The poetry of slam
When Cassandra Euphrat Weston ’14 came to Harvard by way of San Francisco, she missed something. “There’s a very significant spoken-word community in the Boston area, but I didn’t find an undergraduate college spoken-word community here” on campus, she said. So she decided to start one. That idea hatched during Wintersession, when Euphrat Weston and Kyra Atekwana ’14 secured funding for a class that proved so successful it segued into an official student group they dubbed Speak Out Loud (SOL). “Most young people discover slam poetry through YouTube,” said SOL member Virginia Marshall ’15. “But it started as an art form in Chicago in 1985.” “I was lucky enough to be introduced to spoken word through the organization Youth Speaks, which is a wonderful organization in the Bay Area,” said Euphrat Weston, “and I was thrilled by what I found — this idea that everyone’s voice was a great voice for poetry, and poetry...