April 1, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts: Brad Moore or Jeremy Agor
Marketing and Communications Office
Central New Mexico Community College
224-4680
Central New Mexico Community College’s Poetry Slam Team will compete in the College National Poetry Slam 2008 to be held in Albuquerque Wednesday through Saturday.
The opening rounds of rhymes will begin at 3 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday in the University of New Mexico Student Union Building. Competitions will be held in the SUB Ballroom, Higher Grounds and the Southwest Film Center. The semifinals will be held at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on Friday at 6 p.m. The opening rounds and semifinals are free to attend.
The finals will be held at the El Rey Theater at 7 p.m. on Saturday at a cost of $7 for students and $10 general admission.
CNM student Jasmine “Jazz” Cuffee, the 2007 Albuquerque Poetry Slam champion, will lead the CNM team against 23 other schools from around the nation, such as the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico.
For Cuffee, poetry slamming runs in the family. Her husband, Aaron Cuffee, competes for the UNM team. The couple met at a poetry slam and they’ve been dueling poets ever since. At last year’s Albuquerque competition, Cuffee knocked out her husband in the final rounds to claim the individual title.
“We’ve always competed against each other,” Jasmine Cuffee says. “We definitely keep our strategies to ourselves.”
Poetry slams require poets to perform their original works. Poets are then judged on a scale of zero to 10.
“Words are important,” Jasmine Cuffee says. “They are powerful.”
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