If you're anything like me, you either binge watch television shows online or watch small chunks of them while you eat your pathetic lunch, but if you WERE watching The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night on your magical television box, then you would have seen three very good poets read some work as part of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's performance of "White Privilege II."

Regardless of what one might think of Macklemore's song, he seems to keep good literary company. If you're unfamiliar with the work of Jamila Woods, Danez Smith, and Nikkita Oliver, then do yourself a favor and check them out.

Jamila Woods, who sings during the performance, received the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize last year. I'm a fan of her poem "Ghazal for White Hen Pantry." She's also got a book, The Truth About Dolls, which was published by New School Poetics Press. You can listen to a sample and buy the full audio version of the book on her bandcamp.

If you haven't picked up [insert] boy by Danez Smith, who won the Lilly in 2014, then you're way behind. As you can tell in the video, Smith's a powerful performer, but in the books its easier to see how he enriches and complicates his poems with line breaks. He only gets like 20 seconds of poem-time on the show, which is a shame. Watch him perform "Dear White America" to get a better sense of his range.

Nikkita Oliver's been a fixture of Seattle's slam community for a while. In 2014, she won Seattle Poetry Slam's Grand Slam. I don't know how she finds time to teach writing, practice law, write poems, and perform with Macklemore, so I'm beginning to think there are five of her.