MILL CITY SPEAKS

Since our beginning, we have been involved with Poetry Slam, a tongue-in-cheek competition that chooses random judges and awards prizes such as cash and chocolate. Part of this process involves the creation of a Mill City Speaks poetry slam team that has competed in the National Poetry Slam, the Women of the World Poetry Slam, and also various regional events, sometimes inviting poetry slam teams to Lowell for competitions and traveling to other venues to compete with poets there. We do a number of open slams and specialty slams (like the Dead Poets’ Slam) in connection with Untitled Open Mic. When the restrictions of the pandemic limited most of these in-person events, our team sessions evolved into online poetry workshops so that we could continue the kind of support and interaction of the slam scene. These workshops are continuing, and we are publishing, at the end of 2021, a new anthology, Speak Easy: Collaborative Poetry in the Age of Covid-19.