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Melissa Lozada-Oliva performs at the 2015 National Championship in Oakland. (photo: Adam Rubinstein) |
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Melissa Lozada-Oliva, a supervisor at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., was part of the House Slam's five-person team that beat 71 other competitors from all over the U.S. to become National Poetry Slam Champions. WBUR reported that the 2015 National Championship in Oakland, Calif., "was four nights of slam poetry that began last Wednesday. It came down to four teams performing Saturday night at Oakland's Scottish Rite Theater-- Hawaii; Berkeley, California; Denver, Colorado; and House Slam from Boston."
In the fourth and final round, Lozada-Oliva "responded to a New York poet's mocking of millennial women's ways of speaking by charging that 'men silence women's voices,' " WBUR noted.
"I knew that when Melissa did her last poem, when we got the first judge's score, that we'd won," said Janae Johnson, who co-founded the House Slam in July 2014 with Porsha Olayiwola. "There were definitely tears."