Open Mic, Featured Poets (info below) and the Big Money $Lam - 1st prize is $100.  For more info email info@seattlepoetryslam.org

Feature: Every Monday night in Bellingham for more than 10 years, Poetry Night has filled the air of the college town with beauty. Now, Poetry Night is coming to you. Four of their best will be blessing our stage:

Anna Wolff recently completed her Masters Degree in English
at Western Washington University. She spent much of her time
reading and writing and trying to teach Freshman to do the
same. Anna currently live, writes, and plays in Bellingham, and
firmly believes that poets will someday regain their rightful
status as rockstars.

Malcolm Kenyon has published nine collections of poetry,
including The Goat Island Battery and Expeditions to the Golden
Triangle. He has been published in Jeopardy 2007, Manzanita
Quarterly, and Bicycling Magazine. He served in the United States
Navy in Vietnam in minesweepers, before attending the
University of New Mexico where he received his MA in Latin
American History. He is currently retired and teaching English
as a Second Language for the Whatcom Literacy Council.
Malcolm is working on his first novel, Cuentecillos de Las
Cueras (Tales of Las Cueras).

Robert Lashley is one pretty sucker. Those twinkling eyes! that impish grin! those devilish eyebrows! But behind that baby face lurks a fierce and brilliantly poetic brain that spits fire and croons sex. He has been a semi-finalist for two prestigious scholarships this year, the Cave Canem Fellowship and the PEN Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship. His first collection of poems, Songs My City Taught Me, sold out of five printings and has been bootlegged up and down the Sound. We should all be so lucky.

Sarah Goodin started performing at the age of 2, serenading
her mother from the top of the kitchen table with her rendition
of Lionel Ritchie’s ‘All Night Long’. Despite this early
recognition of her genius, the road to fame has not always been
smooth: she has washed dishes in a nursing home, hand-
delivered groceries over the cobblestone streets of Boston, and
gone door to door for the environmental research group
WashPIRG. She released her first CD, ‘Goodnight Noises
Everywhere’ in July. Sarah Goodin lives in Bellingham, with
her gorgeous, brilliant, two year old son.

An integral member of the 2006 Bellingham Slam Team, Jessica
Lohafer cut her teeth as a regular reader at Poetrynight, and
soon thereafter became a featured reader at the Seattle Poetry
Slam, Eugene Poetry Slam, Vancouver Poetry Slam, Snohomish
Poet’s Society and Vancouver, B.C.’s Sista’hood Festival.
Lately, her focus has been poetry in schools; she is currently
organizing Poetrynight’s youth writing program and performing
at elementary, middle, and high schools. Jessica hopes to create
an interest in the arts in schools throughout the Northwest. She
is a student at Western Washington University, where she plans
to study English, and eventually become a teacher.

The Cover Slam requires poets to give homage and perform the work of another poet.

For more information email: info@seattlepoetryslam.org

Stacie Boschma is a performance poet, or performing poet, or writer of 3-minute monologues, or documenter of both absurdities and true tenderness. She is currently on a North American tour with Atlanta singer-songwriter Hollin Gammage, which pretty much involved throwing darts at a map, but oh how many darts they did throw.

She has one full length album out and is traveling with a homebrew EP of her work, called the Shout Rainbows EP. Stacie loves being on stage, likes to get all goofy in public, and when emceeing Slams can be seen actually doing math in her head. This is the least exhilarating part of any Slam she emcees, but it isn’t like she doesn’t know that.

Stacie competed at the 2006 National Poetry Slam on Atlanta’s Art Amok team and her work has appeared in the anthology Look, Up In The Sky, and the journal Limp Wrist.

IWPS Prelim - last chance for poets to qualify for our Finals which will determine who reps Seattle at the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in December in Charlotte, NC.

The format is: 1st round - 4 min time limit, 2nd round- 2 min. time limit, 3rd round - 1 min. time limit.

Maya Hersh began writing slam poetry in 2005, and read for the first time in Brattleboro, Vermont.  Youth slam champion of Northampton, Massachusetts in 2006, competed in 2006 and 2007 IWPS and placed 23 out of 72 in 2007.  She has also been published in Pangaia magazine, an 80-page quarterly magazine that explores Pagan and Gaian Earth-based spirituality at home and around the world.  She has featured at many venues across the nation like Worcester, Massachusetts, Fayetteville, Arkansas and our very own Snohomish, Washington.

Besides poetry, Maya Hersh’s passions are spiders, Judaism, bellydancing, rain and the Russian language. Not necessarily in that order. She likes to bake in the middle of the night and believes that if you want something bad enough, it will always happen. Last November, she got on a greyhound bus without a destination and competed her way across the country to end up here in Seattle, where she is planning to stay. She has self-published two chapbooks and a cd, and is working on a third book entitled “Burning on Purpose”.

This is the first open slam of the season - the first chance poets have towards qualifying for the 2009 Seattle national Slam Team. It is also our LAST show at ToST. Beginning Sept 10th, the slam will continue at The Spitfire Grill - 2219 4th Ave downtown Seattle.

Didn’t get enough of the Seattle National Slam Team this summer? Well they’re ALL coming back to help us say a proper SLAMMIN’ goodbye to ToST. You will see Danny Sherrard, Matt Gano, Wanbli, Tara Hardy,  and Karen Finneyfrock each rock the house individually as well as bring some group work to the stage for your listening pleasure. And if we’re lucky there may be a special surprise guest or two…

Karen Finneyfrock is a poet, performer, host and teacher living in Seattle, WA. As an accomplished Spoken Word Artist and member of the Poetry Slam movement, Karen’s work was featured in the only two National Poetry Slam Anthologies (From Page to Stage and Back Again, 2003 and Freedom to Speak, 2002.) Karen was one of eight poets featured in the Women of Slam Showcase at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, TX. Karen has performed at Bumbershoot, the Seattle Poetry Festival, the Redmond Poetry Festival and Vancouver’s West Coast Poetry Festival. She has been featured in two national spoken word tours. Locally, Karen was Seattle’s SlamMaster and Host of the Seattle Poetry Slam from 2001 until 2005, and is a member of the 2008 Seattle National Slam Team. Her full length book of poetry published by en theos press is titled “Welcome to the Butterfly House.” She is currently working on a book of young adult fiction.

The Goldfronts creators: Meticulous the Visitor (Matt Gano -three-time Seattle National Slam team member and Seattle Grand Slam Champ ) and Moresun Wells (Chris Carroll - past Youth Speaks National Slam team member), have collaborated to bring forth a style of HipHop that pushes creativity while remaining accessible. The Goldfronts are an electric collection of ideas and beats taking hiphop to outer space then back to the streets. Take a gander at their work at myspace.com/thegoldfronts and at http://www.206blend.com/

HOSTED BY GREG BEE.

The final competition to determine who Seattle sends to Charlotte, NC for the Individual World Poetry Slam Championships. A Seattle poet, Buddy Wakefield, has already brought home this title TWICE.

Competing poets are: Karen Finneyfrock, Amber Flame, Roma Raye, Ela Barton, Maya Hersh, Tara Hardy, Jodie Knowles, and Matt Gano.

1st round: 8 poets in random order - 4 min. time limit
2nd round: all 8 poets in reverse order - 1 min. time limit.
Top 5 cumulative scores advance.
3rd round: 5 poets - random order - 2 min. time limit.
Top 3 cumulative scores advance
4th round: 3 poets - random order - 3 min. time limit.

Highest cumulative score wins.

Calgary born songwriter/spoken word artist Kris Demeanor delights in exposing the underbelly of western Canadian culture- gambling, drug use, murder, religion, the suburbs. His latest CDs, “The Guilt and the Shame- tales of the Canadian West”, and “Go Away (with me)” examine these darker, stranger corners of his home province.

“I Have Seen the Future”, Kris’s spoken word piece based on a father/son tennis game sabotaged by three glue sniffing teens, screened in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, and was named one of the top 10 shorts of 2008 by the Toronto International film festival.

Kris has toured numerous times in Australia and Europe, and along with his Crack Band have shared bills with such artists as David Byrne, Cake and Elvis Costello, Ray Davies and Black Francis.

Corrina Bain was born on September 18th, 1983. She began performing her poems when she was 14. She has opened for spoken word legends as diverse as Patricia Smith and Jim Carroll, and is credited in the lyrics of Sage Francis’s album “A Healthy Distrust“.

Corrina has been on multiple New England National slam teams, most recently representing Providence in 2005, and is half the magic behind Distilled, an album with Tom Inhaler of Strange Famous Records. She spent a year as a voluntary worker in an HIV/AIDS prevention project in sub-Saharan Africa, returning in 2007. She currently lives in Boston and works at an abortion clinic.