More Than Words: The Moving Story Behind the Poetry Slam Championship

While studying to become a teacher, Sinah Aline Clos regularly attended poetry slams at the Universum Theater in Landau. Today, she is the state champion herself and had the opportunity to compete in the German-language championships. It’s been a meteoric rise that began with a school project. Here, she shares her experiences.

An ice cream every day until summer break—that’s what Sinah Clos promises her students if she wins the Rhineland-Palatinate state poetry slam championship. The promise doesn’t seem particularly risky to her. She’s only been on stage for three years. Then, on the last weekend of May 2026, the surprise comes: Sinah Clos takes home the title. From that day on, she goes to the supermarket with her class every day and buys ice cream in family-size packs. “I never would have expected that I could win,” says Sinah Clos. “Poetry slam has been a part of my life for a long time, but I had only just started performing on stage.”

She discovered her love for poetry slam—a competition among poets—while she was still studying to become a teacher. She hardly ever missed an event at the Universum Theater. “I was regularly in the audience, left speechless and moved; I laughed, cried, and marveled,” she recalls. But performing herself was “not even an option” back then.

First Steps in a School Workshop

After successfully completing her degree and teaching internship, Sinah Clos began working as a teacher. She teaches German, ethics, and drama in Neustadt an der Weinstraße. In 2023, she plans to organize a project week on the topic of poetry slam and creative writing. “That’s when I realized that simply talking about stage literature for three days wasn’t enough for me,” she says.

At that moment, Sinah Clos recalls Philipp Herold, whom she had seen perform at the Universum Theater. Herold is a two-time German-language runner-up in poetry slam. Sinah Clos owns one of his books herself, follows him on social media, and has already used videos of his performances in class. Since the poetry slammer lives in Heidelberg, she writes to him and asks if he’d like to come to the school for a workshop. He agrees.

During the workshop, Sinah Clos is part of the group: Like her students, she writes pieces and recites one of her works at the end. It’s the first time she’s processed a very personal memory through writing: Her father died by suicide when Sinah Clos was 19 years old. Her piece moved not only her class—Philipp Herold was also impressed by the text and encouraged Sinah Clos to keep going. He told her about two open-mic nights where she could sign up to perform.

Shortly thereafter, Sinah Clos lands a gig at a small café in Heidelberg. About 30 people are in the audience, including some students from the workshop. Sinah Clos is the only participant who has never performed at a poetry slam before. She makes it to the finals and wins. Shortly thereafter, she receives an invitation to perform in front of several hundred people. It doesn’t take long for more gigs to follow. The teacher has become a freelance artist as a side job.

“Suicide Is the Result of a Fatal Illness”

Sinah Clos continues writing and develops her draft from the workshop into the piece “Filter Coffee.” The text begins with famous people who died by suicide and ultimately leads to memories of her father. Sinah Clos recalls his guitar, his camera, the music they shared, and how he wanted to teach her to brew good filter coffee.

A statement from her mother also appears, one that helped her come to terms with her father’s death: “Suicide is the result of a terminal illness.” It’s a message Sinah Clos wants to share. After her performances, people who have lost someone to suicide or who have experienced mental health crises often come up to her. “That shows me how important it is to talk about this taboo subject,” says Sinah Clos.

Furthermore, she writes at the end, with every time she shares her father’s story, it loses “a little of its weight, but never its significance.” Sinah Clos usually finds public storytelling liberating. When she is nominated by the Landau Poetry Slam for the Rhineland-Palatinate state championship in 2026, it quickly becomes clear that she will also perform “Filterkaffee.”

From the Story to the Present

Sinah Clos didn’t write her second piece for the competition until just a few weeks before her performance. “Freddie” tells the story of the Dutch resistance fighter Freddie Oversteegen. Sinah Clos initially misleads the audience: A young woman sits in a bar, wearing red lipstick and feminine clothing, picks out a man in uniform, and flirts with him. Eventually, he follows her into the woods—where she shoots him. Only then does Sinah Clos reveal who the young woman is: a teenager who joined the resistance against the Nazi occupation at the age of 14.

From Oversteegen, the text moves to the present and raises the question of how people recognize when democracy is in danger and why resistance is necessary. These are questions that also occupy Sinah Clos’s thoughts far from the stage. As a teacher, she teaches ethics in addition to German. In doing so, she regularly discusses social and political conflicts with her students. For her, this also means taking a stand when people are marginalized or when fundamental liberal-democratic values are under attack. Her slam poems, too, repeatedly address topics such as racism, sexism, and right-wing extremism.

A “Short School Trip” to Kaiserslautern

Accompanied by “Filterkaffee” and “Freddie,” Sinah Clos travels to the state championship in Kaiserslautern—the city where she was studying when her father died. For many years, Kaiserslautern has been linked in her mind to this dark period in her life. The fact that she is performing a piece about her father here of all places holds deep significance for Sinah Clos: “As I stood on stage, I realized that a circle was closing.”

“As I stood on stage, I realized that a circle was closing.”

What matters to Sinah Clos is telling her stories. She isn’t thinking about winning. She already knows many of the other participants from performances on other stages and describes the weekend as a sort of “little class trip” for the Rhineland-Palatinate poetry slam scene. “For me, just being able to take part was amazing,” she explains. When Sinah Clos found out she had won, she could hardly believe it. Even days later, she says she was “very, very speechless and very, very proud.”

A Highlight: The German-Language Championships

With this title, Sinah Clos qualifies for the 2026 German-Language Championships in Hanover. There, she will compete in a preliminary round alongside eight other poets from Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. All nominees perform a piece on stage, after which an audience jury awards points. Sinah Clos was narrowly eliminated. “I was still so grateful to have had that experience, and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the rest of the days,” she says.

Sinah Clos makes her way through individual and team competitions, experiences impressive poems, and meets fascinating people from the poetry slam scene. The team final, in particular, sticks in her memory: “When two people perform a poem together, it’s incredibly impressive,” she says. “I really appreciate that from my perspective as a drama teacher, too.”

On November 6, Sinah Clos will finally perform where her own poetry slam journey began: at the “Best of Poetry Slam” at the Universum Theater in Landau. This time, she won’t be sitting in the audience—instead, as the reigning state champion and a participant in the German-language championships, she’ll be on stage. And perhaps there will be someone in the audience who is just as captivated by the poems on stage as Sinah Clos was many years ago—someone for whom performing on stage is still “not even an option.”