Aiming to bring teens together across racial, gang, and socio-economic lines, Louder Than A Bomb provides friendly competition that emphasizes self-expression and community through poetry, oral story-telling, and hip-hop spoken word. The festival is an Olympic-style poetry competition, featuring 70 teams and 650 students in 2011. And for the first time in its whole eleven-year history, Louder Than A Bomb will host separate events for its team and individual poet finals. The top twelve individual poets from the high school division compete to see who will become LTAB’s all-star team. The pressure is on, but as always with LTAB, the points are not the point.

Recorded Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.