When poet Alix Olson was put on a list of Ten Most Dangerous Women in America by a conservative women’s group, she treated it like another of her numerous awards. “But I didn’t get a plaque,” she quips with a grin.
 

The paper called me a warrior.
A bad girl. A bad example,
the paper says I smile big,
but I curse too much. And its true, I do
feel like a warrior just for making it through the day, sometimes
I feel like a fighter, cause I fight
to keep the fighting away…

Word warrior, spoken word diva and road-poet-on-a-mission are just a few of the ways Olson has been described. But she prefers to think of herself as a folk poet.

“I perform to reach people, the way folk musicians do,” says Olson. “It’s a combination of a very old lineage of poets and bards and this new genre of urban slam poetry that’s not really accepted in the mainstream academia sensibility.”

Slam Champ

Alix Olson studied political science and theatre at university. But when she moved to New York, she began to hang out at the Nuyorican Poets Café and was soon part of their National Championship Slam Poetry Team. On her own in 1999, she became OutWrite National Poetry Slam Champion. The following year she introduced slam poetry to Holland at Rotterdam’s Poetry International.

“I always loved poetry on the page,” Olson explains, “but I always grappled with my desire to express it. I needed to feel the words crunching in my mouth – to lick them, to taste them and then to share them out loud. I’m a very oral and auditory person.”

Olson tours more than two hundred days a year, and made a ‘road documentary’ about her travels called ‘Left Lane.’ It won numerous Audience Awards at gay and lesbian film festivals.

She has also done poetry workshops with women in prison and teenagers in schools. “One of the best experiences has been at the gay and lesbian high school in New York City. Many of them are kids from the street who have been abandoned by their parents because of their queerness. These kids wrote some of the most raw, beautiful, passionate, expressive poetry I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Young Activist

“My voice is my weapon of choice,” Olson writes in one of her poems and it’s impossible to separate her activism from her poetry. She attended her first demonstration as a child with her mother. “Protest was a part of daily life,” she says. “The sense that my voice was as important as any other voice was instilled in me at a very young age.”
 

I was still sucking my thumb
the first time I sang “We shall overcome.” 
It was a numb December night,
a small town fable,
my first corporate villain,
and my mother was the hero – I asked her,
“Why are we so mad?”
She smiled to herself,
pondered politics of fingers curled,
“this is solidarity,” she whispered to her baby girl.

Global Patriot

In 2003 Olson received the Visionary Award from the Washington DC Rape Crisis Center for her “exceptional commitment to the promotion of social injustice.”  She was extremely critical of the Bush administration in the United States and was accused of being unpatriotic. Olson calls herself a “global patriot.”

“I have much more in common with people working for social justice and peace and progress throughout the world than I do with the people who happen to be in my country. Where you are born is an accident of circumstance – where your mother happened to be when she was pregnant. It always struck me as odd to be proud of an accident. I would much rather be proud of a choice. My choice is to stand in solidarity with the people of the world.”