The UNC Wordsmiths have cooked up their own plans for the Thanksgiving season — hosting Slamsgiving, the last spoken word poetry competition before the Grand Slam Finals, this Saturday at 5 p.m.
The event, also known as Last Chance Slam, will consist of both new and returning poets, as well as feature poet Kevin Kantor.
The top five students from the Grand Slam Finals will earn a spot on the team that competes at CUPSI, the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational held in Philadelphia in April.
Tianzhen Nie, the logistical director for the UNC Wordsmiths, said, “I’m excited to see a lot of these returning poets, some of whom are my friends, come back and see how they’ve improved over the past couple of weeks — and hopefully see them secure a spot at Grand Slam Finals.”
Even spoken word poets who did not compete in previous qualifying slams are welcome at Slamsgiving.
“We’re really looking for new talent: people who have things to say and a new, fresh way to say it,” said Kat Tan, executive director of the UNC Wordsmiths. “Again, we’re trying to find new poets who haven’t been performing necessarily, and they are the ones who we want on the team because that will strengthen the team overall. We are made up of poets who have been doing spoken word for a while, and we kind of want to open up the talent pool.”
One draw of Slamsgiving is that feature poet Kevin Kantor will be performing. They are a spoken word poet from Kentucky who tackles social issues in their work as a queer agent for social change.
“If you’re in the spoken word poetry community, Kevin Kantor is kind of a recognizable name,” Tan said. “They’ve done some really great work. I’ve personally been calling them for about two years now, and I’m just excited to have them come and share their work, which is super high caliber and kind of exposes the UNC community to what spoken word could be.”
The Wordsmiths include feature poets, like Kantor, at their slams to showcase the work of professional slammers.