Poetry, Passion Performance

You wouldn’t compare a poetry slam to a calm summer’s day. A slam is more of a tempest or a tornado. The subject matter is intense, personal and frequently topical. Poets perform as much as they orate. Spectators don’t just observe, they experience the art form.

Slams are wildly popular among younger creatives and ubiquitous across the country—including in Orlando, which over the years has sent teams to regional and national competitions including to an elite gathering called the Southern Fried Poetry Slam.

This year is different: Orlando is hosting “So Fried” for the first time—and it’s a big deal in the world of poetry slams. So Fried is, in fact, the poetry slam equivalent of the Olympics, the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards. It’s slated to run June 9 to 13 at various venues and is expected to attract more than 30 teams and 200 individual poets.

Only spoken-word artists at the top of their game make the cut for So Fried. And host cities have to prove that they can manage the pressure and the logistics required to coordinate the event. At stake will be cash, prizes and bragging rights.

“We’re ready for this,” says Shawn Welcome, former City of Orlando Poet Laureate and originator of the longest-running weekly open-mic poetry event in Central Florida, Diverse Word, which has most recently been held at the Great Southern Box Company Food Hall & Bar in Orlando’s Packing District.

Welcome was also co-founder, with Alex Gurtis, of the Literary Arts Council of Central Florida, a nonprofit with the goal of connecting fragmented resources and making the literary arts more visible and accessible in the community. The council, through an effort helmed by board member Ray Jimenez, secured the upcoming spoken-word showdown for the City Beautiful.

So Fried—sponsored by Southern Fried Poetry Inc., a nonprofit based in Duluth, Georgia—is one of the oldest and largest performance and spoken-word poetry tournaments in the world, and the largest adult regional poetry slam in the United States.

Lasting four days, So Fried includes competition rounds as well as workshops, themed activities, open mics and panel discussions. Poets from the South get to enter first followed by those from outside the region. Teams consist of four or five poets who compete in three preliminary rounds, with winners advancing to the finals.

Rules are voluminous but essentially boil down to these: Poets have three minutes to perform an original work—no props, no costumes, no music—and are scored by five judges chosen at random from the audience.

Although all the venues, dates and times had not been finalized at press time for the 2026 gathering, it is confirmed that registration, orientation and finals will be held at Orlando

Museum of Art, 2416 North Mills Avenue. Prelims will be held at CityArts, 29 South Orange Avenue, and Embassy Suites, 191 East Pine Street. 

Locations for other events include the host hotel, Embassy Suites, and the Orlando Public Library, 101 East Central Boulevard. Sites will soon be announced for such individual events as “Slammasters’ Slam,” “Nerd Slam,” “Haiku Death Match,” “Erotic Open Night” and “Underground Slam.”

Here’s what else we know. So Fried will open with a special “Revive Zora” kickoff event on Tuesday, June 9, at 7 p.m. at the Eatonville Branch Library in the community where folklorist Zora Neale Hurston was raised. The celebration of Hurston’s legacy and impact on poetry and culture will feature commissioned performances by five Black women poets.

And a screening of an inspirational documentary about Welcome’s life and career trajectory is also scheduled for Thursday, June 11, at the Orlando Public Library. Time for the Welcome film has yet to be determined.

Securing So Fried required both heart and hard work. Jimenez was tasked with doing the presentation, but because of a technical glitch never got to show the PowerPoint that he had stayed up half the night creating. So he just had to talk. Recalls Jimenez: “I was shivering and speaking a mile a minute.”

A board member told him to take a breath then asked a basic question: Why should So Fried come to Orlando? “Because we need you,” replied Jimenez, who admits to using stronger (but less quotable) language.

In any case, it all worked out. The vote was unanimous but the work was far from done. Research, meetings and fundraising—among other tasks—lay ahead for locals.

“While I never asked what convinced them, I’d wager it was our earnest enthusiasm,” says Jimenez. “So Fried prides itself as a sort of family reunion, and we were the new cousins who were willing to host dinner next year. It took a bit of nerve but I suppose they liked that.”

Jimenez, Welcome and Gurtis believe that landing So Fried was the first step toward a more robust and collaborative literary arts future in Orlando. The Literary Arts Council also hopes to produce its own festival next year, called Litlando, which will wrap up with a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like it. Until then, they’re starting with a slam.

Visit southernfriedpoetryslam.com for more information. For tickets visit givebutter.com/southernfriedpoetry.