The Niles North Poetry Team, Outspoken, placed 2nd in their first bout and 3rd in their second bout at Louder Than A Bomb 2014 (LTAB).
Outspoken Niles North consists of eight poets: Juniors Katharine Andrew, Andre Jalloh, Meghan Gaynor, Mariah Malave, Alex Owens, Lexie Pitter, and Cassie Lev-Ruth, and senior Liliana Lule. Some of these poets competed in individual poetry slams while others were in a group.
LTAB is an annual poetry festival that is put on the Young Chicago Authors, in partnership with Columbia College Chicago, for the past 13 years. The schools that can participate in LTAB are all the schools in Chicago and in the surrounding suburbs. Niles North is one of the 100+ schools that participated this year.
LTAB consists of:
- Crossing the Street: the kick off of LTAB, where guest writers perform their slam poetry and students come together to write and meet with other poets from different backgrounds and schools
- Preliminary Bouts: where all the teams participating send up writers who perform their slam poetry and compete for their school
- Semi-finals: select teams/students move on to semi-finals, where they compete again in order to move on to either individual finals or team finals
- Individual (indy) Finals: poets compete individually to win the LTAB indy finals
- Team Finals: teams from select schools compete to win the LTAB team finals
“LTAB was created to give youth around the city of Chicago a platform to share their stories. The festival has since become a “bridge” for young people from many different backgrounds to come together and find a common ground through their narratives,” states the Young Chicago Authors website.
Outspoken meets during Mondays after school in room 1250, and practice for poetry slams. For a look into Outspoken and Niles North’s poetry club check out the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7om8brEqF78
For an example of an individual slam poem check out Katharine Andrew’s performance of her poem titled “Dad:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgXDvAh7cbo
