The last week of March, the nonprofit group Spotlight Poetry held a three-day event called Phenomenal Womxn Poetry Festival. It was meant to highlight the voices of women and femme-identifying poets, and it featured a reading by national award winner Yesika Salgado. Phenomenal Womxn was the latest in a series of Spotlight’s milestones.
The group started out about five years ago as an open mic night at Level One bar, and it's grown to a team of a dozen people focusing on slam poetry, holding competitions and uplifting unheard voices in the community.
Founder and President Elle Hope said Spotlight's biggest achievement may have been winning the City of Las Vegas' first regional poetry slam. "It showed how much time and perseverance that we had to face starting out as a group and organization," Hope said. "Because when we first started out, nobody knew what we were really doing. We were just a whole bunch of poets gathering and being like, 'Hey, you like poetry, I like poetry. You want to do this thing called a slam team?'"
She added that it took years of travel to and practice at out-of-town competitions for members to find their voices and get Las Vegas on the map as a slam poetry destination.
Reflecting on what the group has meant to him personally, Spotlight Admin Member Demetri Manabat said, "I've seen this in a lot of other people as well — it gave me a lot of purpose I needed in a specific point in my life. People say this all the time, and it's no exaggeration: To a certain extent, poetry did save my life. [I had] a lot of things going on." The act of writing and listening to poetry kept him and other showing up, he added.
Manabat said Spotlight would be celebrating National Poetry Month (April) with a special edition of one of its monthly showcases at the West Charleston Library. In addition, he hopes to have a poetry slam for the group's five-year anniversary.
Javon Johnson, Spotlight's board member and slam team coach, said this sentiment is not unusual. What poetry can do for a community, he added, is one reason why authoritarian regimes seek to suppress it.
"Creativity is imagination in practice, right?" Johnson said. "Imagination is to think about that which is not here and not now. Creativity is the material practice of working towards that. And I think creativity has a history of really being the perfecter of democracy. Creativity often speaks in places that the state ... is fearful of, but that people often need to hear."
For more information about Spotlight's events, see their website at spotlightpoetry.org.
Guests: Elle Hope, poetand founder of Spotlight Poetry; Demetri Manabat, admin member of Spotlight and slam team poet; Javon Johnson, board member of Spotlight and slam team Coach
