The Bigfoot Poetry Festival is returning to downtown Portland this summer, where we’ll once again see top poets from across the country perform and compete.
Taking place July 10 – 12, this festival will feature three days of FREE events and poetry readings open to the public, including writing workshops, a literary market, and an extensive list of themed open mics, celebrating identity, community, passions, and creative expression from a wide range of poets. The festival’s schedule of events is available here. Programming will take place at establishments such as the Woodlark Hotel, Travel Portland’s Visitor Center, Based General Store, the downtown library, and more.
The main event of the Bigfoot Poetry Festival is a regional poetry slam tournament, featuring 16 teams made up of over 70 of the country’s best performance poets, representing cities such as Las Vegas, San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, and more. The tournament will consist of multiple preliminary bouts on July 10th and 11th, hosted at Powell’s City of Books and Covet.PDX.
The top four teams will advance to the tournament’s Finals Stage on July 12th to see who will be crowned champions of the 2025 Bigfoot Poetry Festival. Tickets for Finals Stage (the only ticketed event of the entire festival) are available here.
Portland has been a long-established host of poetry slams since the documentary Slamnation! was filmed here in 1996 during the National Poetry Slam. Since then, Portland has become home to several spoken word communities, including the Portland Poetry Slam, Slamlandia, and the People’s Poets. The city also hosts Verselandia every spring, a tournament for the best of Portland’s youth poets.
Join us this July for the Bigfoot Poetry Festival! Cheer on poets, sign up to read at an open mic, write a new piece in a workshop, be a judge for the slam tournament, and find out which teams will perform on Finals Stage. Come poem with us.