Beau Sia
poet
Beaufort Benjamin Sia (simplified Chinese: 谢福源; traditional Chinese: 謝福源; pinyin: Xiè Fúyuán; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Siā Hok-gôan, born 1976) is an American slam poet.
Life and career
Sia was born in Ohio. He is of Chinese-Filipino descent. Raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Sia discovered spoken word poetry on MTV as a teenager. When not participating in his high school's swim team, he spent time at Oklahoma City's only open mic night.
In 1995, Sia moved to New York City, where he attended the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts dramatic writing program. He has said that moving to New York City made him conscious of his identity as an Asian American, something that he denied often in Oklahoma City. His cultural identity became a common theme in his poems.
Sia began performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, eventually earning himself a place on the 1996 Nuyorican National Poetry Slam team. That same year, he was filmed for the documentary SlamNation.
“Beau Sia” enters the record as poet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beau and poet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Beau Sia” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Beau and poet provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4877386. VIAF identifies the subject as 188635186. The Library of Congress control number is no2012146942. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1995 and 1996.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beau Sia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.