Last Sunday, four members of North’s Creative Writing Club competed in the Rooted and Radical Youth Poetry Festival Finals and won second place. Located at the Ramova Theatre in Chicago, the event was organized by Young Chicago Authors, a nonprofit organization aiming to make people’s voices heard through creative expression.
The Rooted and Radical Festival is focused on students performing slam poetry and being scored on the content and their speaking skills.
“Slam poetry is a lot more of a performance than regular poetry. It’s a little bit more than spoken word because you do actions with what you’re saying, or you have specific steps, almost [like] choreography,” said Leah Brett, a junior and member of the slam poetry team.
Many of the events at Rooted and Radical have been designed to exemplify the importance of meeting other people with different experiences.
“The first event is called Crossing the Street, and it’s literally called that because they want to encourage people from one neighborhood to meet people from another,” said Elizabeth Battaglia, Creative Writing Club adviser and English teacher.
Most groups at Rooted and Radical compete as part of their school’s team, but there are some independent poets, nicknamed “indies.” The independent poets usually compete against one another, while the poets in groups compete against other teams.
The process of competing happens in many stages. Firstly, there are two preliminary bouts. Each team sends four poets, who are scored by judges. Their collective score is compared with the other teams. If a team’s score is in the top eight, they move on to semifinals. However, only teams who score in the top four move on to finals.
North’s second place win earned the slam poetry team many prizes. They included a four-foot trophy and a $500 investment called the Community Award. This award’s goal is to build connections amongst poetry teams.
“It’s an investment to encourage us to not only grow our slam poetry program here, but also to help us engage in the larger slam poetry writing community,” said Battaglia.
Both Battaglia and Brett encourage students to join North’s Creative Writing Club and perform slam poetry at Rooted and Radical next year if they are interested.
“I[t] was just incredible to be there. It’s incredible to hear what everybody has to say,” said Battaglia.
