To ... begin this thesis, I will situate slam poetry in relation to composition and rhetoric scholarship, by investigating and ultimately questioning the tendency to reject the use of literary or fictional texts in first year writing courses. I will address why compositionists tend to prefer using overtly politically or socially conscious nonfiction articles in order to teach academic writing and suggest that slam poetry might provide a highly effective alternative or additonal focus for a first year course. The second part of this thesis will engage more specfically with the personal and yet highly political rhetoric of slam poetry. This outlet, I suggest, when analyzed, created, performed, and questioned in the first year writing classroom, could function to encourage creative, original thinking on the parts of students while still developing transferable academic and critical writing abilities. I will consider whether slam poetry might offer an opportunity for professors to embrace the current social and political issues each student faces without sacrificing attention to personal development and creativity. I will also argue that slam poetry may provide a non-exclusory space within critical pedagogy that tackles important political topics such as feminism, war, climate change, and race while also allowing for students to voice differing opinions from their classmates and their professors. In this respect, I contend, slam poetry may facilitate the implementation of a reflexive and politically aware critical pedagogy that avoids imposing an ideology, (as its critics have sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly charged) like compulsory liberalism. This thesis will conclude with analysis of examples of my own ideas of how slam poetry can function in the classroom based on the examples of scholars who foster non-exclusory critical pedagogies in their classrooms as they teach. Overall, my goal is to interrogate slam poetry's potential to teach rhetorical awareness, social consciousnesss, and voice, alongside both personal writing and academic, persuasive writing.