share his own writing he began acting out other people’s words. The moment he began performing his own poems and stories his world and mind expanded. He became active in his local Jewish community where his rousing horah-half-splits and one of a kind running man led to consecutive bar and bat-mitzvah dance contest victories.

He continued cutting his performance teeth on summer-camp theater productions and high school musicals, splitting his time between athletics and the arts. An ex-soccer star, Middlesex County winning high-jumper and USY State champion basketball player (affectionately knows as JEW BALL), Scott pledged the Sigma Chi Fraternity in the fall of 1999 serving as the Chapter’s Social Chair while remaining active in sports intramurals. An unfortunate injury to his left knee while dunking a basketball (it went in) forced him to stop playing sports competitively following his arthroscopic surgery. He instead began to focus on his studies (at Rutgers University) where he double majored in Theater and Journalism/Media Studies with a minor in English.

While at Rutgers he received numerous awards for his acting and poetry and was selected as chairperson of the year for his college programming council (RCPC), in addition to starting the longest running on campus open-mic, Verbal Mayhem. After graduation, he co-created Mayhem Poets, than later moved to New York, spending more than half his year on the road performing and conducting workshops in schools, colleges and theaters around the world.

As an actor Scott has starred in several independent movies, shot a commercial for a medical billing company and a cellphone company, performed plays in both the Midtown International Theater Festival (2009) and NYC Fringe Festival (2007) and was featured on CNN’s i-Report for BARACKSPLOITATION, A Letter to President Obama, which received 20,000 hits in under a week’s time.

In 2006, Scott’s group, the Mayhem Poets, appeared on the Today Show winning the Microsoft Idea Wins Challenge for best small business idea, allowing them to fund a new program in New York City called Slam-chops. From 2007-2008 he served as Creative Director of SlamChops, and was responsible for recruiting and training new artists, committed to creating artistically fulfilling, financially beneficial opportunities for all poets and performers in hopes of restoring “poet” as a legitimate profession among the masses.

His first solo spoken-word CD is a collection of live and in-studio poems, entitled Crossing Roads Less Travelled (2003), available on iTunes. With the Mayhem Poets he has released two CDs, the kid-friendly Eat Your Words (2005), and the critically acclaimed Reverse Birth, which was selected as one of the “Best Spoken Word CDs of 2007,” by About.com.

Scott has three books of poetry sitting around his room beside some X-men action figures waiting to be published along with a collection of Shakespearean “Sconnetts.” He is currently working on a fictional novel loosely based on his touring experiences throughout elementary and middle schools around the world and is interested in collaborating with dancers, musicians and other artists.