Alex Tha Great performing one of her poems at the 2022 Exit 36 Slam Poetry Festival. Photo courtesy of Sun Luu.
Dallas-based slam poet Alexandria Gurley, better known by her stage name Alex Tha Great, is organizing her first Right2Write, a one-day slam poetry festival on September 2 from 11 am to 10 pm at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. The festival will have workshops, networking opportunities, slam competitions with cash prizes and more.
The festival is Gurley’s culmination of over a decade of experience in the field. After moving to Texas from California in 2011, she was performing at open mic nights every night of the week to get started.
Since then, her writing has seen both regional and world stages.
Gurley said she wanted to put on something that builds beyond a slam-only competition and exposes beginners and professionals to the writing and slam poetry community in Dallas.
“With workshops and the side events, people will have a little bit more time to learn from each other,” Gurley said.
For three years, Gurley ran an open mic venue named Random Xpressions in 3535 Studios and the Urban Arts Center. She has hosted pop-up poetry performances in different neighborhoods across Dallas during National Poetry Month for the past two years.
After her fair share of slam competitions and open mic nights, Gurley said she’d like to get more out of her time. She hopes that this will be a chance for people outside of Dallas to get a better look at the poetry scene and engage with it.
“From my experience, you fly [to a slam competition] and get there at four or five o’clock and the slam’s at seven and when you go in, people are in their zone,” she said. “My motivation for this festival was to give people a chance to chill, hang, learn and compete.”
Gurley said one of her first stepping stones as a slam poet was Oak Cliff Cultural Center’s open mic space ‘Verse and Rythm.’ She said she feels the location is geographically central and familiar for her festival.
“Oak cliff is reminiscent of where I’m from with the level of community organizations that are present here,” she said.
Gurley said the festival symbolizes the first of many to come. Her firsts- awards, bookings, anthologies- as a writer didn’t come without struggle.
Alex Tha Great on stage at the 2022 Exit 36 Slam Poetry Festival. Photo courtesy of Sun Luu.
Often underestimated, she said her writing roots itself in her sense of identity as a woman of color.
“When I came into the poetry slam scene, it definitely felt male-dominated,” she said. “That’s part of the reason why I gravitated towards an event like Women of the World Poetry Slam.”
Gurley is a 2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist and the runner up for the 2018 National Civil Rights Museum Drop the Mic Poetry Slam.
“Sometimes as the only woman, it’s an extra confidence boost,” she said. “It feels like I stand out already, and I would think to myself, ‘no, you’re gonna hear me,’”
Gurley said she’s never been one to go with the rules, but she also learned the power in silence and self-preservation. She said it took time to learn how to assess the space she is in and sometimes “silence is so much more intriguing and powerful to folks.”
“As a woman of color in this field, it’s about not quivering and not backing down because you can lose your voice trying to scream louder because you’re scared of being silenced.”
