Spoken Word Spartanburg Represents Hub City in National Poetry Festival

SPARTANBURG, SC – Poetry joined Moonpies and RC Cola as a hallmark of southern culture during the annual Southern Fried Poetry Festival, which celebrated the voices of those living in the Southeast. Members of Spoken Word Spartanburg, a local arts and activism organization, added their voices to the mix this year, competing in the 23-year-old festival at the beginning of June.

Old Soul, the name of Spartanburg’s slam poetry team, competed in the regional festival, June 2-7, in Little Rock, Arkansas, this year. The week-long event was open to regional and national poets who compete through slam, or competitive performance poetry.

Marlanda “Sapient Soul” Dekine, Lindsey “Lyla Flower” Stevens, Marcus “Black Phoenix” Turner, Rashad “BlaQ Socrates” Gault, and Derrick “Southern Stylez” Commander represented Spoken Word Spartanburg (SWS), performing both as a team and as individuals.

Black Phoenix, ranked in the top 12 of more than 200 poets. He also participated in one of the side tournaments, the Haiku Slam, and won first place during the championship round on the Indie Final Stage. Old Soul also had two poems to receive perfect scores throughout the competition.

“It’s awesome to be able to represent Spartanburg on a national level, but even more exciting that [Turner] returned home as the Southern Fried Haiku Champion,” Dekine, Director of SWS, said. “We believe that spoken word poetry is an art form with a healing mechanism. We don’t just write and perform; we change lives with what we do. This is for everybody. It’s an honor to bring our experiences back to our own community.”

Dekine hopes to bring much more than personal experience and new relationships with other poetry groups back home. She has plans to place a bid to bring Southern Fried Poetry Festival to Spartanburg.

The organization hosts many other events in the community to connect locals with performance and slam poetry. SWS presents a writing workshop on the second Thursday of each month at Chapman Cultural Center, a conversation on race and racism that incorporates the arts on the first Monday of each month at First Presbyterian Church, and an open mic on the first and third Thursday of each month at Klymaxx Lounge.

“Everything we do is building activism and bringing awareness to the art form,” Dekine said. “It connects people.”

Southern Fried Poetry Festival is the second largest poetry event in the world, serving as an educational opportunity, a showcase of talent, and a tribute to “the creative genius of the south as a spiritual home for artists.”

Spoken Word Spartanburg is a local non-profit that nurtures the art of spoken word through workshops, performance, community dialogue, and activism.

This program is supported in part by The Arts Partnership of Greater Spartanburg, its donors, the County and City of Spartanburg and the South Carolina Arts Commission which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.