The Kalamazoo Poetry Slam was founded in 1998. Our goal was to bring a community together, to promote and celebrate the art of poetry through performance. Our primary venue was Kraftbrau Brewery where we thrived for eight years. Each show consisted of an open-mic, a slam competition (where poets perform original works and volunteer judges from the audience score them on a scale from 1-10), and a feature artist. Feature artists were sometimes local poets or musicians, but more often than not, poets on tour from other cities around the U.S. For nine years Kalamazoo sent a team of poets to the National Poetry Slam. We also helped to found a Midwest Poetry Slam League, and one of our former team members, Dawn Saylor, appeared twice on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. After more than twenty years, over 150 hours of recordings from our archive are being presented in podcast form.
