The Room Is on Fire

Book excerpt: The Room Is on Fire offers an overview of youth spoken word poetry's history, its practitioners, participants, and practices. Susan Weinstein explores its grounding in earlier literary/performance/educational traditions and discusses its particular challenges. In order to analyze these issues, the story of how youth spoken word poetry developed as a field is told through the voices of those involved. Interviewees include the people who organized the first youth poetry slam festivals, the founders of central youth spoken word organizations, and a selection of young people who have participated in their local programs and in regional and national events over the last two decades. Narratives about individual and communal efforts and experiences are supported by analyses of full-text poems by youth poets and by reference to contemporary scholarship in performance studies, critical youth studies, and new literacy studies. Blending history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events, the book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and K–12 teachers.