If you find yourself stopping by the HUB on a snowy evening tomorrow, you can expect to see plenty of Penn State poets on the ground floor reciting performance poetry.

Late Night Penn State's Poetry Slam Championship will take place at 10 p.m. in the HUB-Robeson Center. The contest's winners will form Penn State's team, which will compete in the first ever poetry slam competition in the region. The regional finals will include schools from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

That team will be coached by Camille Welsch (graduate-English) and English professor Carla Conforto. Welsch said that, as a coach, she stresses mostly the performance aspects.

"The hugest thing is delivery," Welsch said. "Can the poet connect, use his or her voice to move people, seduce them, excite them?"

Any Penn State poet who wants to be on the team will have to excite five judges, who will be selected at random from the audience. These judges will rate each participating poet on a scale of one to 10. There are no explicit criteria for judging, except that one half point be deducted for every 10 seconds the poet exceeds the three-minute time limit.

Poems range from the political to the humorous, from free verse to rap. All kinds of poetry are welcomed, Welsch said, and consequently the Poetry Slam is one of the most diverse activities on campus.

"This is absolutely about inclusion," she said. "Everybody belongs here."

Jerad Sorber, program coordinator for Late Night Penn State and co-coordinator of the Poetry Slam, agreed that a wide variety of students participate in the Slam and all are welcomed, despite occasional differences of viewpoints.

"Somebody could say something up there, and there might be 20 people in the audience who disagree, but they'll all respect the person who said it," Sorber said.

Welsch said that while students are always supportive of their peers at the podium, the audience isn't always forgiving to the judges.

"The crowd's been known to boo judges when they don't agree with the score given," she said.

The Slam is open to everyone, regardless of experience or expertise. Welsch said that sometimes people walking by actually write a poem on the spot so they can participate. The atmosphere is much different, she said, than learning poetry in a classroom.

Cecil Giscombe, a poetry professor at Penn State, agreed.

"Poetry slams are the stuff we don't teach," he said. "There's something more immediate about a poetry slam ... It privileges the ear over the eye and intellect. It's poetry merged with performance art, merged again with song."

Although this competition will determine who goes on to the regional finals, Welsch said the competitive aspect of the evening is not why students consistently enjoy coming to the HUB Slams.

"The majority of people don't come to win; they come to be heard," Welsch said.

Sorber agreed.

"Students come to the slams because they like to express themselves," he said. "They like share what they have to share and hear what others have to share too."