Tonight at the UMKC Student Union Coffee House, is the first preliminary of Louder Than a Bomb for West’s Starving Artists. Performances will start at 6pm.

Tonight four of the six poets will be performing to gain a spot in the semi-finals, and then finals.

Eli Southwick, Brianna Cole, Triston Parr, and Emma Van Deventer will each perform a solo piece and come together for a collaboration piece.

There will be a total of five rounds. There is one poet representing West in each of the first four rounds, and one collaboration with all poets in the fifth round.

Five judges will score each poem/collaboration with a ten point grading scale (decimals are encouraged). The lowest score and highest scored are then dropped, and the three middle scores are then averaged towards the team score.

West needs to place either second or first in order to move onto the semi-finals.