[reposted from Vocalo.org]

The Rundown

Brave New Voices calls itself “the largest youth poetry festival in the world”– and for the poets, it’s Game ON: BNV is a poetry slam– scored like a sporting event, with teams competing for the crown. More than 500 youth poets came to Chicago this week to compete, and the semi-final rounds are happening today. Actually, right now– they started at 11 o’clock.

And right here. One of the semi-final rounds is taking place right next door to our studios– the teams from Denver, Cleveland, Jacksonville, and the Twin Cities are fighting it out– and we’ll be covering the competition with help from a couple of experts to give play-by-play and color commentary.

At 12:00 Noon, Roger Bonnai-Agard joins us to get us up to speed on the festival– if poetry is a sport, how do you keep score? how do you set up a winning strategy for your team?– and to bring us highlights from the first hour of the semi-finals.

And Roger’s not just an expert on poetry as a sport– he writes poetry about sports. His new book, Bully, is about growing up in Trinidad and Tobago when those islands dominated an international sporting scene: Cricket. (What’s Cricket, again? He’ll fill us in.)

At 1:00 pm, spoken-word and hip-hop artist Adam Levin comes in to take us through the big finish. We’ll have a post-game interivew with reps from the winning team before we’re done.

Listen to the LIVE STREAM HERE.

Listen to the ARCHIVE HERE.