2012 LOUDER THAN A BOMB MASSACHUSETTS
IS EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE
OUR SPOTLIGHT FINALS SHOWCASE FEATURE
Finals Night Tickets for the LTAB Championship Bout & Feature Presentation to be held at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, April 13th, 2012
“My goal is simple…I just want to move the world one poem at a time.”
IYEOKA IVIE OKOAWO is a Poet/Recording Artist, the 2nd place 2009 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and a 2010 TED Global Fellow. A first-generation Nigerian-American, Iyeoka was a practicing pharmacist before launching her career as a poet, presenter, activist and educator. Among Iyeoka’s individual lists of credits is performing at the Kennedy Center for an award event honoring activist and actress Mia Farrow, being commissioned by Discovery Channel for their 2008 brand campaign, being commissioned by a top-twenty ad agency to write a piece for a diversity training tool, receiving a 2011 Independent Music Award nomination for her R&B song “This Time Around”, a Massachusetts Industry Committee Hip-Hop Award for Spoken Word Artist of the year, and a New England Urban Music 
Award for the Best Female Spoken Word Poet. She holds the distinction of being the only member of the nationally competing Boston Lizard Lounge Slam team to have earned her position nine years in a row. Iyeoka is currently partnering with selective arts organizations to present her WORD SPEAKING TRIBE’S Professional Development Workshops on a 2010 nationwide tour.
A storyteller to the core, Iyeoka’s hope-filled poems come from within and build momentum with truth transformed into songs that reemerge as unique, emotionally complex gifts to her audience, touching on a wide range of issues-love, women, culture, struggle, relationships, among many others. The buzz surrounding her poem and songs has garnered her national attention through performances at the TBS Trumpet Awards, the CBS hip hop show The Source All Access and Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam airing on HBO. Iyeoka also has opened for the Tony Award winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway tour at the Colonial Theater in Boston. Sharing the stage with recording artists Chuck D of Public Enemy, Musiq Soul Child and Vivian Greene to poets Gil Scot Heron, Sonia Sanchez, and Amiri Baraka—Iyeoka has held true to her core.
Across the nation, at venues ranging from universities, large concert halls, and 
neo-soul clubs to venerable spoken word haunts like the Nuyorican Poets Café; Iyeoka’s warm spirit, stirring lyrics and passionate performances leave audiences not only entertained but visibly overcome with emotion. Widely considered one of the top performance poets in the country, Iyeoka has earned her reputation by performing on the National Poetry Slam circuit for well over a decade, with the Jeff Robinson Trio and as a member of the acclaimed Bull Horn Collective and Blackout Arts Collective.
A gifted performer, Iyeoka’s acting prowess has been featured as the title character in a PBS documentary on Harriet Tubman, as well as an off-Broadway play produced by Thema Bryant Davis. Her poem on Rwanda is also featured in a documentary film “Rwanda Rising” that is Executive Produced by Andrew Young the former ambassador to the United Nations.
Mass Poetry & Mass LEAP are excited to announce admission information & Finals Showcase On-Line Ticket Access for our April 13th Evening Finals Showcase!
CLICK HERE to access LTAB page and find all the info you need!
2012 Louder than a Bomb Massachusetts
Bout Draw
Stratton Student Center, MIT Cambridge
Each Team will compete twice throughout the day. 8 teams with the lowest cumulative rank will be invited to compete at semi-finals on Sunday April 1st!
ALL PRELIMINARY POETRY SLAMS TAKE PLACE AT
MIT STRATTON STUDENT CENTER,
84 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE, MA
_____________________________________
MORNING BOUTS 11am-1pm
_____________________________________
Bout 1 (Morning 11am-1pm - Room W20491)
Codman Academy (Dorchester)
Free Verse (Lowell)
Barnstable High School
Phoenix Charter Academy (Chelsea)
Bout 2 (Morning - 11am-1pm - West Lounge)
Hoop Suites (Boston)
Harbor Middle School (Dorchester)
Emerson Writes (Boston)
AMSA Charter School (Marlboro)
Bout 3 (Morning - 11am-1pm - Mezzanine)
Newburyport High School
North Brookfield High School
Words for Deaf Ears (Artovation/Books of Hope) (Somerville)
Peabody High School
Bout 4 (Morning - 11am-1pm – Lobdell Cafeteria)
University Park Campus School (Worcester)
Billerica High School
Cacique Youth Center (Boston)
Worcester Youth Poetry Slam
____________________________________________
AFTERNOON BOUTS 2-4pm
____________________________________________
Bout 5 (Afternoon - 2pm-4pm - West Lounge)
Codman Academy (Dorchester)
Hoop Suites (Boston)
University Park Campus School (Worcester)
Newburyport High School
Bout 6 (Afternoon 2-4pm - Lobdell Cafeteria)
Free Verse (Lowell)
Harbor Middle School (Dorchester)
Words for Deaf Ears (Artovation/Books of Hope) (Somerville)
Billerica High School
Bout 7 (Afternoon 2-4pm - Mezzanine)
Barnstable High School
Emerson Writes (Boston)
Cacique Youth Center (Boston)
North Brookfield High School
Bout 8 (Afternoon 2-4pm - Room W20491)
Worcester Youth Poetry Slam
Peabody High School
AMSA Charter School (Marlboro)
Phoenix Charter Academy (Chelsea)
Mass LEAP & The Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project
are excited to announce the location for the
2012 Louder than a Bomb Massachusetts Finals Showcase!
Friday, April 13th, 2012 7-9:30pm
VILLA VICTORIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS MAIN HALL,
85 W. NEWTON ST. BOSTON, MA 02118
Villa Victoria Center for the Arts is a program of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), a non-profit organization that since 1968 has been dedicated to increasing the social and economic power of our community through education, economic development, technology, and arts programming.
Villa Victoria Center for the Arts is the largest and most significant Latino Cultural Center in New England. Reaching over 20,000 people a year, our mission is to preserve, promote and celebrate Latino art and to create dynamic cross-cultural collaborations. 
Awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants in 2008, 2009 and 2010; we present the broad diversity of Latino and Latin American cultural expression in a variety of disciplines (music, dance, visual arts), while using arts and culture as tools for self-transformation and community building. The Main Hall is a 445 person capacity performance venue. Grandiose and historic, the hall features a large stage, a mezzanine/balcony. With over 1,700 square feet floor space and the optional sitting on the balcony area, the hall offers the flexibility to host large gatherings from concerts and theater performances to smaller affairs like wedding and private dinners.
SATURDAY MARCH 10th, 2012
4:30pm – 7:00pm
2012 Louder than a Bomb Massachusetts Coaches Meeting
Grub Street Writing Institute, 162 Boylston Street (4th Floor) Boston, MA 02116
Once again, our good friends at Grub Street Writing Institute are generously loaning us their beautiful space for us to hold our meeting. This 2 hour session is MANDATORY for your team to participate in the tournament. If you have a time conflict, please get in touch with Amanda Torres or Alex Charalambides as soon as possible, in order to figure out a proxy. Teams are also encouraged to bring a student leader / captain with them to this meeting.
At this meeting, we will discuss festival details, tournament rules and field any 
questions, but more importantly, it is a unique opportunity for us to continue building a strong community that will serve as a model for our youth throughout the festival. We have 16 teams officially registered at this time, and we cannot wait to see everyone in the room!
Click HERE for directions and parking information.
The last two teacher / coaches training & informational sessions at Grub Street were incredible successes. We’re so excited and gratified to see our Massachusetts teacher activists getting together, taking part in writing & performance exercises, sharing best practices and showing enthusiasm for this inaugural festival. The last session, we were extremely proud of the youth and adult turnout. We welcomed guest educators, poets and LTAB Chicago Alumni Roger Bonair-Agard, Peter Kahn, Jose Olivarez and Novana Venerable. Coaches, teachers and student leaders wrote and perforemed group poems, discussed hip hop & spoken word pedagogy and connected on a level that Mass LEAP’s super proud to continue to make spaces for.
Young Chicago Authors & MassLEAP will join forces to bring you the professional development you need to get you and your team ready for the festival. The outline below includes a breakdown of the schedule to be co-taught by Peter Kahn, Jose Olivarez, Roger Bonair Agard; with special guests Novana Venerable & Tabitha Watson.
All workshops to be held at Grub Street
(160 Boylston St, Boston, MA)
Saturday, February 11th
1:00am – 3:00pm
Breakout 1: Using Spoken Word to Teach Writing: Immersion in pedagogy, teaching, spoken word and hip-hop poetry with a focus on composition
Breakout 2: The Art of the Group Piece & Performance: Immersion in performance and group pieces
3:00pm – 5:00pm
Round-Table Discussion: Immersion in building a spoken word club, building a spoken word culture in your school & building a year-round culture in your city. Please come prepared to participate in the dialogue!
5:00pm – 8:00pm
Saturday Night Showcase! FreeVerse! presents “I Think I _____ You!” a performance poetry showcase in collaboration with COOL + UnchARTed @ 126 Merrimack St. Come kick a piece and listen to Lowell’s young folks tear up the heart.
The organizers of the inaugural 2012 Louder than a Bomb Massachusetts (LTAB Mass) Festival have set up a new date, time and location for an optional pre-registration session for teachers and community activists who would like to learn more about the process for putting together a youth poetry slam team. There will be opportunities to ask questions, discuss the festival tournament rules and share best practices for working with youth poets. We would like to thank our friends at Grub Street Writing Institute for sharing their incredible conference space with us!
Saturday Jan 28th 6pm-8pm
Grub Street
160 Boylston St. (4th Floor) Boston, MA
Public Parking Garages Nearby, Train Accessible
Please RSVP with us at LTABmass@gmail.com
More about Grub Street: www.grubstreet.org “Grub Street is one of the largest independent centers for creative writing in the United States. Our mission is to be an innovative, rigorous, and welcoming community for writers who together create their best work, find audience, and elevate the literary arts for all.
We accomplish this by offering the highest quality classes and services for writers at all stages of development, by educating writers through the entire writing process from inspiration to publication and promotion, by putting a premium on teaching excellence, by welcoming as many writers as possible through generous scholarships and free outreach programming, by creating fulfilling employment for writers, by connecting people and ideas through writing, and by empowering writers to fully embrace new opportunities ushered in by the digital age.”
Casey Rocheteau is running this month’s writing workshop for: teacher-poets, or just plain curious writers, and listeners of ALL ages, on November 19th.
The only hints I’ll give you to what this will be all about, is: displacement & a “holiday” setting. Also that it’ll probably find a way to be exactly what you did expect, and didn’t expect, all at the same time. No lie.
About Casey:
Casey Rocheteau doesn’t believe in the end of time, but is a historian from the future. She began performing poetry at Hampshire College, where she was one of the leaders of the Hampshire Slam Collective from 2004-2007, during which she was a member of the first Hampshire/Five College teams at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational. She has continued to perform throughout the country, releasing the album Pump Your Concrete on the Whitehaus Family Record in 2008. She has attached four books onto the legs of carrier pigeons: Roguish Young Things (2006), Keelhaul (2007), and List of American Rituals (2008), 11:11 (2009) . Recently, she’s gathered up the stuttering syllables of American cities and formed a new album entitled Chiaroscurro. More recently, she’s written a book called Wild Child, filled with sex and heartbreak. Her next book, The Dozen is cooking in the maelstrom of the Age of Insecurity.
This event is open to the public, and is FREE.
It’ll be held upstairs at Rodney’s Bookstores in Central Square, Cambridge from 12pm-3pm on November 19th.
Bring others on in too to join in on this hootenanny.
(Also to bring more words like hootenanny into this space).
Got any other ideas/comments?
Send them along to: caclarke@suffolk.edu
Mass LEAP is the Massachusetts Literary Education and Performance Collective.
We’re a network of artists, educators, and students working together to create a vibrant youth poetry community in Greater Boston.
We work to connect teaching artists with schools and other organizations in order to create opportunities for the youth of the Commonwealth to experience, create, and perform poetry.
Our goals are to empower the voices of young people, foster creativity, promote literacy, and build community.
We offer:
- Writing workshops
- Open mics
- Poetry slams
- Adult development trainings for educators who want to incorporate spoken word into their curricula
Mass LEAP is sponsored by Mass Poetry.
Meaghan Ford is a Massachusetts transplant from Elizabeth, New Jersey where she learned the art of yelling eloquently. Last year she earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Emerson College and recently has been qualifying in poetry slams in the Boston area. She is a freelance writer and graphic designer and has been published in such magazines as The Legendary, Phantom Kangaroo, and The Scrambler. Currently she is working on her first chapbook of poetry, a nonfiction book, and a screenplay for children with more puns than she’d like to admit. When not being an adult she’s usually around the city enjoying the lack of a real winter and praying for snow so that she can go sledding.
