The Bigfoot Poetry Festival is an annual, three-day series of literary events taking place in downtown Portland, OR. Bigfoot offers a wide array of poetry open mics, writing and performance workshops, showcases, a poetry market, and themed poetry slams throughout the weekend, all of which are free and open to the public. Some notable events are the Nerd Slam (themed around various fandoms), the Youth Slam (exclusive to younger poets), and the BIPOC open mic series (centering poets of color). This will be our fifth year organizing and facilitating this festival.

Additionally, the festival is headlined by a national poetry slam tournament, in which sixteen teams of poets and spoken word artists from across the country compete in bouts scored by judges over the course of the festival. Teams will compete in two preliminary bouts on the first two nights and the top four highest-scoring teams move onto our Finals Stage event on the last night. While only registered teams can compete in the tournament, the preliminary bouts are also free and open to the public to attend. Finals Stage is the only ticketed event of the entire festival.

Our goal is for the festival to be as accessible to everyone as possible. We work with ADA compliant venues, are COVID conscious, keep our venues within walking distances from one another, and do outreach with high schools to provide opportunities for local youth poets. We strive to showcase the best of contemporary performance poetry, the best of the city of Portland, and the best our community has to offer. We believe everyone’s voice deserves to be heard and that poetry has the power to change lives.

The Bigfoot Poetry Festival is awesome because it brings together some of the best poets and performers from across the country, promotes local and national literary community, and provides opportunities for writers from all walks of life, especially historically marginalized communities, to have their voices and poems heard.