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A participant performs her piece in the 2009 Louder Than A Bomb Indvidual Category on Finals Night.
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2009 Louder Than A Bomb Semi-finals at Columbia College Chicago
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Louder Than A Bomb
The largest of its kind in the world, Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB) is the city's rapidly-growing teen poetry festival. Aiming to bring teens together across racial, gang, and socio-economic lines, LTAB is a friendly competition that emphasizes self-expression and community via poetry, oral story-telling, and hip-hop spoken word.
As author and LTAB co-founder and artistic director Kevin Coval describes, "For three minutes at a time the students speak about their lives. For the other eighty-seven minutes, they are listening to the lives and stories and dreams of others. Kids that don't look like them and come from a different neighborhood. In listening, the city shrinks."
Based on alumni surveys, LTAB boasts an 85% high school graduation rate, and most notably—within a year of national discussion on youth violence—has had zero incidents of violence in it's 10 years of working with students from across the city. Traditionally operating outside of regular school programming, LTAB brings together poetry teams that are often founded by students and coached pro-bono by teachers, for the annual three week competition each Spring.
Louder Than a Bomb's 10th anniversary year is themed "The Real Chicago Renaissance," a play on Chicago Public Schools controversial Renaissance 2010 school privatization program. Beginning February 20th, with finals taking place at The Vic Theater March 6, LTAB 10 will be dedicated to Chicago's legendary oral historian Studs Terkel.
For more information on Louder Than A Bomb, and the documentary recently filmed about it, please visit:
www.louderthanabomb.org
WordPlay
WordPlay is an open space for teen writers, rhymers, and performers to showcase their work to peers and the public. Each session begins with an hour-long writing workshop, led by a working writer who specializes in topic, genre, or form.
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