ON THE ONE HAND the Lit Slam is a monthly variety show, workshop and competition, revolving around poetry—featuring some of the best local voices as well as luminaries from all over North America. This is our love letter to the oral tradition. Something magic happens when writers encounter a live audience, and we can't get enough of it.

ON THE OTHER HAND Lit Slam is an annual poetry collection curated by a live audience. We think the apparent divide between spoken and written poetry is a bit silly, and that masterfully crafted words are worth a second (and seventy-second) read. So at the end of each season, we're taking the winning poems from each month's epic literary battle and wrapping them up in a gloriously paper-y journal that you can read and enjoy forever. What'd you expect? We're poets. We have a weakness for print.

-Learn More About Lit Slam