Kinsman Avenue Publishing, Inc. positions SLAM 2027 as a global competition for contemporary poetry that carries the charge of the spoken word. The title invokes the poetry slam—a form historically rooted in live, improvised, and audience-responsive performance—and the editors explicitly seek submissions that retain that sense of spontaneity on the page. This is not a call for conventional lyric polish alone; it is an invitation to poets whose work moves with rhythm, breath, and structural daring. The competition is open across disciplines and explicitly welcomes LGBTQ+, queer, BIPOC, writers of color, disabled, and neurodivergent poets, signaling a curatorial commitment to voices historically underrepresented in mainstream literary publishing. Winners receive up to $500 in cash prizes and publication in the SLAM 2027 collection. Selected finalists will also be featured in Kinsman Quarterly magazine and its associated platforms, extending the work beyond the anthology itself. The editors describe the desired terrain as vulnerable or hard-hitting themes of culture, resilience, love, and justice. They encourage poets to move beyond predictable rhyme schemes and to embrace free verse, inventive language, and bold experimentation with sound, structure, and voice. The result is a call that values risk over decorum, and sonic intelligence over received form.