The world’s largest individual poetry competition comes to Berkeley, CA in October

The individual world poetry slam will be hosted in Berkeley California, bringing hundreds of poets and fans from around the world to compete for the title of individual world champion.

[ClickPress, Wed Jul 29 2009] Each fall the best spoken-word poets in the United States and Canada, having won championships in 75 cities and towns across the continent, converge on one metropolis to test their mettle against each other. These bards, griots, emcees and wordsmiths of all stripes travel thousands of miles to compete in iWPS - the Individual World Poetry Slam. They come from far and wide for the chance to win the highly coveted title of National Individual Champion. In October of 2009, Berkeley will proudly play host to this prestigious tournament, bringing this super-heated poetic battle to the Bay Area for the first time.

During this thrilling three-day event, co-sponsored by Epic Arts and Poetry Flash, Slams will be held at venues throughout Berkeley culminating in a final competition expected to draw a crowd of thousands to one of the city’s premier performance spaces. The iWPS tournament will also be connected to a larger, weeklong festival of poetry spanning NorCal with events in cities as far flung as Santa Cruz and Sonoma.

If your poetry knowledge goes only as far as Poe and Pound, the Poetry “Slam” was birthed in 1984 in a Chicago bar called The Get Me High Lounge and moved to The Green Mill by a construction worker named Mark Smith (so what!). Mark, tired of what he saw as the stuffy aesthetic of the open-mics going on at the time, decided to start his own reading. What he actually ended up starting instead was a movement credited by many with the resurgence of spoken-word specifically and poetry in general. The idea of Slam caught on quickly and in 1990 the first team tournament, called “The National Poetry Slam” was held right here in The Bay, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason. The event featured teams from Chicago, New York and of course, the home team. “Nationals”, as it’s commonly called by the poets hoping to make the trip, has been held every August since and has grown to include teams representing cities in every state in the nation as well as Canada and France.


For more information, press only:

PR Manager:
Christopher Bundy, (408) 489-2419, Cbundy711@gmail.com


For more information, event info only:

Host City Coordinator:
Charles Ekabhumi Ellik - voluptuary@hotmail.com

Daytime Events Coordinator:
Jen Gigantino - chthonian.j@gmail.com

Director of Hospitality:
Nazelah Jefferies – chocolateorange8@yahoo.com


For more information on IWPS:
http://www.IWPS.poetryslam.com

For more information on PSI:
http://www.poetryslam.com