2024 Events with Descriptions

The NOPF Roadshow kicks off this year's festival on the road at Southeastern University in Hammond, LA. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and Southeastern Louisiana University, this event features Korean poets Ha Jaeyoun and Hwang Yuwon, translator and poet Jake Levine, and three poets from Louisiana: Alison Pelegrin, Carolyn Hembree and Skye Jackson. These poets will perform their work and take part in a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Tuesday, April 16th, 12:30pm on the campus of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, LA, Cate Teacher Education Center, RM 1022.

 The New Orleans Poetry Festival takes the show on the road in 2024. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and Yes We Cannibal, this event features Korean poets Ha Jaeyoun and Hwang Yuwon, translator and poet Jake Levine, and three poets from Louisiana: Lisa Pasold, Henry Goldkamp, and Benjamin Morris. These poets will perform their work and take part in a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Tuesday, April 16th, 7pm at Yes We Cannibal, 1600 Government St, Baton Rouge, LA 70802.

The New Orleans Poetry Festival takes the show on the road in 2024. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and Nicholls State University, this event features Korean poets Ha Jaeyoun and Hwang Yuwon, translator and poet Jake Levine, and three poets from Louisiana: Albert Belisle Davis, Jessica Kinnison, and Jonathan Penton. These poets will perform their work, which will be followed by a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Wednesday, April 17th, 1pm at Le Bijou Theater in the Donald G. Bollinger Memorial Student Union, 104 Ellendale Dr., Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA 70301.

 The New Orleans Poetry Festival takes the show on the road in 2024. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, and Jefferson Parish Library, this event features Korean poets Ha Jaeyoun and Hwang Yuwon, translator and poet Jake Levine, and three poets from Louisiana: Rodrigo Toscano, Bernardo Wade, and Christine Kwon. These poets will perform their work and take part in a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Wednesday, April 17th, 7pm at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon Ave, Metairie, LA 70001.

For our Locals Night Opening Gala & Fundraiser, NOPF is partnering with The Splice Poetry Series to curate a showcase of emerging and established New Orleans poets actively engaged in the community. Encompassing a broad range of subjects, poetics, and styles, these poets testify to the city’s vibrant and diverse sensibilities. Featured local poets include Nikki Ummel, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Ian U Lockaby, Cid Galicia, & Lauren Burgess, performing at Saturn Bar at 3067 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117 at 7pm on Thursday, April 18th. This event is free and open to the public.

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.

In partnership with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, our annual International Night features a roundtable and performance by Korean poets, translators, and publishers. The evening begins with a roundtable discussion among the participants and culminates with a bi-lingual reading by the poets and their translators. The roundtable will begin at 6:30pm and will be followed by the performances at 7:30pm on Friday, April 19th, at Café Istanbul in the New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude, New Orleans, LA 70117. This event is free and open to the public.

The Small Press Fair will run from 9 AM to 5 PM on Saturday and Sunday, with doors opening at 8 AM for exhibitor setup, in the Main Hall of the New Orleans Healing Center. The Fair will feature small press publishers, authors, and others displaying their work. Among the exhibitors this year are
Unlikely Stories, Litwire, Gaudy Boy, VOLT-SCRAM, Tilted House / Fine Print Press, Riot in Your Throat, MadHat Press, White Pine Press, Roof Books, FlowerSong Press, Luna Press, Factory Hollow Press, Sundress Publications, Ghost Proposal Press, NOLAC, Anhinga Press, Xavier Review, Tram Editions Press, Beautiful Days Press, Defunkt Press, The Georgia Review, Poets Dream LLC, Los Lorcas, Annulet, Fertile Repository, Sublimity City, Belle Point Press, POETRY Magazine, Rebel Satori Press, Antenna Press, One Book One New Orleans, Chax Press, Sarabande Books.

The Windfall Room editorial team invites you to delve into the genesis of our online journal, a  distinctive platform spotlighting poetry engaged in the art of recitation. Join us in discussing the elements of poet and poem responding to anamnesis, locale, and transformation in our editorial vision. Our dialogue will cover the pivotal role of memorization and the nuanced challenges of bringing poetry from the page and into the recitative realm. Through curated screenings of poems showcased on our website, we will explore the profound impact that diverse environments wield on the art of recitation, unraveling the potential for poetry to transcend the sometimes isolating boundaries traditionally associated with the written word.

Kinship of Rivers is an international river project that brings rivers and mountains together through poetry, art, music in the form of river flags. Thousands of flags have been made by the people along the rivers: the Mississippi, Yangtze, Amazon, Nile, Ganges, and others, with the pledge for clean water, soil and air on earth. These flags have traveled around the world, all the way to Mounts Everest and Kilimanjaro, blessed by rivers and mountains and communities. The flags follow the tradition of Tibetan prayer flags. Each time the wind blows, the flags will release a prayer into the air.
Flags will be on display in the Small Press Fair, and at the Kinship of Rivers table you may make your own prayer with your wishes for our earth. Your flag will join the rest of the poetry flags for their next journey, which will be along the Ohio, Cleveland, and Rhine rivers. Curated by Wang Ping, Founder and Director of Kinship of Rivers, www.kinshipofrivers.org

Polyphonic Swamp Sonics is a performance organized by four University of New Orleans MFA students. We will use the interplay of spoken word and recorded sounds such as water crashing against the lakefront and the sound of cars rushing by on the overpass to mirror the Anthropocene. Through vocal and audio manipulation, we will degrade these sounds into their simplest syllabic noise. Speaking to each other and as one, we will present a multimedia collaborative poem using field recordings from the soundscapes of New Orleans and video clips of locations including the lakefront, Bayou Bienvenue’s cypress “ghost swamp” in the Lower Ninth Ward, the Crescent City Connection bridge near Tchoupitoulas St., and the batture region of the Mississippi River proximal to the uptown neighborhoods. The performance will also feature small sections of call and response with the audience, inviting them to join the poets in an interrogation of sound and environment. By activating multiple senses, audience members will have an embodied experience related to the climate crisis in New Orleans. 

This reading will feature writers from Sublimity City, a poetry collective established in 2018 in Louisville, Kentucky. Kristi Maxwell will read poems from Goners, her book of extinctions, a form invented to linguistically engage human-induced species erasure. Jessica Farquhar's current project considers the idea of a "good job" through bossy poems that portray the mundanities and wonders of mothering and working. Ken Walker will read from Coma Time, a manuscript that uses ekphrasis to explore Deleuze's statement "Exhausted is a whole lot more than tired" and that looks at and beyond the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski and the visual artwork of Kiki Smith. Ann DeVilbiss will read from recent work that explores the persistence of life in the era of climate change, making strange what is natural and seeking hope amid mourning. And, finally, John James will read from The Delusion of Being Absolute, which uses poetic form to explore questions of climate and agency in the midst of cultural decline.

In celebration of Texas Review Press’ 45 years of literary publications and the last five years’ renovations— including new leadership, hefty prizes, genre bending work and the rebranding of the press as TRP— interdisciplinary poets Burnside Soleil and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth and TRP Director J. Bruce Fuller offer a multi-modal reading and Q&A showcasing renegade poetry and art.  

The editors of Ghost Proposal, Tilted House, and mercury firs will discuss the operations, challenges, and miracles of small-team, DIY collaboration. How does a team bring abundance? How can it fall short? Where do values intersect and where do they veer apart? What about funds? What about hydration? Other topics could include press aesthetics, publication methods, and existence outside of the institution.

Individual poets present their work.

Poems embody many types of existence that transcend the particulars of their initial time and space continuum.  For instance, poetry readers revivify a poem upon each reading; a poem reanimates experience, feeling, or an idea over and over; translators give a poem an afterlife or second life in another language. And most of all, poetry embraces the unknown by exploring different manifestations of pre-life (genetics) and post-life (ghosts and other spiritual manifestations). Poets on this panel will approach this topic from a diversity of angles, including interlinguistic translation and the translator/poet as spiritual medium; the use of persona to give voice to incorporeal beings; archival violence; poetry as concrete evidence of past experiences; and poetry as a portal to possible futures and to connect with eco-grief.

This roundtable will interrogate the possibilities and limitations for poetry as a vehicle for horror (and vice versa) by attending to their shared interests in forms, affects, cultural narratives and taboos, and social functions. Candice Wuehle’s presentation will consider the unheimlich in the work of Sylvia Plath as presented through the poet’s depiction of domestic space as well as her constructions of femininity. Hannah V Warren’s presentation will include an exploration of the uncanny in Sylvia Plath’s poetry through the lens of automata theory. Warren will share excerpts from her own creative work, an in-progress poetry collection named Sylvia, which compiles and manipulates this research to form a narrative point of view from a female-coded automaton figure. Maxime Berclaz’s presentation will consider the utopian possibilities of horror as they manifest in poetry and how the poetic context allows for a medium-specific articulation of utopian horror. Berclaz will argue that this horror is neither imposed onto poetry nor dependent on allusions to other media, but rather is made uniquely possible by poetry and horror’s rich symbiosis. Zachary Anderson will focus on two constituent categories of horror: the weird and the eerie. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s definitions, Anderson will examine how these categories map onto Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color, a text that uses strategies of déjà vu, contagion, and automatism to confront and subvert the horror of “untranslatability.”

Kundiman poets Sally Wen Mao, Tiana Nobile, and Jane Wong will read their works, as they celebrate Kundiman's 20 years of nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. Executive Director Cathy Linh Che will introduce the event and moderate the Q&A. 

Does the world really need another sestina? Instead of just writing a new poem, wouldn’t it be great to create a whole new form or modality? In a workshop led by Christopher Shipman and Brett Evans, the poets discuss the practice of Versus-Verses poems, a new modality that by its nature attempts to dispel the impulse toward meaning-making in favor of the joy of creating, leaves the poets with zesty list poems of sorts for further poetic alchemy, and is just good fun in and of itself. 

In a simple example, a line of a Versus-Verses poem could be "Fight Club v. Fan Club".

The workshop will include the lead poets sharing some Versus-Verses with half of the items filled in, and half blank. This is the "training wheels" part of the group practice, as the assembled fill in their sheets, which are then compared, letting the bold share and the bashful remain bashful if need be. After a hearty go-round of this practice, we do another, and perhaps a third. Then we move to the final stage: The Blank Page—made less terrifying by suggested 'themes' to give a compass point. 

Versus-Verses is an alluring and supple new poetic form. Who doesn't want to embark on a whole new type of poem? One that both beginners and seasoned practitioners will enjoy, either as collaborative generation or for solo art.

Like Louisiana in general, and New Orleans in particular, many parts of the world are working to reclaim land from the sea, as well as reclaim the sea and other water bodies from pollution and catastrophe. More figuratively, reclamation is also a way to repossess one's identity, history, and space from forces that would deny or crush them. In this reading, three poets—Ally Chua (Acts of Self-Consumption), Brad Vogel (Find Me in the Feral Pockets: Poems from the Gowanus Interregnum) and Shuan Sim —speak of their attempts to reclaim themselves and the idea of home, and read from those acts of self-reclamation. From Singapore to New York, the reclamation occurs both physically and abstractly in a way that demands reckoning. Moderated by Kimberley Lim of Gaudy Boy, an imprint of Singapore Unbound.

Translation, as a poetic practice, is inherently grounded in transnational and transcultural exchange—an outlook that informs the crux of our conversation. Participants of this roundtable will discuss current translation projects--works from the Norwegian, Spanish, Galician, Polish, and German--and what these texts might bring to American poetry. Conversation will include brief introductions to the writers being translated with a focus on their cultural significance in their homelands, discussion of translation strategies and techniques for specific languages and genres, as well as the relationship of the translators’ own poetic practices to their translation projects. Participants include: Michelle Gil-Montero (Spanish), Gabriel Gudding and Gunnar Wærness (co-translators Norwegian), Lau Cesarco Eglin (Galician), Hannah Warren (German), and Magdalena Zurawski (Polish)

In spite of contributions from such wits, satirists, and comediennes as Dorothy Parker, Carolyn Kizer, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Wanda Coleman, Sommer Browning, and Morgan Parker, women remain underrepresented in the scant literature on humor in contemporary American poetry. Why? What makes a poem funny, and who says so? Is there a risk to joking—and as a lady!—in such an earnest art form? An eclectic group of women will discuss how they use humor as a strategy in their narrative, formal, hybrid, and performance poetry.  

Five poets discussing and reading from the works of five poets with significant New Orleans roots who have left us for greener pastures (ie, the oblivion our memories will keep them from).

A discussion & reading of six deceased poets with strong connections to the city: Everette Maddox, Bob Borsodi, Leon Stokesbury, Lee Grue, Amos Zu Bolton and Bob Sabatier, a celebration of their lives and work, as well as an examination of their various poetic styles and their varying approaches to being poets and making their way in the world. The participants all knew one or, in most cases, several of the poets under consideration. Discussion of at least one poem by each of these poets who are gone but—because we will continue to read and celebrate them— not forgotten.

Join four poets as they share the stage to read work that explores the transformative power of poetry to reclaim women's narratives. With a focus on risk-taking and holding space for vulnerability and authenticity, Kelli Russell Agodon, Ananda Lima, Simone Muench, and Melissa Studdard will read poems that call out injustices, refuse patriarchal limitations and controls, and celebrate aspects of women's lives that we are told should be taboo.

Celebrating their new release Last Night in America, poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blur boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Federico Garcia Lorca so ardently championed. Troubadouring widely in the US and abroad (Ireland, Canada and Slovenia), Los Lorcas have performed everywhere from farmhouse kitchens to pubs, coffeehouses, schools, theaters and 1,000+ book festival crowds, attesting to the broad appeal of their lyrical tapestries and innovative vision of how poetry and music are two sides of the same spinning coin and together can attain a mesmerizing symbiosis.

Bodies define and shape us yet are in a constant state of transience, as much a tangible, living thing as a social and cultural entity. What stories do our bodies tell? How do we move within these physical and poetic spaces, including the ways we move against racial, gendered, hetero and able-bodied norms? 

As writers, how we address our own physicality (including whether we do at all) happens at the intersection of identities. This panel will specifically feature women poets whose work marries the physical, social, and poetic, as their bodies (that are aging, disabled, female, trans, queer, black, brown, sick, poor…) are under constant threat of regulation, conflict, and ownership. Our bodies are definitive, fickle, serious, fragile, strong, sexy, ugly, political… and inseparable from our identities and experiences. Panelists will read from their own work and discuss how their own corporeality and identity influence their poetic practice. 

Anaïs Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Join Jack Bedell and M.A. Nicholson for a generative workshop exploring how the poetic process begins with enthusiastic engagement with the world—careful observation, provocative questioning, dialogue, and the creation and study of archives—and continues to grow to fruition through imaginative reconfiguration, syntheses, and divisions. 

The workshop will begin with a discussion and study of strategies for taking field notes before an excursion into the streets and cafes of New Orleans to harvest “seeds” of poems. Upon returning, Bedell and Nicholson will share examples of how to transform field notes into first drafts before ending with time for writing, experimentation, and collaboration.

The war between Israel and Gaza prompted strong and passionate responses all over the world as it rightly should have--and within the U.S. literary world as well. But often even poets have fallen into rhetoric.  What does poetry have to say for itself? Can poetry have the floor?  Can poems create a space to prompt heartfelt honest and painful dialogue instead of two or three word slogans? As poets we listen to a voice within us which is complex, full of feeling, and capable of holding more ideas than one at the same time. We will present poems of our own that touch on the current situation, as well as poems by contemporary poets translated from Arabic and Hebrew, and will  respond to one another's presentations thoughtfully.  Our hope is to model the possibility of a dialogue through poetry even in a time when it is so difficult to speak from the heart.

Poetry communities exist everywhere--in community centers, coffee shops, bars, libraries, prisons, hospitals, on digital platforms, and in the open air. The four panelists discuss their work in building, maintaining, and documenting the lives of various American poetry communities. Jennifer Browne, poet and director of the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts, will discuss recent public poetry installations in an Appalachian county, to illustrate how, even with lean budgets, individuals and organizations can bring poetry into public spaces in their communities. George Guida, poet, critic, and author of the forthcoming book Virtue at the Coffeehouse: Poetry and Community in Contemporary America, will discuss the roles poetry and the social and cultural milieux it creates play in the lives of communities and individuals, many of whom are most subject to social, political and economic inequality, or most concerned with the effects of such inequality, whose most viable platform in a world dominated by corporate media is the local or virtual poetry venue. Gerry LaFemina, poet, critic, and literary arts activist, will discuss the ways in which a subculture of community groups that come together in workshops, open readings, writers' groups, and community/regional journals sustain and foster poetic growth and engagement, through an underground network of programming. Gregg Wilhelm, poet, professor, publisher, and Executive Director of Poetry Daily will discuss Poetry Daily's creation of a program delivered in the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center, which operates a high school in conjunction with the Fairfax County Public Schools so that the youth there can pursue their education. Started by Nicole Tong as part of her community project as the inaugural Fairfax Poet Laureate, the program has been transformative for the youth and the MFA students who share poetry as a key to learning.

This panel on environmental and ecological justice explores how poetry supports making our communities more equally resilient through the languages of poetry. Panelists identify how to strengthen our communities in a more balanced way and how poetry can contribute to a more inclusive way of speaking about and addressing climate change. Current capital structures  change through poetry and poetics' spaces as these spaces change how we use words? Since metaphor scales, audiences will hear points of view at different scales. Local NOLA poets and poets from other localities across the United States all want to point to the language innovations that work toward a more just future? Our panel is moderated by poet and ecologist E.J. McAdams.

Marcella Durand will discuss how words like "natural," "resiliency" and "sustainable" are used to cloak and cover everything from meat products to construction projects. Even "green space" might mean green paint splashed over a square of asphalt. These greenwashing words are no longer denotative or even connotative. Totally unmoored from the realities of climate collapse around us, they mean exactly the opposite of what they say. It is here that poets may rescue language, re-placing words with new possibilities of definition within the poetic space.

Tonya M. Foster will speak about circulatory systems: what we might mean when we talk about environments and environmental justice. How our descriptions are coded or inflected by circulations of money and resources. What is considered worthy of preservation? What is laid waste? And what's money got to do with it? 

Tommy Parrie will speak about the symbiotic relationship between trees (how their root system spreads horizontally as it grows and not straight down) and other organisms as a metaphor for our relationship to the environment through a Native lens. 

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker will discuss how Suzanne Cesaire's 1945 essay, "The Great Camouflage" guides her thinking about eco-solidarity across climate, labor and race. 

James Sherry will talk about connectivity and ecology from the perspective of the words we use in poetry about the environment to make it more active and more aligned with our intentions. Words like eco-poetry and nature are based on assumptions that cannot persist in an environmentally aligned world. 

Founded in 1998, the web-magazine Unlikely Stories continues to bring some of the web's most innovate and startling literature and art. Along with its daughter imprint Unlikely Books, Unlikely Stories seeks the scary edge of sociopolitical thought and how it intersects with artistic experimentation. Our five readers, who come from a variety of backgrounds and aesthetics, will excite and inflame.

Come celebrate Alyssa Moore’s debut chapbook WET MEDIA, recipient of Tilted House’s 2023 1BR / 3BATH Chapbook Prize. They will be joined by last year's 1BR recipient, Danny Unger from New Orleans, and 2023 Netsuke Series recipient, Isaac George Lauritsen from Chicago. WET MEDIA is a humorous, visual explosion of polemics on paywalls, clocks, la la land, and other mechanisms of control. Through its (anti)forms, it jams its slippery text into the cogs of the apparatus, and waits. Hosted by Tilted House editor, Cameron Lovejoy.

Individual poets present their work.

Join us for an unforgettable journey at the New Orleans Poetry Festival as three distinct voices, Toni Bee, Jean Dany Joachim, and U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, weave an evocative tapestry of poetry exploring the profound themes of home, belonging, and the complexity of life and love. These poets, parents and published authors will take you on an immersive poetic experience. Toni Bee, a powerful wordsmith with deep Boston roots , will bring her raw and unapologetic reflections on life, love, and the search for community. Jean Dany Joachim, with his Haitian roots, will infuse the performance with the rich rhythms of his heritage- exploring the nuanced layers of identity and belonging in English and French. U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo, a Zimbabwean American singer and poet, will offer her work in English and Shona, delving into the complexities of life and the threads that connect us all. Together, these poets will create a space where diverse narratives converge, inviting the audience to reflect on their own experiences of home, identity, and the intricate dance of life. Don't miss this unique poetic collaboration that transcends borders and resonates with the universal human spirit. "Roots, Rhythms, and Resonance" promises to be a celebration of poetic diversity and a journey into the heart of shared humanity.

The sudden collapse of Small Press Distribution has caused a major crisis in the world of the small press, especially poetry presses. In this panel, a distributor, three publishers, and a bookseller will discuss short-term models of survival and long-term models of evolution for presses who have lost their distribution method.

Roof Books has introduced poets from every new poetic tendency for nearly 50 years. Roof editor, James Sherry will introduce this year's poets. Our reading at New Orleans Poetry Festival includes: Norman Fischer, Tonya Foster, E. J. McAdams, Biljana Obradović, & Tyrone Williams.  

“Bayou Nonsense: Jazz, Design and Making Meaningless-ness” is a workshop that stages the encounter of sense and nonsense, realism and surrealism. During the workshop, we will invite participants to question sense-making in poetry, specifically poets with deep relations to the Third Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and lower Appalachia. Poets we might focus on include Bob Kaufmann, Harmony Holiday, Fargo Nassim Tbakhi, Nick Flynn and others. The Gulf Coast is where much of European Surrealism first found footing in America, by way of French New Orleans and the Menil imports to Houston. The format for the workshop is as follows: after a first half of study and discussion, writers will then create their own responses to sense-making, surrealism, and nonsense. The workshop will be led by two graduate students studying poetry at the University of Houston whose practices are informed by surrealism.

This workshop on nonsense responds to the ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as other significant tragedies borne of neocolonial and neoimperial violences. We will ask workshop participants to lean into the senselessness of a senseless moment, rather than give in to the capitalist demand to make meaning and discipline artistic practices. We will discuss surrealism as the work of deconstructing and re-imagining various liberatory worlds and ideas while providing numerous examples and strategies for how to express our uncharted despair.

The poem “Bat” begins innocuously, “Because our beds are on different continents / when I go to sleep you wake up / and when I wake up you go to sleep”—and continues, “Have you received the pair of hands I sent you yesterday?” Such are the turns present everywhere in the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, a prominent South Korean poet known for her vivid and surreal imagery of the feminine. The collection A Drink of Red Mirror, originally published in 2004, was translated by a team and published in English in 2019. Entering the collection is to enter the landscape of the poet's body and mind where her hands can at once write a poem and hang like bats from a ceiling a continent away. Fragmented then knitted back together in fantastic ways, the poet's body is simultaneously her own but also a fabric where the mythological and technological past and present of Korea manifest. Kim Hyesoon gives new meaning to the lyrical/poetic/feminine you, whom she releases from the prison of the poem and the prison of the body of the poet herself. Co-translators Lauren Albin and Sue Hyon Bae present a reading and discuss the unusual translation project.

We will define and then write “free”sonnets after studying the traditional sonnet forms known as the Shakespearean and the Petrachan. In this two hour workshop, we will write the first draft of a "free" sonnet.  

White Pine Press is a non-profit literary publisher, established in 1973, which publishes poetry, fiction, essays, and literature in translation from around the world. For almost fifty years we have been at the forefront in bringing the rich diversity of world literature to the English speaking audience. We seek to enrich our literary heritage; to promote the cultural awareness, understanding, and respect so vital in our rapidly changing world; and to address complex social and human rights issues through literature.

MadHat Press is a leading publisher of unique and vital contemporary poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism.

MadHat Press seeks to foster the work of writers and poets: explosive, lyrical, passionate, deeply wrought voices that stretch the boundaries of language, narrative and image, vital and enduring literary voices that sing on the page as well as in the mind.

Poets from the NOPF community present their work.

This roundtable discussion brings together seven dynamic poetry editors, each at the forefront of challenging traditional notions of poetry as confined to the printed page. In an era dominated by hypermedia, where words coalesce with visuals, sounds, and digital elements, this diverse group of editors explores the evolving landscape of mixed and intermedia poetry. From avant-garde digital platforms to cutting-edge print presses, our editors will engage in a thought-provoking dialogue about the transformative potential of poetry in the digital age. The panel will delve into the ways in which the work these editors publish transcends the boundaries of traditional mediums, embracing a fusion of text, image, sound, and technology. By examining the intersections of different art forms within poetics, our editors will highlight the significance of mixed media poetry in reflecting and responding to the complexities of contemporary life.

This proposed reading would consist of four authors who recently published full-length poetry debuts from Sundress Publications including Athena Nassar, Evelyn Berry, Caleb Curtiss, and Hannah V Warren. The panel will be moderated by Sundress Publications Executive Director, Erin Elizabeth Smith.

In this workshop, we’ll explore and expand the possibilities of intimacy in our writing. Lauren Berlant argues that intimacy, rather than something privatized, experienced, and cultivated in heteronormative couplings, is everywhere in circulation. It moves freely through private and public worlds and thus can show up in any number of complex, unruled encounters, inspiring not only desire, but also apathy, disgust, violence, wonder, and many other kinds of feeling. 

We’ll engage a short, beginner-friendly somatic exercise to disturb and to feel out the edges of our private worlds, considering what possible intimacies emerge from our gestures, motions, and interactions. Then, we’ll take our embodied reflections into a generative reading and writing time, analyzing and writing poetry that engages these expanded notions of intimacy. Overall, we’ll use this workshop to discover new ways of being with ourselves, each other, and our work. 2 hours.

This panel will discuss poetics with an eye to urgency: its fluidity, expression, and representation. Each artist will read a poem or poems and address their unique experience of focusing oneself on the present--on balance: beyond the banal and the bureaucratic, to the Cartesian and the transcendental. Hurricane Katrina and Sept 11th will serve as seminal backdrops or landscapes of ongoing disaster and survival: DACA, exile, personal grief, and crisis—the uncertainties or certainties that arise with sudden change.

Lavender Ink/Diálogos & Friends present readings and book releases by recent press authors and others, followed by discussion and reception with refreshments (canap's, cash bar).

This panel will explore the various ways poetry works to activate, teach, heal, motivate, and inspire communities. It brings together poets whose work centers community. Poets who address issues and tell stories important to the community and present their work in a manner a broad audience appreciates. The panel will emphasize African American and Filipino solidarities, particularly in the South. Each poet will read or recite work that addresses their respective community, before briefly discussing how poetry compliments their work as activists, community historians, and/or healers.

Inspired by the 2023 Latina Writers Conference in Los Angeles, the Latinas de las Americas reading will feature seven Latina poets with heritages spanning North, South, Central America, and the Carribean. As we celebrate the identities of the Americas, we honor each poet's individuality and power. 

Individual poets present their work.

NOPF presents our main event with interdisciplinary poet and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and multimedia poet Carolina Ebeid. Their performances will be followed by a set from the Cornelius Eady Trio. Performances begin at 7pm on Saturday, April 20th, at Café Istanbul in the New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 St. Claude, New Orleans, LA 70117. This event is free and open to the public.

The Small Press Fair will run from 9 AM to 5 PM on Saturday and Sunday, with doors opening at 8 AM for exhibitor setup, in the Main Hall of the New Orleans Healing Center. The Fair will feature small press publishers, authors, and others displaying their work. Among the exhibitors this year are
Unlikely Stories, Litwire, Gaudy Boy, VOLT-SCRAM, Tilted House / Fine Print Press, Riot in Your Throat, MadHat Press, White Pine Press, Roof Books, FlowerSong Press, Luna Press, Factory Hollow Press, Sundress Publications, Ghost Proposal Press, NOLAC, Anhinga Press, Xavier Review, Tram Editions Press, Beautiful Days Press, Defunkt Press, The Georgia Review, Poets Dream LLC, Los Lorcas, Annulet, Fertile Repository, Sublimity City, Belle Point Press, POETRY Magazine, Rebel Satori Press, Antenna Press, One Book One New Orleans, Chax Press, Sarabande Books.

This event will focus on several innovative women working in Intermedia and Visual Poetry. Visual Poetry is expanding at a great pace. Groups such as the Women Asemic Artists and Visual Poets have garnered strenth in numbers and visibility in the visual poetry communities. Three visions of current visual poetry will be presented and discussed. Kristine Snodgrass will cover glitching, including her own work with the body, gender, and error. Terri Carrion will also discuss glitching and ecology, Karla Van Vliet will present asemic writing through her work and practice, and Maria Damon will discuss the use of textiles, including process and product. In addition, Susana Garnder of Dusie Press will represent publishing of visual poetry with the presses new book, GLITCHY WOMYN: AN ANTHOLOGY. We will engage the audience with examples and processes now being used in Intermedia.

While trauma can stem from many causes, it can especially be shaped by the physical spaces where it originated. When such places involve our homes or people we trust, the impact can be further magnified and difficult to reconcile with the fuller pictures of our lives. In this roundtable, four authors of new and recent Belle Point Press collections will discuss trauma’s influences on their writing and how they have used creative work to address its lingering effects. Whether navigating trauma in the body itself or connected to a geographical location, each author’s work explores a variety of poetics to make their traumatic experiences translate to a wider audience. Topics range from living a closeted life to sexual assault and addiction, family loss, and pandemic grief.

Christopher Kurts will lead artists and poets through an exercise of call and response that explores the intersection of collage and poetry. Utilizing an expansive supply of collage materials from the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue (@neworleanscollage), a collage collective in New Orleans, workshop attendees will start by making a twenty-minute collage. They will then pass their collages to the person next in order for them to write a poem inspired by or meant to juxtapose with the collage. Those poems will then be passed on to the next person to make a collage that will in turn be the inspiration for a final poem. This workshop would be an extension of the PoetryXCollage project started by Kolaj Institute in 2022. You can read more about it here: https://kolajinstitute.org/poetryxcollage/

Chax Press founder/director Charles Alexander and other friends and Chax authors will present a history of Chax Press 1984-2024, a look toward the future, and brief comments. Some participants may read from their own Chax books.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far 

from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when 

it gets too far from music. 

                                              -Ezra Pound

How do we choose to engage in received, contemporary, or nonce forms as new or experienced writers? Are they great tools for growth? Are they stifling and antiquated? What is our relationship with form, the frequency of its use in our practice, and what leads us to choose a particular form in the moment? Poets experienced with the sestina, villanelle, ghazal, pantoums forms have curated a generative choose your own poetic form adventure generative workshop.

Today’s news, always about to be old news, is that auto-writing has made it back big--- as if it ever went away--- thank goodness--- it’s exhausting to pretend you’re not around when you’re hitting the keys or holding the pen--- unless, that is, your genius lies in splendor among the many ways we play at now you see me, now you don’t we will talk about this situation and do not forget about invention, dreams or memory, nostalgia and the uncanny action of finding yourself a stranger to yourself. We invite you to join in, everyone is invited to bring a short poem to read as our time together unfolds.

"Resonant Visions" emerges as a groundbreaking performance, artfully merging the enchanting realm of visual poetry with the dynamic landscape of sound poetics. This experimental event signifies a unique collaboration between the visionary talents at Post Asemic Press and the auditory pioneers at Full Spectrum Records. The journey began in 2016 when Andrew Weathers and Tanner Menard embarked on an experimental Sound Poetry Project, later celebrated under the Full Spectrum Records label. Fast forward to 2023-24, the creative alliance blossomed further, showcasing the works of Snodgrass and Menard in Post Asemic Press. Lenhart was Menard’s teacher at NAU, an essayist and experimental writer. Notably, Menard’s ‘The Poet’ is set for 2024 published in both Full Spectrum and Post-Asemic Press arenas. This reading event is a testament to the collaborative spirit, uniting artists who are trailblazers in their unique mediums. 

The South is a celebration of queerness. It is home to contemporary LGBTQ+ poets like Danez Smith and Jericho Brown who have transformed the literary landscape. It is also a region marred by great pain and suffering where our governments are actively restricting our rights, access to healthcare, and demolishing our histories. As young poets, we ask ourselves how do we find our passions, our pleasure, our light, our joys of being human in the South? We are angry and outraged by the acts these states exhibit on our bodies, but through our voices, we can resist and reclaim power. This panel discussion will consist of four talented queer poets from/living in Louisiana.

This workshop will begin with two BIPOC writers discussing the overt and covert intertextual links between poetry (and by extension, written language) as a form of music, and music (and by extension, all sound) as a form of poetry. The panelists will detail how their individual works incorporate, illustrate, explore, and/or expand upon sound and musicality as a distinct (and often, mostly POC) form of language that works at cross-purposes to what is commonly considered to be “lyric.” Additionally, in hopes of encouraging lively audience participation and discussion in the form of a post-panel Q&A, we will end our panel with brief remarks and observations on the influence of various musical genres on contemporary poetic forms. There will also be time set aside for writing exercises based upon the previous discussion and readings. 

This workshop will challenge the imagination. As a group, we will discuss the pros and cons of the nDada style of poetry, and each of us will create a poem or poems in the nDada style. nDada is a combination of a cartoon (perhaps absurd or unconventional) and a poem. The two are entirely unrelated, and often come together by pure, surrealist, chance. The cartoon is done by hand, while the poem is written with a typed font (digital or manual). The cartoon interrupts the poem and reorients the reader’s point of view. Participants do not need to think of themselves as “good” artists or writers. The purpose of this workshop isn’t to create works of genius, but rather to use the nDada process to open the imagination, and thereby allow participants to enjoy a moment of distinctive creativity. Because nDada relies to some degree on chance, there are always surprises, which can lead to interesting conversation. Our purpose is to create an exercise that will take us out of our comfort zone, and  enhance our creativity by facing us with the unexpected. Poems created at the workshop will (by permission) be added to our Endless Chapbook at nDadaPublic.org, and may be included in our printed anthology of nDada poems, “An Anthology of LOOK AT THIS COVER nDada Poetry”, edited by Whiskey Radish and Meinzer

“To write nDada is to play with absurdity -- but in the end, the absurdity plays with you.” David Chen, poetry student, Harvard University ‘24

Beginning with the roots of postmodernism, with Olson in the 1950s, this panel will retrace major movements, including some of the most important manifestos of avant-garde poetry of the postwar era and how these have shaped the current wave of the avant-garde.

A reading showcases new and emerging works by South Asian and Filipinx women and nonbinary writers and poets.

For many of us who have inherited queer and/or diasporic genealogies, lineages of ancestors who had to migrate elsewhere as an act of livelihood, preservation, or survival; familial histories of displacement or occupation, there is an intimate relationship to power we share. We understand too well what it feels like in the body, in meditation to exist so close to domination— to write and create under its weight and gaze. To do so is to enter an intersectional, alternative space, a liminal zone of both mourning and resistance, rage and radical love, nature and death. In her poem, “Morning,” Serena Chopra comes very close to describing this space as where loneliness is a wave of amplitude and pitch / In which the animal inside is not the animal without.”

Consequently, even in our grief work, our musings with the natural or spirit world we are always suspicious of dominant forces, dominant narratives, especially those that are driven by capitalism. We understand where there is capitalism there is the machinations of industry and war.

 As feminist writers, our literary experimentations, our ecological and humanitarian concerns, our prayers, and our ritual work are moved by being in resistance to domination. In doing so, it bring us closer to hope and other alternative passageways through and beyond domination.

Come listen to fresh cuts and cultural classics where poets and musicians have converged to create multidimensional acoustic experiences. After listening to the collaborations, we, poets and musicians, will discuss the creative symbiosis required to perform poems with music and to create music for poems. We’ll explore where and how we merge our crafts and open the conversation to those curious about the same.

Reading Experiment in Progress, an interactive collaboration hosted by Red Rover Series, will involve any writers who wish to participate.  Our goals are to foster innovative forms, aesthetic solidarities, and a multifarious performance with this year’s NOPF community so all have the opportunity to improvise in live space and time together.  We will continue to recruit collaborators up to the start of the 2024 festival.  During this event, every audience member is a potential performer.  Writers are invited to bring one stanza or paragraph to read/perform connected to the question “How can we create change in the world right now?”  Language collects.  Pieces of paper emerge and fall to the floor.  The performance keeps going until our time is up.  Red Rover Series has hosted similar large-scale readings for AWP, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the MLA conference, the &NOW Festival, and past New Orleans Poetry Festivals.  

A conversation, in the wake of the demise of Small Press Distribution, on the future of small press book distribution, hosted by Laura Paul of Asterism Books.

The Rose City comes to the Crescent City! This group reading showcases poets from Portland, Oregon, many with connections to the city's longstanding Spare Room reading series and to Portland State University. Readers represent a variety of styles and subject matters, but are united in a commitment to linguistic adventure and sociopolitical inquiry.

This reading panel consists of four poets whose own work has been shaped by their practice as translators. The languages they translate from are Russian, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, Galician, German, Polish, and Norwegian. Each poet will read their own original work along with one piece they translated that is somehow related to their own work. Though there need not be any causal connection between the translated piece and the work of the poet, each poet will briefly elucidate the nature of the relationship. This relationship can be causal: in which case the reader will briefly elucidate how translating the work affected their own poetry, or how their own poetry somehow made cognizable (understandable, interpretable) to them the work that was translated. Likewise, this relationship might simply be mimetic: in which case the poet will briefly elucidate the nature of the similarities (whether in content or form) between their own work and the original work they translated. In all four cases, we hope to showcase some of the rich aesthetic and sometimes political and philosophical connections that can manifest between translations and the original works of the translators. 

In 1933 in Buenos Aires, the electrifying Spanish poet Federico García Lorca presented his famous lecture, “Play and Theory of the Duende.” The Duende, Lorca said, is a goblin—as distinct from an angel or a muse—which inhabits great art. But what is this goblin, and what business does it have with our poems? Lorca left us a few cryptic hints. To begin with, “The Duende … will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death’s house …” Also, “intellect is oftentimes the foe of poetry because it imitates too much, it elevates the poet to a throne of acute angles and makes him forget that in time the ants can devour him, too …” In this workshop we will invite the mysterious goblin Duende for a visit.

Through literature and media, from the rise of Tumblr to the current, trendy Instagram poetic form, and observing through the films of Wes Anderson, A24, Greta Gerwig, and Noah Baumbach to the music of Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Bright Eyes' Connor Oberst, and Lucy Dacus, Millennials have made it chic to be sad, forlorn, and distraught. But there's something deeper going on underneath the surface as many of these queer, gender-questioning artists battle grief, late-stage capitalism, the popularity of social media, and deep religious indoctrination in response to the late 80's Satanic Panic. In their formative years Millennials all over took Sylvia Plath's "Sad Girl" poetry and turned them into mood boards on Pinterest, themes on Tumblr blogs, and tattoo'd lines of suicidal ideation on their bodies ironically. Millennials imagined a world in which sadness was the "in" to artistry, to creation, to being seen as valid and interesting and important. However, 2012 soon turned to 2022, and in recent years, Millennials have had to cope with a pandemic, economic decline, and the general mundanity of life appearing much more dull, no longer seen through those rose-colored Snapchat filters. Our panel seeks to discuss and investigate these trends and how they play into other topics this generation is tackling head on like compulsive heterosexuality, deconstructive, and disability visibility; what they've done for poetry at large through investigation of the Confessional and it's rise in Millennial art; from the Sad Girl turned Mad Girl and it's validity inside and outside of the classroom, the workshop, and the Chapbook contest; and into the rising craze of short, neatly formatted social media poetry from digestible, sometimes ridiculed, poets like Rupi Kaur. What can we learn to do, or not do, from these emergences and changes in subject, form, and delivery? How can we engage in good faith as and with Millennial poets and turn this talent for aestheticization into something productive and constructive? 

This reading will be a preview of LMNL Art’s first-ever anthology that will be published May 2024. The anthology series aims to platform New Orleans multi-genre writers, while celebrating our community’s representational diversity and creative pursuits. LMNL Arts Anthology Vol. 1 contains a curated collection of the best written works that have been presented at various LMNL events during 2023.

This year (and every subsequent year) the LMNL Arts team has picked one word that best describes the selected works in the anthology. This word is the overarching theme of the volume and determines the design direction of the book. For LMNL Arts Anthology Vol. 1, that word is “flow.” 

The LMNL space is where creation takes place. It is a state of flow. Popularized by psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura, flow state describes a feeling where, under the right conditions, you become fully immersed in whatever you are doing. The flow state is generally less common during periods of relaxation and makes itself present during challenging and engaging activities. On the subject, Csikszentmihalyi once claimed, “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… the best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Though anyone can achieve flow, writers are particularly familiar with this state of being. 

Being in flow is often misconstrued as a smooth and fluid process. However, this mental state is, more often than not, anything but. The creative process, even during flow state, is messy, torturous, and exhausting, because the brain functions at full-capacity while in flow. For instance, writers process up to 120 bits of information a second while in flow. Writers rapid-fire through multiple courses of action, over and over again, for long and short periods of time, in a chaotic, non-linear cycle that eventually leads to a creation. 

LMNL Anthology Vol. 1 aims to manifest the creative process during flow state in a realistic way. Graphic elements are imperfect and sketchy. Imagery is applied to the page in a rough, collage-like manner reminiscent of fast-making. The whole book is printed using a risograph, a printing method known for having imperfect registration, smudging, and uneven coverage. These design quirks reinforce and embrace the unpredictable nature of being in flow, while celebrating the creations that are born of it. 

We all sleep.  Many of us have problems with sleep.  This 1/3 of our lives we spend asleep affects us all in different ways and has been a subject of poetry for centuries.  Our five poets will read work which engages with aspects of the sleep experience, from insomnia to dreams.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski, as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, presents his talk: “Rhymes and Lies in Medieval Poetry” explores the role of rhyme in the verse narratives, or “romances,” of the early fourteenth century.  These anonymous texts are characterized by their use of repeated formulae at the end of the line, so-called “stock phrases” or rhyming tags like “I swear,” or “without lying.”  The rhyme tags are metatextual, in that they refer to the text itself; they tend to occur at sexually scandalous, gruesome, or hyperbolic moments, and assert the presence of a speaker who may or may not be telling the truth, but who draws attention to the question of authorial veracity.  I suggest that the rhyme tags are conscious artistic devices, spoken in the voice of the poet themself, a narrator who is not part of the plot but who comments on it.  They constitute an authorial signature in much the same way as a graffiti “tag,” and they are a means by which we may measure an emergent self-conscious sense of authorship in medieval England. 

At this reading, a collective of poets from the Coastal South will share their work concerning what it means to be a poet at home, a poet searching for home, or a poet returning home in 2024, when home is subject to rampant environmental and social injustices and their consequential economic, political, health, and climate crises. 

Readers will share poetry and meditations upon various and changing concepts of and relationships with the people, places, and states they call home, exploring displacement and the loss of home, questioning whether it is ever possible to leave home, and demonstrating how a poem might bring one home, how a poem can be a home.

This reading panel, featuring poets Paula Cisewski, Danika Stegeman, Angie Mazakis, and Darius Atefat-Peckham, formed around the idea of the "Ancestress," as illuminated in the Bjork song of the same name from her 2022 album Fossora. The idea of the ancestress explores the ways we evolve from and carry our mothers as well as broader ideas of birth, mothering, and the feminine forward in time. Our mothers survive pain and violence while also creating life and/or healing in the face of those things. The readers come from diverse backgrounds and will share poems inspired by our mothers that capture the complexity, terror, and grace of their unique experiences. As Bjork intones "You see with your own eyes / But hear with your mother's." Three of the panelists lost their mothers in 2020; the other experienced the near loss of their mother. Each of us carry our mother forward in time through our survival and our words. To echo Bjork, "We are her hopekeepers / we assure hope is there at, at all times."  

Fine Print is an independent literary and visual arts magazine that is distributed free to the public worldwide. Founded on inclusivity and its mission to bolster marginalized voices, Fine Print brings together authors of diverse backgrounds to create a greater collective understanding of how artists should approach environmental crisis, religiosity and spirituality, and physical or mental health issues under late capitalism. In this way, we hope to catalyze a cross-pollination of artistic communities that are willing to grapple with the most pressing issues of our time: social and environmental justice, religious trauma, and whether it’s possible to forge more humane paths of spirituality.

This reading brings together a selection of authors from our publication’s history. Readers were chosen for their eclectic backgrounds and geographic locations to create a group of voices that represent our publication’s core values.

Kundiman poets Jane Wong, Sally Wen Mao, Tiana Nobile, and Cathy Linh Che share poems that engage the power of rage -- as a means of activism, community care, and radical resistance. As Asian American women, how can poems of rage also resist gendered and racialized stereotypes of silence and submissive complacency? These four poets will share poems that speak to both personal and collective rage -- against colonialist empires, against patriarchal systems of oppression, and toward healing and ancestral love.

mercury firs is a new online journal of poetry, text, and whatevfir else— with a special interest in translation, hybrid texts, & 'ecologically-minded' work. Founded in 2022 and published biannually, mercury firs aims to grow fungalesque connections among a network of innovative poets and artists across geographic, aesthetic, linguistic, and generational spans. This reading, hosted by founding editor and New Orleans-based poet, Ian U Lockaby, will bring together contributors from the first four issues of the journal. Readers will include poets Jimin Seo, Kelly Clare, Michael Joseph Walsh,  Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, Joe Hall, Valerie Hsiung, Justin Cox, Danika Stegeman, Michael Martin Shea, and Alexis Almeida— and the reading will also feature accompaniment by ambient musician/sound artist Ceremonial Abyss.

This panel proposes bilingualism as a form of poetic inquiry, one that enables poets to observe the culturally expressive potential of remaking monlingualized, standardized forms of languages reflexively and expressively. As each of the poets demonstrates through their own innovative work, bilingual poetry happens amid the socially constraining monolingualist assumptions about language, and breaking free from this unleashes linguistic power across borders between genres, forms, and languages. The poets in this panel will offer bilingual approaches to understanding the language games of being biculturally critical and creative. Luviette Resto pushes against the colonial linguistic mindset exploring deeper Bad Bunny’s Grammy performance where “singing in non-English” and “speaking in non-English” was plastered on the screen. Aditi Machado investigates translation as the means by which languages can transform the material of a text, thinking through the character of these new materialities, what they afford sonically, semantically, and even opaquely. Steven Alvarez looks to “walls” as metaphors for containing and excluding bilingual poetics, and translingual poetics as a means for dismantling them. Edward Vidaurre delves into the self-awareness of bilingual poetry, finding power across languages to speak the lived experiences of biculturalism.