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 The Ninth Annual

New Orleans Poetry Festival

April 18-21, 2024 

We are still taking proposals for NOPF 2024, but the deadline is fast approaching. We're relying on you to provide fabulous content for NOPF next April, so please send us your ideas for readings, roundtables, workshops or any sort of event at all. You have until December 15 to get your proposal to us. Ever wanted to do a presentation or performance that was so wild and/or so radical you thought no festival would dream of accepting it? Well send it to us and I'll bet we're interested. We look to you make the primary content for NOPF, so please take a minute and check out the Participate page to see how you can get involved. Send us a proposal for a Reading, Roundtable, or Workshop and we will do our best to get it into the program. Details and proposal forms here.

We are pleased to announce that our lineup for International Night, Friday, April 19th, at Café Istanbul, has been finalized. The evening kicks off with a panel discussion:

Department of Lost-and-Found: a discussion by poets, translators, and publishers Janaka Stucky, Jake Levine, Sue Hyon Bae, Ha Jaeyoun, and Hwang Yuwon on translation.
As a character in the Jim Jarmusch film Patterson says, reading poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. Likewise Robert Frost said, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." So translation is often framed in the narrow terms of what is lost. But translation is also a process where creative possibilities emerge in the chasm between languages, where new meanings and breakthroughs are often found, where authors and their work are discovered by readers in new contexts, speaking in non-native tongues. These poets and translators, working primarily between Korean and English, will discuss the role of creativity in translation, how translation affects their poetic practice, and the pitfalls and pleasures of translating and having their work translated.

Following the discussion we'll see performances by Hwang Yuwon, Ha Jaeyoun, Sue Hyon Bae, & Jake Levine.

Also this year we are introducing the NOPF Roadshow:

rdshw

The NOPF Roadshow will feature Korean poets Hwang Yuwon and Ha Jaeyoun, with translator and poet Jake Levine plus local and other guests TBA, on the road in Louisiana. So far these dates and venues are confirmed, with more to be announced soon:

  • Tuesday, April 16th, 1pm Reading w/ Q&A, at Southeastern University, Hammond, LA.
  • Wednesday, April 17th, 1pm Reading w/ Q&A, at Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA.
  • Wednesday, April 17th, 7pm Reading w/ Q&A, with locals TBA, Old Metairie Library, Metairie, LA.

We will be adding stops in Baton Rouge and who knows where else. Check back for details.

Thanks to everyone who helped make 2023 another great year for the New Orleans Poetry Festival. We're happy to announce that most of the events were recorded and are now live on our Youtube Channel. The videos are also embedded in our own archive, here. Click on that link to relive or check out what you missed. Special thanks for Board Members Sean Munro, Henry Goldkamp, and Jonathan Penton for filming and for the many hours of editing and rendering it took to get the videos live.

 

Please Help Us Keep NOPF Running by Donating Today

We are committed to the idea that poetry should be free and open to everyone, but please realize that it costs a significant amount to put this festival on. So if you can, please send your tax deductible donation to NOPF today, or, better yet, set up a recurring gift. Click here to access our easy-to-use donation portal.

If you can't make it to one of the evening events, we'll be live-streaming them on our youtube channel. Join us there!

Poets and website users:

If you were a registered user on the website last year or before, your user account is still active, however you may need to reset your password. Just click on Log In, above or here, then click on "Forgot Password." Please do this rather than creating a duplicate account.

2022 Recap:

With funding provided, in part, by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment For The Arts, we had a fabulous lineup of readers in 2022. Whiting Award winner Rickey Laurentiis and Fence Modern Poetry Series winner Joyelle McSweeney joined us for our Saturday night feature, and our international night hosted the performance poet and multimedia artist Rocío Cerón (Mexico) and poet, translator, editor and lawyer Enrique Winter (Chile) along with Chilean indigenous poets and advocates Jaime Luis Huenún and Daniela Catrileo with translators Thomas Rothe and Edith Adams. Our locals night featured New Orleans poets Karisma Price, Té V. Smith, Henry Goldkamp, & Daniel W.K. Lee.

Also Check out LITWIRE, the new poetry event calendar for the New Orleans region.

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Follow us on Twitter @nolapoetry.  And on Instagram at neworleanspoetry 

If you would like to see some video highlights from years past, search for us on Youtube.