Co-produced by Poetry Center San José and Tabard Theatre.

The San José Poetry Slam is a competitive performance poetry and spoken word event. Participants may sign up with the host at 6:30pm. A random draw of poets will take place at 6:59pm.

This is Day Five of our five-day festival! Check out the complete list of events that are part of the 8th Annual San José Poetry Festival! You can check out all of our events and support local poetry with a Festival Pass.

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A Little Bit About the Slam

Established in 1998, the San José Poetry Slam was one of the first continuous competitive poetry events in the Bay Area. It has been a foundation and home for spoken word and performance poetry, loaded with a collection of regional and national championships to boot. San José has a widely respected name for spoken word thanks to the quality work and notable poets that have come up through the ranks, all thanks to the poetry slam community. Our slam has hosted many acclaimed featured guests from around the world, and it has brought home both national and international trophies. Covid forced a move to Zoom until now, and we're excited to try out our new home at the Tabard Theatre in San Pedro Square in downtown San José!

Poetry Slam Rules

1) Poems can be on any subject and in any style. Each poet must perform work that they have created.

2) Each poet has three minutes and ten seconds to perform. Any time over that will reflect in a lower score. Poets will be stopped at five minutes.

3) No props. Generally, poets are allowed to use their given environment and the accoutrements it offers, such as microphones, mic stands, the stage itself, chairs on stage, a table or bar top, the aisle as long as these accoutrements are available to other competitors as well.

4) No musical instruments or pre-recorded music, a poem which violates this rule will be assessed a score of zero.

5) No costumes.

About Our Feature

Tongo Eisen-Martin Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice ... His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”

Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He was appointed San Francisco Poet Laureate in 2020.

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Want more poetry? Check out the rest of the San José Poetry Festival 2022 lineup. The 8th Annual San José Poetry Festival celebrates our community’s diverse ethnic and cultural heritage with a wide range of topics and literary styles reflected in performances, workshops, and a small press fair.

Follow Poetry Center San José on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for announcements about other amazing South Bay poetry events happening throughout the rest of the year. Help support Poetry Center San José by becoming a member.

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COVID NOTICE: We are so very happy to return to in-person venues this year, but we are aware that, due to infection rates, a venue could cancel at any moment. If a venue cancels, the San José Poetry Festival event will be broadcast to PCSJ’s Zoom channel. All ticket holders will receive a link to the Zoom. Refunds requests for unattended individual events moved online will be reviewed and considered.

San José Poetry Festival 2022 San José Poetry Festival 2022 is presented by Poetry Center San José and is sponsored in part by: Festival and Cultural Affairs grants from the City of San José; a grant from SVCreates, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara and the California Arts Council and also supported in part by a SVCreates National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan grant; funding from Poets & Writers; and with support from Anne & Mark's Art Party, Applied Materials Foundation, Brandenburg Family Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. We would like to acknowledge and offer our deepest gratitude to past venues worthy of your support: Art Boutiki, Books Inc., Caravan Lounge, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, History/San José, Recycle Bookstore, and Works/San José. Please support these spaces however you can.