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About This Festival

Previous Location

Multiple Locations in Chicago|, Chicago, IL | Map

Everfest's Take

* Festivities may not take place every day during this date range. Please check the festival's official page for more details.

From the Organizer

Founded 2001 in Chicago and hosted by Young Chicago Authors (YCA), Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is the largest youth poetry festival in the world. The heart of the LTAB experience is the annual poetry slam, a citywide youth competition that over the years has annually attracted the best and brightest young writers from across the city. LTAB runs over 5 weeks from February to March. Annually, it experiences upwards of 1,200 teen participants from over 120 school & community organizations, across 125 different Chicagoland zip codes. LTAB creates a cultural safe space that emphasizes community building, education, empowerment, self-expression and celebration of youth culture. Recently, LTAB's most successful season saw a total of over 15,000 audience members experience 90+ scheduled events across 10 different Chicago locations. In addition to poetry bouts, the festival plays host to Town Hall meetings, new book & mixtape releases, panel discussions, art tours and competitions such as LTABU (College student slam), MC Olympics and the Grudge Match. The final 3 days of LTAB culminate into a National Symposium gathering that invites organizers, educators, students, administrators, funders from around the world interested to participate in professional development training, discussions on curriculum development, round table discussions, breakout sessions and the sharing of best practices in the work of HipHop Poetica, spoken word poetry, publication and performance education. The first event of LTAB is "Crossing The Street". The event that closes out the festival is "Team Finals". For more information, visit youngchicagoauthors.org