A microphone sits in front of the black curtains in Tam High School’s theater.

The area around the microphone is lit up, while the periphery of the theater is shrouded in darkness.

Sophomore Olivia Sinclair saunters into the light, foregoing the microphone, and instead moves closer to the crowd. She is the first performer for Redwood. She takes a deep breath, and projects, with rhythmic persuasion, a poem about her diagnosis with type 1 diabetes.

“I wrote this poem while I was in the hospital, I wrote it at two in the morning while I was just laying in bed kinda freaked out and alone,” Sinclair said, reflecting on her poem.

Sinclair, along with the rest of her Redwood teammates, claimed victory over Tam and Drake at the district poetry slam on June 2 for the fifth year in a row.

The slam is judged in three rounds, and the team who wins two of the rounds takes home the championship title.

Two of the three rounds consisted of individual poems, where all three schools rotated sending up performers. Each round of individual poems consisted of three poems from each school.

The third round featured a set of group poems, in which a group of students from each school performed one poem. Each performing member of each team would alternate speaking, creating a cohesive poem from fragments.

Redwood’s team emerged victorious in the first two rounds, automatically clinching the title before the third round of competition.

“It’s not a poetry reading in the traditional sense where you just sit there and read off the page,” said sophomore Jake Baldwin, a member of the Slam team.

“You’re trying to convey those emotions in the most multimedia presentation of your ideas,” Baldwin said.

During the Slam, poets not only recite their poems, but also infuse their words with constant action and inflection. They tend to move around the stage, and speak with varied tones.

“The content is really important, making sure it just sounds good, but also a really big aspect of  a good performance is just believing in what you’re saying,” Sinclair said. “You could have a really bad poem, but you can make it sound really good if you just believe in it and make it strong.”

Baldwin performed individually during round two, presenting his poem called “Lent Advice.”

“What ‘Lent Advice’ became after a while was a poem about my habit of telling people what to do and about how I’m almost pretentious in giving out this advice and not taking it myself, and being hypocritical,” Baldwin said.

In addition to Sinclair and Baldwin, seniors Rayna Saron and Matt Cummings and sophomore Jason Seavey performed individual poems.

Sophomore McKinley Clemons joined Sinclair, Baldwin, Saron, Cummings, and Seavey during the group poem.