Slam Spot: The Spice Factory
Price: $5 dollars or PWYC (Pay What You Can)
Slam Rules: Team pieces welcome, no props, no costumes, no nudity, no hate speech, original work only, memorization optional. Prize: $50 for 1st place and surprise prize for 2nd and 3rd place
SLAM: There will a 14 poet cap on the slam signup. Slam signup goes up at 6:15. If the list exceeds 14 poets at 6:45, we will randomly select 14 poets to compete by drawing their names out of a hat. If you aren’t drawn, you will have 2 names in November slam’s draw. If you don’t get drawn that slam, you automatically will be slamming the December slam.
Round 1 will be in random order. Round 2 will takes the top 6 poets from Round 1 and have them go in reverse order. Round 3 will take the top 3 poets in random order. Each round is “clean slate” scoring. The first place winner will be determined from the Round 3 slammers.
The time limit for poems in the slam is 3:00. There is a 10 second grace period. So poems under 3:10 will not be penalized. Poems will be penalized (.5) for every ten seconds over time. The time starts at the first contact with the audience; this can be a word or action.
Your overall scores for the season go towards rankings for the year. At the end of the season if you have slammed at least three times and ranked (or won) you will be contacted to be in the semi-finals to compete to be on the HYP Slam Team. (The top 16 poets of the season are eligible to go on to semi-finals.)
OCTOBER HYP SLAM FEATURE: Nisha Patel
Nisha is an Indo-Canadian poet, artist, and public speaker in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Edmonton. She is also the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion, the 2019 Edmonton Slam Champion, and the Executive Director of the Edmonton Poetry Festival.
She is the author of "Limited Success" and co-author of "Water". She is the 2016 Edmonton Indie Slam Champion and a four-time member of the Edmonton Slam Team. She is a finalist of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. She is the former Artist-in-Residence at The Nook Cafe and The Sewing Machine Factory.
Her work has also been published in The Glass Buffalo Vol. 2 No. 3 & The City Series: Number Four - Edmonton, as well as The Polyglot Issue 3: Curating our Canons.
Nisha holds a Bachelors of Commerce from the University of Alberta school of Business with a major in Business Economics and Law, a minor in Political Science, and a Certificate in Leadership.