New Student Poetry Group Opens for Alix Olson
BY CHRISTINA MORGAN

Poetry will slam hard tonight at Oberlin College when national spoken word champion Alix Olson and new campus spoken word group The Lyracistas perform starting at 8 p.m. in Finney Chapel. 
The Lyracistas, a spoken-word group consisting of juniors Tarika Powell, Yvonne Etaghene and first-years Vida Vazquez, Vanessa Tobar and Julie Dulani will open for Olson. Founding such a group was in the thoughts of the above poets from the beginning of the semester, and the five began working together the week before spring break. “I’d seen Yvonne and Vanessa perform and I liked what we all talked about in our poetry,” Vazquez said. “And I wanted to create a space for other women of color to work together and inspire each other.”
Tonight will be the first public performance for the Lyracistas, who plan to release a CD in May and perform during this month’s “Take Back the Night” program. The show will feature each member spitting her own individual work and culminate in a group poem “Keeping it Personal,” which according to Powell, will “serve as an introduction from us to the campus.” 

Alix Olson, 24, who was described as a rhyming “red-hot, fire-bellied, feminism-spewin’ volcano,” by Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, comes to Oberlin in the middle of a vast college tour. Since graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997, Olson has become a well-known member of the national spoken-word circuit. Two of her major credits include being a member of the 1998 Nuyorican National Championship Poetry Slam Team and the 1999 winner of the Outwrite National Poetry Slam competition. 
Olson became a regular at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café in Manhattan, and has performed with the likes of Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni and Queen Latifah. Olson has also been highlighted by the national media, making appearances on CNN, Dyke TV, and was featured in publications such as Ms. and The Village Voice. 
Those who attend the free event, however, should expect to see more than just feminist-based performance. Olson’s poetry spans a variety of topics including much more than gender politics. For example, in “America’s on Sale,” Olson muses over corporate greed and universal health care coverage. “America’s on sale!/National health care’s 100 percent off/ and Medicare’s in the 50 percent bin/So you can buy half an operation/When America’s on sale,” she states in a poem the audience can expect to be performed.

In addition to touring and making national appearances, Olson has also co-edited the Vagina Verses and co-authored a collection of work by her Nuyorican Slam Team Burning Down The House, also featured on a hip-hop compilation benefiting Mumia Abu-Jamal’s legal defense fund. 
“Alix Olson is proving that success and popularity doesn’t have to mean giving up good old-fashioned radical lesbian feminist politics,” wrote the author of an Olson article in a 1999 issue of Out in the Mountains, a Vermont-based LGBT magazine. Olson’s performance in Finney tonight will put a face on someone leading a productive, socially conscious and creative life-style.