Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Mass Poetry is hosting its first ever Teen Spoken Word Festival, Write Here | Write Now | Speak Loud! on May 3-5, 2024 in Boston, MA. The Festival will take place in multiple locations around Boston’s Seaport District, as a means of encouraging youth to access and explore this part of the city. Our goal is to offer a space for young people to feel a sense of community centered around written and spoken word. Young people have so much to say and we want to hear it!

The weekend festival will kick off on Friday May 3rd with an opening showcase ceremony featuring Tim Hall, Brandy Blaze, José Olivarez, and Melissa Lozada-Oliva. After an exciting night of remarks and performances, teens will take the stage. Saturday, May 4th, will be a full day of Teen Team Slam competition, along with a series of non-competitive activities including open mics, workshops, and more! The day will close with the Team Finals, where a winner will be announced, followed by a dance party at the ICA. On Sunday, May 5th, a Post High School Resource Fair will be held for young poets to explore ways of continuing their creative practices beyond high school involvement. The Independent Finals will follow into the afternoon, and the festival will conclude with closing remarks.   

In the months leading up to the festival, Mass Poetry and partnering organizations will be putting on a series of individual preliminary slams, culminating in the Individual Slam Finals hosted on Sunday afternoon. The six winning poets will be invited to join Mass Poetry’s team to compete at the Brave New Voices Festival in Washington D.C. on July 17-21. 

Would you like some new fuel for your poetic engine? Or could you use a jump start? Please join award-winning poet Charles Coe, a faculty member at the Newport MFA program, for a fun, relaxed workshop that will offer tools and strategies for generating new poetic ideas. Come spend an hour at "serious play."

Audre Lorde said, “Poetry is not a luxury.” To think, write, and be fully engaged with the world around us in ways that matter is nothing less than a radical act of survival. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and postcolonialism through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. Matthew E. Henry’s latest collection, said the Frog to the scorpion, blurs the lines between pedagogy and prejudice, romance and anti-racism, from conversations in public school classrooms and faculty meetings, to arguments in restaurants and folding tents. Jennifer Martelli’s latest collection, Dear Justice, complicates the personal and political with a series of epistolary sonnets—addressed to conservative Supreme Court judges—that embody the struggle against gender oppression, systemic violence, and the ongoing threats to reproductive rights. In SKY.POND.MOUTH, Kevin McLellan’s poems navigate the poetic inheritance of experimental queer poets—Ashbery, Schuyler, Stein. McLellan records the inner echoes of mind and body: language and desire, illness and eros, flora and fauna, memory and moment. In poems of reclamation and warning, Anna V. Q. Ross’s Flutter, Kick plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

This session will feature the internationally lauded poet Marie-Célie Agnant (former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate) in conversation with Danielle Legros Georges (former Boston Poet Laureate). The writers will discuss the riveting work that appears in the newly released anthology Blue Flare, written from the standpoints of 21^st century Haitian, Caribbean and African diasporic women. Join this dynamic conversation by award-winning Haitian and American women committed to literary and cultural works that reveal, dream, instigate interrogations, express deep commitments to questions of ethics, occupy crossroads, and mine intersections. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

Join two of the coeditors of a new poetry anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024) that Dawn Lundy Martin calls “astonishing.” Martin states, “after these 116 poems—at times achingly visceral, at others necessarily light-filled—you’ll wonder how you ever thought a body was a thing you knew.” Pichchenda Bao and Jennifer Franklin will lead participants through generative writing prompts inspired by a series of poems in the anthology by Diane Seuss, Ellen Bass, Fred Marchant, Martha Collins, Iain Haley Pollock, Kim Addonizio, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier.

Award-winning poet Cynthia Manick and renowned author and three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky read from their books No Sweet Without Brine, and Proverbs of Limbo: Poems. Manick’s No Sweet Without Brine, voted one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New York Public Library, personifies love of self and culture through fresh observations and bitter truths voiced with breathtaking lyricism. In Proverbs of Limbo, Pinsky’s first new book of poetry in eight years, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders. Come listen to these engaging poets read their work and discuss their upcoming poems in this unmissable headline reading. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

A stellar line-up of spoken word poets—Parker-Vincent Alva, Princess Moon, D. Ruff, Essmaa Litim, and Maria Zaki— take the stage and steal some hearts in a fast-paced, time-stopping poetry extravaganza. Whether you’re a longtime fan of spoken word or this is your first experience, this performance is sure to immerse you in poetry and leave you wanting more. Our moderator is Amanda Shea, a two-time Boston Music Award-winning Spoken Word Artist. Sponsored by Mass Poetry.

Poets Anthony Walton and Heather Treseler will guide participants in a revision workshop, drawing from Ellen Bryant Voigt’s observation that a poem is “not the transcription but the transformation of experience.” They will lead participants in implementing concrete revision strategies from poets such as Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Molly Peacock, and Mark Strand. The workshop leaders believe that revision is the key to poetic practice, a set of tools that can be learned and honed, and will provide specific rubrics, so that participants can crack open their poem drafts and locate what is not yet on the page.

Join us and raise a glass or two with other poetry lovers at what’s become a favorite BBF tradition, Poems & Pints! Comfy furniture, free pints and pretzels, and readings by four fantastic poets: Tarik Bartel, Gregory Glenn, Joshua Nguyen, and Bianca Stone.  Sponsored by Mass Poetry.