PLEASE NOTE: This event is sold out.

The second annual Verselandia! event is a PPS city-wide all high school poetry slam presented by Literary Arts and hosted by the PPS high school library media specialists.

Participating high schools will conduct their own Poetry Slams and the finalists from each school will compete against each other for big prizes (to be announced soon). If you are a high school student wishing to participate, please contact your library staff.

Poetry Slam is competitive spoken word performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on both writing and performance. Though rules vary from slam to slam, the basic rules are:

• Competing poets have 3 minutes (plus a 10 second grace period) to perform one poem of their own construction.
• They may not use props, costumes or musical accompaniment.
• Each poem/performance is then given a score (on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0) by five “judges” who are audience members randomly selected by the emcee at the beginning of the Slam. Or pre-selected from the community.
• The high and low scores are dropped, giving the poet a score ranging between 0 and 30.
• Most Slams have two or three elimination rounds. The highest scoring poets at the end of the Slam win prizes.