Burn Beautiful Brought the Heat

By Dakota Parks for Inweekly

In the world of slam poetry, all you get is three minutes, a microphone and the courage to say what needs saying. That’s what Burn Beautiful brought to this year’s Southern Fried Poetry Slam.

The Pensacola slam team traveled to Orlando in June, where veteran performers and first-time competitors alike tested their work against some of the region’s strongest poets. Burn Beautiful finished 17th out of 35 teams, returning home with its sights set on an even higher ranking next year.

“There’s poetry, there’s spoken word and then there’s slam poetry,” explained team coach Asia Samson. “Spoken word is when you take a poem and memorize it, turning it into a performance. Slam is when you take those performance poets and have them compete. They get scored by judges on their poems.”

The origins of slam poetry trace back to 1980s Chicago, where poet Marc Smith sought to make poetry more engaging by inviting audience members to score performances. While each slam has its own variations, the core rules are simple: no props, no costumes and three minutes to perform an original poem, with a 10-second grace period. Five judges selected from the audience score each poem on a scale of 1 to 10, using decimal points for added precision. The highest and lowest scores are dropped to remove any bias, leaving the three middle scores to determine the final total.

“There are people who say, ‘I hate poetry,’ but you know, I think you hate poetry because you don’t know what it can be yet,” Samson said. “Turning your poem into a story or a performance really invites the audience in, which is what slam is all about. It’s not about getting up there to scream and yell.”

Samson has built a career as a touring spoken word poet, competing at Southern Fried and national poetry slams since 2004. While living in South Florida, Samson met a poet from Pensacola who had performed with P5, the city’s slam team in the early 2000s. That connection introduced him to the competitive slam scene. When Samson later moved to Pensacola, he saw an opportunity to revive that legacy, leading the first Burn Beautiful team to Southern Fried in 2019.

For Burn Beautiful, the journey to Southern Fried began long before the team arrived in Orlando. In October 2025, Samson hosted a qualifying slam to select the poets who would represent Pensacola. Over the following months, the team refined poems, workshopped performances and built the trust necessary for team poems.

The team consisted of poets Shelby Drummond, Zakara Parker and Ebony Bradley, who were supported by Slammaster Francesca “Frannie” Scarpatti, timekeeper Dee Herbert and assistant coach Keegan Anderson.

“Coaching is like 50% work and 50% strategy,” Samson said. “When I get a new team, I first take inventory of what three or four individual poems each poet is bringing to the slam. Next, we find out what group poems can we come up with. The more poems I have in my pocket, the more I can strategize us to win.”

Samson said Burn Beautiful came into the competition overprepared in one sense—the poets had spent months practicing, revising and rehearsing—but underprepared for the level of experience they faced from teams that have been competing together for years.

Moving forward, Samson hopes to bring more team pieces to the stage and continue building the chemistry that comes with time.

Samson was also honored in June with the Southern Fried Legacy Award, which recognizes individuals who have made significant, long-lasting, positive contributions to the organization and its community.

“I never expected it,” he said. “I’ve always loved Southern Fried and volunteered to help however I could, from designing logos to competing and bringing my own teams. It felt like a really big deal to be seen and respected by my friends and peers, especially during the year that I brought a team from Pensacola. The whole team was standing up and cheering for me, telling people, ‘That’s my coach!’ Seeing them cheer felt better to me than the whole room cheering, because those were our people from our town, and that recognition meant everything.”

For Shelby Drummond, a newcomer to slam poetry, the stage itself wasn’t intimidating. As a theatre kid, she was already familiar with memorizing lines and performing for an audience. The harder part was learning to share her own words.

“Coming from the theatre, I was accustomed to telling other people’s stories,” she said. “I was not as comfortable doing the intensely vulnerable part of sharing my story, and even more importantly, in this arena, my voice. This was one of the hardest hills to climb in all of the prep leading up to the slam—[learning not to change] who I was as a poet to fit into the established slam scene. Instead, I had to become comfortable with my form of expression.”

Writing has become an essential part of Drummond’s life and a way to explore topics that are difficult to grapple with aloud. Slam introduced her to a new kind of real, human vulnerability.

“The most important lesson I learned was that your story is what matters, no matter your chosen medium,” Drummond said. “In the age of AI, the population is looking for what is real. I saw how people wanted to be able to see themselves in the pieces. We all want to feel like we are not alone in our experience. So, no matter what one’s perceived level of talent may be, I hope everyone will be brave enough to create. The world needs your art. The poems that I still think about are the ones who assumed no outcome of their work. They just wanted the chance to be heard. That level of honesty is what I will continue to seek in my own work.”

As she works to finish her first book of poetry, Drummond said Southern Fried reminded her why she returned to writing in the first place. The experience reinforced the importance of making art simply for the joy of creating.

“I left my creativity on the shelf for ten years because I let myself be convinced, by the wrong people, that if I couldn’t make money from it, then it was a waste of time,” she said.

For Drummond, that freedom is what makes poetry so powerful— the ability to take something personal and turn it into something shared.

“I love the art of poetry. It condenses a story to its most important parts while still using some of the most vivid language you can find. [Then adding] a level of performance that took you into that story was breathtaking. I was on the edge of my seat for so many of the pieces. Those poets had me invested in the journey they had crafted for the audience. That is an experience I will never forget,” Drummond said.

Burn Beautiful plans to hold more workshops and slams to build a stronger Pensacola slam community, as well as a qualifier in fall to identify the next cohort of poets for the Burn Beautiful slam team. Follow @pensacolapoetry or @theasiaproject to stay updated.