Author
Marc Kelly Smith, an American poet born in 1949 in Chicago, is considered the founder of the slam poetry movement. A graduate of James H. Bowen High School, Smith spent his early years as a construction worker…
Category
Slam
A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points.
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- Glossary Terms
A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points. Slam is a composite genre that combines elements of poetry, theater, performance, and storytelling. The genre’s origins can be traced to Chicago in the early 1980s. Since then, groups of volunteers have organized slams in venues across the world. The first National Poetry Slam was held in 1990, and has become an annual event in which teams from cities across the United States compete at events in a host city. For more on poetry slams, see Jeremy Richards’s series “Performing the Academy”. See also poets Tyehimba Jess, Bob Holman, and Patricia Smith. See also spoken word poetry.
- AuthorSam sax is the author of the poetry collections PIG (Scribner, 2023); bury it (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), winner of the James Laughlin Award; madness (Penguin, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series…
- AuthorBorn in Detroit, poet Tyehimba Jess earned his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from New York University. He is the author of leadbelly (2005) and Olio (2016), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Jess…
- AuthorPatricia Smith (she/her) has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Incendiary Art (Northwestern University…
- AuthorSpoken-word poet and arts activist Bob Holman was born in Harlan, Kentucky, and grew up in Ohio. He earned a BA at Columbia University and also studied at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Ted Berrigan, Alice…