This 1-hour poetry workshop for French-speakers will be led by performer Joce Mienniel & poet Frédéric Forte. This will take place at the Contemporary Art Center in downtown New Orleans. You can attend this event in-person or virtually.
Sign up for this workshop at https://nolapoetry.com/contact/2025_workshops
The NOPF Roadshow kicks off this year's festival on the road at Cavalier Books in Lafayette, LA. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane, the Division of the Arts, and Cavalier Books, this event features French poets Virginie Poitrasson and Frédéric Forte and French-American poet Michelle Noteboom. These poets will perform their work in French and English, and take part in a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Tuesday, April 8th at 6PM, at Cavalier Books, 302 A Jefferson St, Lafayette, LA 70501.
The New Orleans Poetry Festival takes the show on the road to Thibodaux in 2025. In partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane & the Division of the Arts, and Nicholls State University, this bilingual French/English event features French performers Virginie Poitrasson, Frédéric Forte, Michelle Noteboom and Joce Mienniel along with poet Lisa Pasold from Montréal and two Louisiana poets, David Middleton and Jace Brittain. After a performance of their work, these poets will hold a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Wednesday, April 9th, 1PM in Le Bijou Theater in the Donald G. Bollinger Memorial Student Union, 104 Ellendale Dr., Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA 70301.
As part of Louisiana State Poet Laureate, Alison Pelegrin’s Lifelines Poetry Project and in partnership with the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Louisiana State Penitentiary—commonly known as Angola—opens its gates to poetry in an unprecedented event of artistic expression and solidarity. This landmark performance brings together renowned poets to transform a space long defined by confinement into one of creativity and shared humanity. This represents a bold step forward in recognizing the role of art in healing, rehabilitation, and social change. By bringing poetry into Angola, the event challenges boundaries—both literal and figurative—offering a glimpse of freedom through language and imagination. This program is made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.
A virtual (zoom) poetry workshop for French-language teachers led by Frédéric Forte. Forte currently co-heads the MFA in Creative Writing in Le Havre (ESADHaRF.) He has been a member of the well-known Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) since 2005 and leads Oulipo-inspired workshops across France for a wide range of students of all ages.
You can sign up for this workshop at https://nolapoetry.com/contact/2025_workshops
The New Orleans Poetry Festival expands uptown for an early-bird special "lecture musicale" featuring French poet Virginie Poitrasson and French musician Joce Mienniel. Sponsored by the French and Italian Department and the Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French at Tulane University, and in partnership with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane and the Division of the Arts, this event features an hour-long performance followed by a brief Q&A. Free and open to the public, this event will take place on Thursday, April 10 at 5PM, in Brent V. B. Dixon Performing Arts Center, The I. H. Bass Choral Hall, Room 254.
For our Locals Night Opening Gala, NOPF curates 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 Rachel Zavecz, Andy Young, Brad Richard, Marian Moore, Benjamin Morris, Skye Jackson, and Ariel Francisco, performing at Saturn Bar at 3067 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117 at 7pm on Thursday, April 10th. This event is free and open to the public. Funding for this event has been provided by the State of Louisiana and administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. NOPF is also in partnership with New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund.
This year, we'll be offering a four-hour open mic filled with lots of great local, national, and international poets. Jonathan Penton and Lisa Pasold will MC this very special event.
All open mic slots are currently reserved, but there's bound to be some people who have to drop out, so bring your own poems when you come by!
Each year NOPF hosts a second line with jazz funeral to remember great poets and friends of the fest who have passed during the previous year. This year we are honoring the internationally renowned poet, translator and editor Pierre Joris, who performed in the very first NOPF and in many years since, and New Orleans poet, teacher and mentor Jerry Ward, who also has been at almost every NOPF. Please gather at Siberia after the open mic on Friday. We will promenade, led by the Breathe In Brass Out brass band, down the few short blocks to the Healing Center and the International night show. We'll stop along the way for a short program of readings and tributes and then continue on into the Friday night show. Much more information about each of these great poets is available by clicking on the images below.
Those in the audience may also choose to tribute other members of the community of poets who have recently passed.
In partnership with the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane & the Division of the Arts, our annual International Night features four award-winning French creators from Paris: Frédéric Forte of Oulipo, Virginie Poitrasson, Joce Mienniel, and Michelle Noteboom, who will perform a bilingual set of poetry and jazz improvisation. The performance will begin at 7 PM on Friday, April 11th, 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. Funding for this event has been provided by the State of Louisiana and administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. NOPF is also in partnership with New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund.
A reading by poets near and far, hosted by Pitymilk Press and Bathmatics - Chelsea Tadeyeske (Milwaukee, WI), Edie Roberts (Detroit, MI), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge, LA) and Alix Jason (New Orleans, LA)
Much of the literary landscape in recent years has been dominated by the Internet: ebooks, digital media, Instagram poems, BookTok. Now, with the rise of AI, it can feel especially necessary and rejuvenating to break out of algorithms and prioritize poems that live exclusively outside the digital world. This workshop offers ways to center interactivity and chance in one's writing practice. How might we invite chance—fortune—into our writing practice? Can we utilize accident and recognize serendipity, harnessing the surprising recombinations that lie beyond logic and association? We invite you to embrace fortuity as an opportunity to collaborate with the universe through play with everyday materials. This workshop will begin with a brief introduction to modernism's automatic writing and (deliberate!) incorporation of randomness into poetry. We will then share various examples/tools you can use in your own work, including paper die, "cootie catcher" origami, and "beautiful corpse" collaboration. We will have tarot decks, playing cards, paper and books as raw materials for you to use, but please feel free to bring any additional items you'd like to work with.
This intimate roundtable explores the relationship between creative writers and their collaborators, delving into perspectives offered by multiple disciplines including music, film, photography, and visual arts. Inviting curiosity and dialogue around fostering meaningful poetical partnerships, this session will spotlight non-hierarchical approaches to art-making, emphasizing equity, mutual inspiration, and the fusion of perspectives. Kristen Nelson and Samantha Bounkeau will discuss a decade of collaborative music and poetry performances. Mathew Stadler and Afrasiab Pashangpur will discuss their writing and editing collaborations with The GOAT PoL (the Geopolitical Open Atlas of The Polity of Literature), a radical international editing and publishing community for disenfranchised writers. Bo McGuire will discuss poetry and film and how both ways of making bleed into one another. Melissa Mack will discuss deep listening with other-than-human life and land in her series of site-specific walking poems written in landscapes across California.
A reading of new poetry in translation from Latin America, read by the translators. This reading will also highlight work from recent and forthcoming books by Liliana Ponce (Argentina) translated by Michael Martin Shea, Roberta Iannamico (Argentina) translated by Alexis Almeida, César Moro (Peru) translated by Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe, and Ennio Moltedo (Chile) translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A.
Women in Independent Publishing is a book of interviews with and resources about women actively engaged in small-press publishing between the 1950s and the 1980s. The interviewees include Hettie Jones, Bernadette Mayer, Barbara Smith, and many others. The book illuminates the unifying and diverging elements between multiple publishing “scenes,” revealing their particularities and commonalities, and showcases the variety of types of publishing possible within the small press community. Women in Independent Publishing is a timely and urgent documentation of literary history and reveals and celebrates the multifaceted roles of women and non-binary editors and publishers and the communities they built during these years. This roundtable celebrates the publication of Women in Independent Publishing. The book's editor, Stephanie Anderson, will moderate a conversation between interviewees Jaime Robles, co-editor of Five Trees Press (1973-78, San Francisco), Lee Ann Brown, editor and publisher of Tender Buttons Press (1989-present, New York), and MC Hyland, founding editor of Double Cross Press (2008-present), who contributed an afterword to the book.
Panelists will explore how contemporary poets use transgression and ritual to challenge conventions, reclaim autonomy, and confront oppressive structures through their craft. Angela de Foligno, a thirteenth-century mystic, said, “And when a scab from the leper’s sores had become lodged in my throat, I tried to swallow it; and my conscience kept me from spitting it out—just as if I had received Holy Communion.” This visceral moment of abjection—merging the irreverent with the sacred—resonates deeply with contemporary writers who draw inspiration from figures like Foligno, Georges Bataille, and Julia Kristeva to navigate the intersections of sublime aesthetics. Discussing how they grapple with the limits of language to enact abjection and ecstasy, panelists will speak to working within the tradition of redefining sublimity to render irreverence, resistance, and reclamation in their writing. The discussion will define the abject, consider the tensions between poetic and public speech, and explore the ethics of refusal to examine how these ideas manifest within poetic practice and ritual. By placing their work in conversation with contemporary and historical poets, panelists will explore transgression as craft: a catalyst for reimagining language, confronting oppressive structures, and transforming the act of writing into an act of defiance.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
A multilingual experience decentralizes a singular origin, turning languages pliable and open to exchanges and confrontations between culturally contextual milieus, as though mirrors for one another, layering multitudes of encounters and definitions. Edgar Garcia asserts, “The deep structure of language — the condition that all languages share —is not deterministic relativism but rather the ability to constantly reformulate what the structure of language is amidst its present contexts.” Language becomes a breathing entity, formed and formulated by all of its entries into action of the past, present, and future tenses, as though a constant reassemblage. Four poets and translators working in Russian, English, German, and Spanish, Inna Krasnoper, Matvei Yankelevich, Cristina Perez Diaz and olga mikolaivna, will offer their interpretation of and work in multilingual poetics through form, sound, translation and collaborative practices.
How do other arts affect poetry’s shapes, forms, and textures? Since writing doesn’t occur in a vacuum, how do visual and audial media, as well as technological interactivity, change our poetic responses? This panel will bring together writers who will discuss the influence of artistic mediums outside of poetry, as well as how their engagement in other artistic practices colors how they approach language. All writers included have acted as publishers, editors, distributors, and/or book designers. The conversation will focus on why panelists embrace multimedia strategies in creating work, as well as how they exhibit text. Art forms discussed will include, but not be limited to, cinema, music, video games, graphic design, painting, and fashion, and the interrelationality between these modes and poetry.
DIALOGIST and Tyger Quarterly are excited to propose a collaborative reading that features poets from our pages. In the spirit of dialogue and a little flirtation with symmetry, the poets will be paired to identify pieces that mirror, contrast, or depart from one another by theme or form. From "Mother" to "April," sonnet to prose-poem, abecedarian to palindrome, the editors and readers will collaborate over the winter months to craft a reading that speaks from and back to the opening breath and the concluding silence. DIALOGIST and Tyger Quarterly are both web-based journals that feature contemporary poetry. Formerly a biannual print journal, DIALOGIST was founded in 2013 and now publishes work on a weekly basis. Tyger Quarterly debuted in 2022, with the gentlest emphasis on work that extends the curious energies stirred some time ago in the questions of William Blake. Alicia Wright and Timothy Leo will introduce the readers who are included below.
Mario Bellatin’s novel Szechuan's School of Human Pain revolves around the questions of representation and pain, delving into the complex relationship between art, trauma, and violence. If pain is inevitable and omnipresent, what can we do with it? “Now that you find yourself far away, allow me to tell you, here, surrounded by dozens of corpses, that there is no goal. Sorry, actually, yes: to make a book", writes Bellatin. Using The School of Human Pain (composed of rules and scenes), as a guiding codex, as well as other curated materials to build upon, participants will generate writings and collages that will form part of an ever-growing Archive of Pain. It’s an invitation to a live open reading of Bellatin’s fractured book to generate new writing (alphabetic and pictographic), reading and writing as an act of archeological speculation and translation, creating fragments of new languages, possible ways to represent human pain –it’s causes, context, and consequences.
For this roundtable discussion, contributors to Annulet’s special spring issue folio, “American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025” will present talks that detail and open up their individual and collaboratively authored contributions for discussion, which will also welcome audience participation. Presentations respond to the foundational question driving the folio, which is—what is the history of American poetry and poetics in this period from the 2008 recession to the present, and why isn't there yet a clear understanding of it? Our conversation will address how we might begin to attend to the past seventeen years of influences and trends in poetics, or critical theory’s application to or interpretation of poetry, as we consider whether there have been significant publishing outlets or networks, or noteworthy affects and affinities particular to this time period. We will also consider what holdovers may continue from previous aesthetic groupings or movements, and whether these legacies are still operative or intact. As part of our conversation, we all also discuss which forms of poetics, practices, or methods, like documentary poetics, translation, or archival study, are cresting or have waned, and which poets or methods might currently be ascendant. Finally, we’ll also include discussion of presses, organizations, journals, conferences, cohorts or coteries, and other social forms and solidarities will or should define the post-recession years until today. Further questions that we’ll pose to our audience include, but are not limited to: Can it be said that there are generational traits, or intergenerational aesthetic links, that have developed in the past decade and a half? Which figures have defined their respective traditions, or their own oeuvres? Whose influence do you suggest will become increasingly ascendant? When you look into the pool of current poetics, what do you see?
Join us for a special display of rare books from the Tulane University Special Collections celebrating the intersection of poetry and printing from Les Cenelles, the groundbreaking collection of poetry published by free men of color in nineteenth-century Louisiana, to contemporary poetry set and printed by the visionary and innovative Perishable Press.
This collection will be on display from 11am to 2pm, on Saturday, April 12, and Sunday, April 13.
In this session, Ariel Francisco, Carlos Gerardo, and Nicolás Cabrera will explore their connection to Guatemala through poetry in a moderated conversation with Nahum Villamil. The idea of exploring distance comes from understanding that, at this moment, the three poets live in Louisiana, so we are the same physical distance from Guatemala. At the same time, the poets have other distances (time since the last visit, experiences with Guatemala, and age at their previous visit). So here, we want to explore what, as poets, we get out of these distances, how those distances affect our writing, and what other distances influence our writing.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
Since its formation in 2002, Saturnalia Books has been publishing poetry by poets who push the boundaries of style and form. Saturnalia Books authors Nicole Callihan (SLIP), Kristi Maxwell (Wide Ass of Night), Danielle Pafunda (Along the Road Everyone Must Travel), and Michael Robins (The Bright Invisible) will read from their new books.
This workshop explores ways to use poetry to uncover buried truths in personal history or historical moments. We will talk about ways to integrate research, confront difficult scenes, examine erasures, and document artifacts to honor what has been hidden, lost, or disappeared. Participants will be guided through steps to write into the moment, examine the unknowns, and identify research questions and methodologies to deepen the discovery of the poem.
Join Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin over a complimentary lunch to learn about the Lifelines Poetry Project which has brought poetry workshops to prisons and communities across the state. Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world, and arts education and experiences for the incarcerated are rare to nonexistent. Learn about the various prompts and bits of inspiration that worked well in the carceral environment, and listen to Pelegrin and those who worked with her recall snippets of poetry and conversation still on their minds after these poetry workshops. This program is made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.
A reading/performance of recently published, forthcoming and/or in-progress work from poets who’ve lived in and love deeply New Orleans but have moved, for better or for worse, to differently-hued pastures. For us, N'Awlins is a central place from which our imaginations spring. We carry the New Orleans flag deep within wherever we are and always look forward to returning. Come see what magic we've been making--and be part of the fun we'll have together!
Poets Kelly Hoffer, Jennifer Whalen, Margaret Yapp, and Sebastian Paramo read from recently published work (Lightscatter Press, Rampage Party Press, Northwestern University Press) . Moderator, Lisa Bickmore, publisher and editor at Lightscatter Press Each author has experience in translating poetry into other modes--Lightscatter Press's mission is literary multimodal poetry, which means an experience in a non-alphabetic mode, designed for the published books. Other authors have staged reading and performance series, and make letter-pressed broadsides. Each author will read, and will offer insights into their multimodal work as a function of their work as a poet. There will be a short period at the end for audience questions and interactions.
This is a performance at the intersection of language and sonic fragmentation. Poetry's movement through realm-making is dependent on how language empowers a species into its transformative self, starting with the vital element of listening. Between Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola's somatic materiality, David Rothenberg's prescient engagement with the animal kingdom, Gryphon Rue's osmiotic sound sculpting, and Edwin Torres' bodylingo process, this quartet of sound artists will bring their wide-ranging poetic and musical discourse into improvisational alignment to initiate the fractured body as a living form — the poet as un-species through sound.
The most intimate, erotic and absurdly surreal yet mundane elements of our life’s poetry can be found in the trash. Within the bin, we discard our hidden emotions and our state of health, the ways we nourish and destroy ourselves, the activities that make us feel alive or numb. Our trash is telling of our present, and poetry is what brings it together with memory and time. The trash is an honest, beautiful and scummy place to be. For this workshop, I would like to offer some Trash Poetics insight and practices to entice both the adventurous poets and writers of other genres to give scum a chance when crafting their own poetic narratives. I will offer a Trash Poetics ritual with prompts that dirty up their practice and throw a bit of tactile chaos into the idea of what it means to write. The exercises will help readers to cultivate erotic awareness of their own trash, literally and metaphorically, and to bring in an element of play into constructing a self-reflective poem. I will guide participants to explore their present identity and its relationship to their trash as a point of entry in approaching this Trash Poetics. The materials I will bring include their trash, scissors, pen, paper, glue… it's about getting creative, off the computer and into a more tactile experience of poetry. This sort of engagement with trash, poetry, and erotic awareness of the self will lead readers to consider the malleable nature of time, memory and identity within their work. Everyday objects layered with poetic perspective act as a warped looking glass—one in which we can reflect and reinterpret our relationship with our perception of our own truths and myths. By playing with our mundane humanness in unassuming ways, and subtly altering their presentation, purpose and context, I want to give the reader a sensual and human freedom to discover new notions of creative expression time as well as their inseparable role in the construction of poetry, memory and identity.
Urgency, imagination, distinctiveness, craft: Tupelo, an independent, nonprofit literary press, publishes some of the most powerful poetry around. Karen An-hwei Lee, Cate Peebles, Preeti Kaur Rajpal, Natasha Saje, and Lesley Wheeler will read from their recent Tupelo collections.
Like music, loss is a common language we all learn. The ways poets explore grief are as disparate as the ways it manifests in our lives. From Victoria Chang to Nick Cave, writers in every genre wade into the messiness of this work every day, creating unique processes that inform unique poems, stories, and songs. Participants will discuss the challenges of writing about grief, specific processes to overcome those challenges, and share brief examples of the work made possible along the way. While grief finds us all regardless of identity, it should be said that grief can also manifest in response to injustices perpetrated against us because of our identities. Grief is both universal and highly personal. It does not reveal itself only for the loss of a loved one, but for the loss of freedoms, the loss of a home, the loss of the means to do the thing one loves. The myriad ways grief is experienced reflect the myriad ways poets are able to explore it in their work. The moderator, Brad Richard, will begin by introducing the event. Each participant will then provide an overview of their respective project, their approach to process, and a brief example of their work. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A.
Since 1998, the online journal Unlikely Stories has been publishing the political, the transgressive, and the stylistically bizarre. This reading celebrates that journal by bringing together four diverse voices, united in their commitment to expanding and redefining the impact of poetry on an audience. We’ll move through traditional forms and historic subjects to contemporary terrors and innovative poetic structures, running wild and hitting hard. Unlikely Stories editor Jonathan Penton will MC, presenting Tobey Hiller (SF Bay Area), Aileen Bassis (NYC), Xander Bilyk (Minneapolis), and Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Arkansas).
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
The green scum atop swamps & five-inch mud in marshlands. Carcasses in the desert & rat-infested sewers. Toxic waste build-up, invisible yet powerful. In cityscapes, nature preserves, and all the spaces between, we encounter grotesque landscapes. These places shape us: how we interact, think, love, form identity. “To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere,” Edward S. Casey writes, “and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place.” What do we do, then, with haunted, polluted, radioactive nowheres? What do we make of floods & famine, soft pelts & barbed wire? What do we owe ourselves and the landscapes we create in the face of human-initiated climate change? This panel investigates how the grotesque, liminal, and unquantifiable elements of place shape poetic voice and how surviving in such habitats infects and inflects our poetry. Poets will share works that embody place and discuss their poetics of place, climate, habitat, and community.
Whether we pray or not, it is in our nature to find solace in ritual. This generative workshop focuses on the invocatory touch of poetry, and it serves as an invitation to meditate on those moments when we seek such ritual and solace. The session focuses on poetry for change. During the introduction, we will discuss what place prayer - or our different concepts of prayer - has in our lives. We will discuss expectations and our individual and collective needs. The session will be held in a secular manner, intending that each participant can either curate a collection of poetry discovered during the session, or written during the session, or a mixture of both, as their own 'prayer book.' The session begins with a visualization and a meditative exercise related to the day's topic. This will be followed by some minutes of free writing. The rest of the session is generative. Participants will have 3 detailed prompts and time to share and discuss their first drafts. Participants are given a poetry pack on the theme (around 6-8 poems). Two or three of the poems will be used during the class, while the others are for further reading and contemplation.
In 2024, Blue Bag Press released two editions of Tina Darragh's agitprop plays: FOUR PLAYS (AGITPROP) (collecting work from the 2000s) and MUTANT SOLIDARITIES (one of Darragh's final projects written between early 2000 and 2019/20). Darragh is a respected and influential poet to older generations of innovative writers, however, over time (and for perturbing reasons), in recent years, much of her work has gone out of print and proved of great difficulty to access. Alongside a substantial digitization effort which provided copies of much of that out of print material, Blue Bag Press' editions were published with the explicit goal of enabling a wider readership of Darragh's writing by new audiences largely unfamiliar with her intensely ethical, political writing which radically questions the power and purpose of the text, especially the creative one. This roundtable, led by Thom Eichelberger-Young, who edited the editions in question, features four early career writers, practicing a variety of styles and forms, and working towards various ends, coming together to read and discuss Darragh's work Mutant Solidarities, a hybrid poem-documentary-drama interrogating manifold matters such as radioactive waste, animal and human consciousness, and human dominion over the natural. Panelists will reflect on Darragh's increasingly relevant political and ecological text, and its impacts upon them, in hopes to show the potentials of its influence and demands upon new generations of writers, editors, and artists.
This roundtable will consist of writer-translators who work and live within both French and English. The panelists will discuss how their individual approaches confront bilingualism, intermedial translation, and the question of authenticity. Can we say that the original poem and its translation are authentic in different ways? We will examine the process of co-translation and what means to work collectively through languages and gender. What happens during the process of receiving and interacting with a text, or in the experience with a text, and what happens in the shift from reader to translator? Where is the line of authenticity in mother tongue, original written language, and translation?
This group reading will bring together poets and translators who have been published by Tripwire, demonstrating a range of international voices and political poetries. Featured readers include Carlos Soto Román, Erasmo Pantoja/Biblioteca Popular de Bruce Lee, Cait O'Kane, editor David Buuck, and 1-2 other poets.
Ghost Proposal Press hosts a celebration of Ian U Lockaby’s new chapbook A Seam of Electricity. Also featuring GP contributors Jimin Seo, Olga Mikolaivna, and Matthew Broaddus reading work that transcends traditional genre boundaries.
What happens when a poem moves beyond the page to become a tactile object in three dimensions? Following M.C. Richards’s notion that “the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills,” this panel will discuss the creative and critical potentials of working at the intersection of language and tactile experience. How, for example, can we render the divergences of the disabled body in the somatic textbody of 3D poems? What assumptions about poetry might “touchy” poem objects reveal and upset? Tactile poems blur the boundary between creator and spectator, reader and participant. This roundtable of poets and book artists will emphasize process, performance, and interactivity as essential areas of aesthetic inquiry and theory. We will aim to provide practical discussions of craft elements—the process of moving from concept to prototype to 3D object—as well as reflections on what it means to center touch, an underrepresented area of poetic production, in our creative practices.
Lavender Ink and Diálogos present readings by the authors of recent releases, including but not necessarily limited to:
Courtney Bush reading from A Movie (Lavender Ink 2025); Mark Statman reading from Volverse / Volver (Lavender Ink 2025); Indran Amirthanayagam reading from his new translation of Kenia Cano, Animal for the Eyes (Diálogos 2025); Carrie Chappell and Amanda Murphy presenting their new translation of Sandra Moussempès' Cassandra at point-blank range (Diálogos 2025).
This is a collective performance by an ensemble which has grown organically out of community reading and listening practices we have done in NYC in a small monthly reading group. Together we performed Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola’s poem Decompositions from her book the Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons Press, 2023) which features performative visual text and spacing that suggest staccato and multivocal work. We are interested in how performance opens a text for readers, listeners and authors and can also produce new work. We will explore and unfold the sonic elements of poems playing with percussion, handpan, voice, and keyboards including piano or electronic keyboard and typewriter. Lee Ann Brown will offer two short poems written the last time she was at the NOLA Poetry Festival New Orleans which documents a group poet trip down to the Bayou Bienvenue viewing platform. This poem plays with bringing the occasional happenings of a day into form, documenting poets in community and in collaboration. We end up at the viewing platform where we can see birds and wildlife as well as witness an area which was flooded during Hurricane Katrina and has been rebuilt. Angela Carr will offer two parts of a new poem: Foothold and Threshold that explore the places memory lives in the land and in the body, and the contingent energies of pleasure and survival. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola will present “Archaeological Radio: Gravities of Memory,” a multilayered performance exploring ideas of gravity, ritual, archives, sound and memory. This is part of a series of interdisciplinary works that inspired her book The Telaraña Circuit, which focuses on her aunt’s archeological investigation from 1974. This poetry reading and performance will integrate her research into a sonic ritual including long drone experiments with synths and keyboards, field recordings, poetry readings, sonic archives and textural experiments. The listening experience of this could be translated into a symbolic level by using the gravity and presence of the rocks as historical and ecological depth and the drone as an elongation of presence, care and acknowledgement of both her aunt, women archaeologists in Mexico, and the people of San Martín Huamelulpan. E.J. McAdams will offer a poem created for a performance with Edwin Torres called “Soon Is Now” which can be read horizontally and vertically. He can play, or we can perform riffing of his film “Out of Paradise,” a poem from my latest collection LAST, that takes spoken language from those who escaped and fought the fire in Paradise, CA. Together this group will perform, interact and create a unique performance which grows out of synergies and connections from their conversations, readings, exchanges and enactments over time.
Poetry is kin to prayer and spells not only in its aims—to praise and petition the more-than-human world—but in its bodied mechanisms of repetition and rhythm. This roundtable considers the craft of spiritual seeking through poetry, emphasizing the transformative powers of literary language and drawing from diverse literary, religious, and ecopoetic traditions. Panelists also offer a handout of prompts for writers to consider in their own journeys.
Fredric Jameson, drawing on Lévi-Strauss, puts forward the proposition that “all cultural artifacts are to be read as symbolic resolutions of real political and social contradictions.” Yet what does it mean when artifacts, specifically poems, foreground contradiction at the level of form and text? For this roundtable, four poets will interrogate the possibilities and functions of contradiction in poetry, working through oppositions and entanglements between registers, languages, and sensory systems, between signal and noise, inside and outside, alienation and utopia, and ultimately between contradiction and seamlessness. Zack Anderson will explore tensions between translation, communication, and noise in Eugene Jolas’ “polyglot” poems from the 1938 collection I Have Seen Monsters and Angels (Sublunary Editions, 2023). Maxime Berclaz will consider how horror functions across a range of poetic texts as a mode of attention that both generates contradictions and heightens our awareness of existing ones, with the pleasure of its fascination serving to resist the desire for resolution, symbolic or otherwise. Ellen Boyette will investigate disjunction-as-locomotion in Lisa Robertson’s The Apothecary (Book*hug Press, 2007) by imagining the possible communion between the text's frictional modes: generous visual brevity versus oscillatory tonal play. Abby Ryder-Huth will ask how intersections of translation and poetic response assert contradictory states of visibility and occlusion in work by Sawako Nakayasu and Rosmarie Waldrop.
This workshop invites participants to explore together examples of public poetry: poetry meant for contexts beyond the book and outside the sanctioned reading space. This workshop will amass criteria for what makes effective and affective public poetry under today’s unique socio-political conditions by analyzing examples such as the Situantionists’ 1968 graffiti slogans and “guerrilla poetry” from the Bush-era (PIPA, PACE, The Agit-Truth Collective, and Sidewalk Blogger). The scope of the workshop will take us to the present with the work of Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha and his Edward Said Public Library as well as responses in the West to the Gaza genocide, such as NYC subway-ad détournement and Jewish Voice for Peace image creation. Participants will be invited to take part in producing poetic language—slogans, aphorisms, dictums, micropoems, etc.—to share in spaces beyond the workshop where poetry is not typically encountered, troubling the category of what a poem is. Participants will have the opportunity to public-ize some of that work during and after the workshop.
In celebration of five years as a small press (and our first year in New Orleans), Carrion Bloom Books will host a reading featuring writers and translators from across our catalogue. Toasting five years of handmade chapbooks exploring the grotesque and ecstatic, five years of paper objects and letterpressed ephemera, and five years of international, translingual, boldly original experiments.
Both dance and poetry share a long history as forms of resistance in the wake of intergenerational trauma. We’ll speak to how dance, and its role in our poetic practices, allows us a way back into our bodies. Trauma comes from the Greek word for wound, and dance is a method of tending to said wounds, of embodying and reimagining aliveness within all that we have inherited. Dance as empowered creation. Dance as a way of informing a poetics that attends to a deeply embodied practice of imagination. In this way, dance poetics is a form of imagined futurity in the wake of past atrocity. The discussion of how our poetry and dance practices help us to reconnect with our bodies, as well as how these practices benefit us as artists and makers will resonate with an audience of writers in two major ways. First, it will engage writers who spend much of their time focused only on the cerebral experience of writing. Second, it will speak to how poetry can be an embodied practice with a corporeal argument. The moderator (myself) will begin the event by introducing the roundtable and the participating poets (5 min.). Each participant will give a brief introduction of their own work, including a short reading, performance, or other demonstration (7-8 min. each). The moderator will ask an opening question or two which all of the panelists will have the opportunity to answer (5 min.) before opening the discussion up to the room for audience Q and A (10 min.).
Join us for a reading featuring four queer/trans Texas poets, Aliah Lavonne Tigh, Keagan Wheat, Anthony Sutton, and Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal. Each of these readers plays with queerness and pop culture. Aliah Lavonne Tigh (Weren't We Natural Swimmers, 2022) moves through lyrical landscapes with a shifting scope of natural disaster, world politics, and personal heartache, which allows a fascinating closeness for the reader. Keagan Wheat (Viaticum, 2022) is a Latinx, trans poet exploring disability and trans identity through dead qualities and community connection. Anthony Sutton (Particles of a Stranger Light, 2023) implements wit and wisdom to move between Dante, Jason Voorhees, and Keats without missing depth of emotion nor thought; even in a poem naming Icarus as the 'I', Sutton's voice stands strongly recognizable. Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (WATCHA, 2024) mixes forms and language to pull the reader into the intimacy of watching. Villarreal uses ekphrasis, photography, essay, and poetry to capture the reader, and the poems consider gender, Chincanx culture, and politics. We're excited to bring these incredible voices to the historic New Orleans Poetry Festival.
This reading will celebrate the final issue of Rigorous: A journal edited and written by people of color which was founded by Rosalyn Spencer and Kenning JP García. The works will range in styles and themes to reflect the diversity of work coming from some of the most interesting and innovative writers of color at work today. Readers will include: Rone Shavers, Khaya Osborne, Rob Arnold, Genève Chao, Tameca L Coleman, and Roman Johnson as well as some thoughts and thanks by Rosalyn Spencer. Kenning JP García will host the event.
A reading of mythos-inspired poetry. How do we use ancient myths to tell modern poetic stories? How can myth and ancient story help us process the trauma and complexity of our present day lives? Sandra Simonds reads from Burning Oracle, a forthcoming book of poems that reimagines the characters Cassandra from classical greek mythology, Reynard the medieval fox, poet Paul Celan and painter Francisco Goya by interweaving them in a book-length poem that explores issues of cultural history and identity; Rebecca Lehmann reads poems from The Sweating Sickness that use witch lore and Eurydice and Orpheus mythos to process the twin griefs of the pandemic and the suicide of an abusive ex; Jessica Q. Stark reads poems from a work in progress that recontextualizes the mythos around Marie Antoinette with references to Vietnamese and Greek folklore; Jaclyn Stephens reads poems from her work in progress re-envisioning biblical Job's wife as a suburban housewife.
Changing our process can change our relationship with our writing. When I started creating book arts projects, I wanted my process to be beautiful and creative, not just the final product. I also wanted to think about how to write with my body since I was experiencing the first onset of my disability. In the first half of this workshop we will create a small book arts project and decorate it. These small books will fit in our pockets as we take a short walk together during which we will pause, read a few poems together, and write. Time permitting, we will share some of our work after our short walk concludes.
Poet and Elizabeth Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz will talk about Bishop as a translator (Paz, Drummond). “Bishop was a great translator, both accurate and profoundly poetic and skillful. Octavio Paz said that her translation of his poem "January First" was better than the original”. Paz also translated Bishop’s poetry into Spanish – we will discuss how different these approaches were. Poet and translator Mary Jane White will talk about translatability of Marina Tsvetaeva’s work. “To write poetry is already to translate, from the mother tongue into another --- whether into French or German is of no moment. No language is the mother tongue. To write poetry is to translate.” Marina Tsvetaeva’s letter to Rilke of 6 July 1926. Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892, and began to publish in her teens, to multiple good reviews by Russian literary critics. She was a working contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke, all of whom were important to her as rival, lover, correspondent and mentor, respectively. Translator Margo Shohl will talk about Anna Akmatova’s deceivingly “simple” late elegies and their translatability. “The later poetry of Anna Akhmatova is just as steeped in nouns and often as deceptively simple as her early, incredibly spare lyrics. But with the perspective of a lifetime— from a Petersburg youth in Tsarist Russia through the most harrowing experiences of the Soviet twentieth century—her poems gain resonance to the point where she seems almost the very Symbolist poet her modernist movement reacted against. Where does one turn, what principles does one live by, in order to bring into a very different culture poems whose apparently light lines bear such weight?” Poet and essayist Irina Mashinski, whose first ever Russian-language book on Elizabeth Bishop, with translations and renditions of her poems, is coming out in 2025, will talk about bringing Elizabeth Bishop into Russian. We will reflect on the unique aspects of Bishop’s vocabulary, timing, tone, and composition – and on translatability of this unique voice. Osip Mandelstam famously said, "Do not compare: what lives is incomparable.” And yet it is interesting to see how these aspects of Bishop’s poetry relate to Tsvetaeva’s precision of form, as well as to the reserved tone of Akhmatova’s late elegies. Q&A.
NOPF presents our main event with poets Ariana Reines & Tongo Eisen-Martin. Performances begin at 7pm on Saturday, April 12th, 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. Funding for this event has been provided by the State of Louisiana and administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. NOPF is also in partnership with New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund.
After the main Saturday evening event, Lavender Ink / Diálogos and Unlikely Books will sponsor a reception honoring their recent releases and new and established poets, with an inexpensive cash bar and food provided. This will be at the Artisan Bar and Café, a few doors down from the Healing Center. Come relax, chat with the poets, hang out, dance on the tables (just kidding), and whatever you like.
Poetry has a long and complex history in colleges and universities, but higher education is in a weird spot. Cultural pressure, debt, decades of adjunctification, schools closing: this panel will explore how poetry might help us think about education, institutions, and what’s still possible. Panelists will share recent poems that touch on issues of labor and learning–as educators, administrators, students, and workers–and then discuss topics such as: fantasies of higher ed and their fallout; obstacles to solidarity and to writing in the academy; the poetics of precarity; and creative writing after the “boom” of writing programs. We’ll ask where we see ourselves in five years. We’ll ask how poetry can both be put to work and use all its sick days.
In this panel, five poets who work across genre and media will discuss how their alternative creative practices alter, inflect, or enliven their poetry. Stella Corso will discuss her background in fashion design and her experience making visual and performance art, and how these practices inform both her poetic style and approach to craft. Michael Joseph Walsh will talk about translation, improvisation, and collage. Rachel Franklin Wood will talk about sculpture and filmmaking as methods of being distracted (back) into poetry. Inna Krasnoper will talk about embodying a poem through practices of dance improvisation and voice recording. Leah Nieboer will discuss how the ethics and practices of Deep Listening lead to a poetry and poetics that is increasingly sound-driven, socially inscribed, and strange. Each poet will read from work refracted through these alternative practices. Through this roundtable, we hope to illuminate the manifold ways creative forces off the page get folded into relationship with a poem, as well as the ways the poetic process may extend far beyond the writing desk.
When the unthinkable happened in the 2016 presidential elections, poets Julie Kane and Grace Bauer hatched a plot of poetic resistance. They sent out a call for "all good women to come to the aide of their country." The response was enthusiastic and culminated in the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press). A nationwide community grew out of the anthology, with Nasty Women Poets' Readings happening from coast to coast--including here in New Orleans. Now that the even more unthinkable has happened again (and your body, my choice tee shirts are available online), we think it's time to hear from these women once more. This reading will feature 9 regional Nasty Women Poets, plus the editors, who will read their poems and other poets from the anthology. We will encourage the audience to persist in their own nastiness in their own ways--poetic and otherwise.
What kind of writing emerges if we accept that no stable boundary separates the human from the nonhuman: that our existence is a coexistence? What kind of writing does this dynamic equilibrium with the world of animals, fungi, plants, and all other self-organized systems call for? How does one write in a way that acknowledges that the free-living aerobic bacteria that long ago became our mitochondria are inextricable from the present speaking self? Over the course of this workshop, we will explore these questions through a sequence of somatic attunements, observational field work, and language experiments. We will also engage with brief readings from Goethe, Emerson, Gertrude Stein, and Jack Spicer.
Carrion Bloom bookmakers and editors Rachel Zavecz and Jace Brittain lead an interactive and generative survey of simple book objects during which attendees will learn to construct several basic folded forms as the compose, cut up, and/or erase new poems. Together, we'll consider how the constraints and potentials of those forms can shape the writing. Attendees will walk away with a few book objects of their own creation and some essential know-how for making their own books.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
In this multimedia poetry performance, Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, Kai Ihns, and Alyssa Perry will each present work that takes a hybrid approach to such topics as performance, business, poetry, image, punctuation, swans, and powerpoint presentation. Juliet will perform her one woman poetry show, Business v. Poetry. Kai will perform Picture Hyphen--a show of image and text. Alyssa will perform her poem Swan, set to a YouTube video of said swan. The event will bring together performance, poetry, and the tools we use to build them.
This roundtable will explore the life and legacy of the poet Frank Stanford (1948-1978). Drawing on the unique expertise of each panelist, it will do so through several perspectives. James McWilliams, author of the first Frank Stanford biography (due out in the summer of 2025 with the University of Arkansas Press), will survey Stanford's early upbringing in Greenville, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; Snow Lake, Arkansas; Mountain Home, Arkansas; and Subiaco, Arkansas. A. P. Walton, whose edited collection of Stanford's letters is also forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, will examine not only the intricate and deeply personal nature of Stanford's copious correspondence, but also how Stanford crafted those letters into a form of art that complemented his poems as he moved across various geographies in northwest Arkansas (Fayetteville, Rogers, Eureka Springs, Busch) and relationships. Poet Canese Jarboe will explore Stanford's poetics, giving special consideration to the rural and backcountry registers in Stanford's work, as well as the ongoing interplay between death and sexuality that animates so much of his poetry. Aidan Ryan, whose Foundlings Press has long promoted Stanford, will discuss the challenges involved in introducing a long neglected/overlooked poet to a larger audience of readers. As a filmmaker, Ryan can also comment on the cinematic nature of Stanford's writing. Finally, as poets who knew Stanford personally, Bill Willett and Ralph Adamo are in a unique position to discern the mythical Stanford from the actual Stanford, noting how Stanford negotiated his identity to craft a life that was dramatic, heroic, prolific, brilliant, and tragic.
What is literary influence? How can we re-envision traditional models of unilateral, hierarchical modes of influence to an understanding of influence that evolves from more organic, rhizomic, dialogical means. A concept of influence that may include friendships, collaborations, and the experiences of one's material life as part of its nexus. Four poets will discuss their understanding of poetic "influence" and lineage through their work in the new collection Other Influences: An Untold Story of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry.
How to transform a set of poems into a book? Into an experience, a room, a landscape you can walk around inside? This workshop is designed to help writers view their poetry manuscripts clearly and refine their vision for the book they want to create. Through a series of exercises and frameworks, writers will clarify their own ideas using tools I developed to refine my own manuscripts. We’ll discuss book structures, titles, tones, themes, patterns, and style, as well as some publication basics. To bring: a copy of your manuscript, a list of books whose titles you love, and a list of books whose covers you love.
When so much of our reading happens through phones and screens, what does it mean to share poetry that takes not just printed, but specifcally handmade, forms? The participants in this roundtable make postcards, books, broadsides, and other poetry objects on kitchen tables, in letterpress shops, and in book-folding or sewing parties, one at a time, by hand. How does hand-seting type, or hand-stitching chapbooks, change our relationship to poems, or to language more generally? What can we learn about poetics by making it by hand?
Readings from seven poets who have recently published or are working on books about watching movies as a way to connect with or write into relationships with others. These works are Ed Steck's A Place Beyond Shame, Marie Buck and Matthew Walker's Spoilers, Courtney Bush's A Movie, Laura Paul's Film Elegy and a forthcoming work from John Yau about every movie he watched or talked about with John Ashbery.
Resistance Dreams, 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 2025 festival. During this event, every audience member is a potential performer. Writers are invited to bring one page to read/perform connected to the question “What are your dreams of resistance?” 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.
Since 2008, DoubleCross Press has produced letterpress chapbooks of poetry and poetics by emerging and established poets. This reading presents work by DoubleCross editors Anna Gurton-Wachter and MC Hyland and by poets published by DoubleCross over the course of its eighteen-year career.
The Louisiana French word lagniappe means “a little something extra.” In New Orleans, lagniappe is a gesture of generosity—a small bonus given freely, whether an extra shucked oyster, a long pour, or an unexpected kindness from a neighbor. This spirit of abundance and reciprocity resonates where poetry is not just a genre but a living practice embedded in community, resistance, and cultural exchange. These Lagniappe Readings celebrate this ethos, offering a space where five poets perform their work.
Through a combination of print formats historically labeled ephemera, from newsprint to letterpress broadsides, this panel will explore how print formats beyond the book can restore control of the art-making process to writers and publications, thereby enabling them to engage with the page in new and experimental ways that traditional nine-by-five book formats might obfuscate or prevent. This panel will explore movements such as Fluxus and mail art, discussing how practices like these can continue to push the boundaries of print media. The value of this panel is twofold. The first is to celebrate print media traditions and explore how older forms of letterpress and newsprint publications open the field of the page and offer an expansive poetics to their readers. The second is to offer several strategies for bolstering egalitarianism in a literary landscape too often stratified by access: access to education and academic spaces, access to wealth that makes or breaks the possibility of entry to such spaces, and finally, access to literary journals compelled to gatekeep contemporary literature in order to survive in an increasingly demanding economy. Ultimately, this panel will provide a number of distinct but compatible approaches to resisting the commodification of art, with the aim of encouraging more publications to engage in more equitable publishing and distribution practices. The panel will also explore how thinking beyond the book can expand reading practices and create an experimental zone for a poetics that engages with its own making in both form and presentation. This panel comprises presenters from Fine Print Press, Prompt Press, Send Me Press, Tilted House, and The Wax Paper.
Everyone has (at least) one of those drafts: the one that haunts you—and just won’t come right. You know: the poem you go back to, sink days or weeks of effort into, spend god knows how long wrestling, and giving up on, and returning to, trying to finish. The darling you killed--that won't stay down? You're sure you can fix it / you keep giving up—but...you can’t throw the draft out. That ghostly almost-poem (old or new) that excites and resists and gets put back in the drawer or file—and keeps coming back out out. This workshop is for you—and that zombie work. Bring it! We’re going to learn some radical revision techniques which will open, loosen, and inspire. We’ll have rigorous and real fun with our problem children—in the interests of having a better relationship to our poetic practice, and ourselves. Because—I know you already know this—this workshop is less about the poem than the poet. Enjoy a chance to take risks in a safe space, where we all want each others’ success: while you may or may not finish (off) this poem, you’ll have given it a chance teach you what it needs to about your mind and heart, and you’ll be a better—and happier—writer for the effort.
Trampoline is a New Orleans-based online poetry weekly spotlighting local writers, as well as poets from around the world. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, Trampoline presents a reading by past contributors, Jesse DeLong, Daniel Fitzpatrick, M.A. Nicholson, alongside editor Justin Lacour.
Winter Editions is a literary small press with a particular focus on poetry and its intersections with the essay, the novel, and the visual and performing arts, as well as books that investigate print culture and poetics. Founded in 2023, WE supports writing which pursues an “other” way—opposing generic constructs and codified forms, or offering unfamiliar, outsider, or marginalized perspectives. Just as these works derive meaning from their publishing contexts, WE finds its purpose reciprocally through their slow and steady publication. Winter Editions authors will read: Robert Fitterman (Creve Coeur, 2024), Claire DeVoogd (Via, 2023), Leah Flax Barber (The Mirror of Simple Souls, forthcoming May 2025), and James Loop (full-length collection forthcoming 2026).
This Bagley Wright Lecture is on being influenced (thinking of influence as a site of openness, and pleasure - not anxiety), and sits in three parts: the first has to do with growing up with Anselm Berrigan's folks as parents and starting to write. The second part gets into Anselm being influenced by a range of other people and has a passage that is made up mostly of things people said to him across a period of childhood/teen/early 20s years, while also getting inside the one semester he spent working one-on-one with Allen Ginsberg. The last section gets into poems from a his new book, called Don't Forget to Love Me, and how a few of those poems from a section titled Theories of Influence are specifically influenced by other poets and writers. The range of writers includes W.G. Sebald, Ron Padgett, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Alice (mom) Notley, June Jordan, John Yau, Fred Moten, and various others.
2025 marks the centennial of the birth of Kenneth Koch and this event is a part of the international celebrations scheduled for 2025. Kenneth Koch, who died in 2002, was one of the finest poets of the 20th century. With John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, this group formed the nucleus of the first generation of the New York School of Poetry. Koch’s fame came not only from his poetry, but from his innovative work as a teacher of poetry. Teaching graduate and undergraduate students, children in public schools, and senior citizens, his influence comes not only from his writing but from the generations of poets he taught, and the poets they taught and continue to teach. The presenters will reflect on Koch and the role he played in their artistic lives. These represent friends of Koch, family, and individuals who Koch influenced deeply. The same four presenters will read from Koch’s poetry, from the earliest exuberant and witty poems, for which Koch was first known, to the stunning final books, New Addresses and A Possible World, which confirmed Koch’s place as a 20th century master. There will also be time for audience members to reflect on Koch and their experiences of his work.
Focused on the sacredness and connectivity of water, this ekphrastic event is part short film screening, part immersive art exhibit, and part guided writing prompt. The first half of our journey will begin with a screening of the film(22mins), What About the Drinking Water?, an empowering story of Southern conservation and successful community action. Workshop participants will then be guided through a structured and approachable writing prompt based on Tiffany Westry Womack's film. For the second portion of this ekphrastic workshop, we'll explore connection and reflection as we write in response to a stunning water-themed immersive digital project by Liz Williams Trader, Mik Mitchell and Shani Kashani. This is a partnership between Houston and Asheville-based artists. We are meeting in New Orleans, and after Helene, all our artists now share an experience that many New Orleanians know well: ecological vulnerability and devastation. We gather with you to generate writing, yes, and also, something good and healing. This workshop is devoted to beauty, narratives of true community power, and to experiencing environmental joy. The workshop, lasting 1 hour and 50 minutes, is divided into two parts. Part I, the film-based portion (60-75 minutes), begins with a 10-minute introduction to the artists, followed by a 5-7 minute introduction to the film and an overview of the first writing prompt. The film screening and a community update from the director take 27 minutes, leading into a 25-minute guided writing prompt. Part II, the digital art portion (30-45 minutes), starts with a 5-minute introduction to the immersive digital artwork, followed by an 18-20 minute guided writing prompt. The workshop concludes with a 10-15 minute session for participants to share their work.
The APARTMENT Poetry high-rise has been online for twelve years and counting. To celebrate, we present a reading featuring some of APARTMENT's most illustrious and multitude-containing tenants. APARTMENT thanks you in advance for your attendance. As we're always saying: If you lived here, you'd be home by now.
Where would poetry be without delight? Without wonder? 5 Poets Laureate from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Kansas will talk about the importance of joy to poetry. They will share poems that embody joy, as well as share their laureate projects that focus on uplifting other through language, from wonder walks in nature while writing, to composing poems to praise for the people in our lives, to generating hope through creativity for incarcerated teens and adults.
Since its English publication, Danish experimentalist Inger Christensen’s alphabet (trans. Susanna Nied) has been a touchstone for environmentally minded poets in the U.S. A book of intersecting forms, alphabet is an abecedarian poetry series that uses the Fibonacci sequence—one of the so-called languages of nature—to determine line count from section to section, which lends itself to a spiralling and expansive poetics. The intersection of linguistic and mathematical sense-making systems emphasizes the book’s questions about the limits of sense as Christensen engages the senselessness of the atrocities of war and planetary destruction and makes a lyric plea for the existence and continuance of human and non-human lifeforms. The four poets on this panel build on Christensen’s work and engagement with ecological and sociopolitical concerns. Poets Carolyn Hembree, Kristi Maxwell, Sarah Rose Nordgren, and Kathy Wu will discuss their engagement with Christensen’s poetry and poethics then read some of their corresponding poems.
Poets sometimes use other artists' work as an entry point for addressing societal issues. Visual art can provide a way of triangulating trauma, for example, offering a necessary distance to look at the overwhelming, or provide a unique lens through which to reflect on an overwhelming subject. What ethical and artistic pitfalls must we be mindful of in adopting such strategies? How do we give voice to political upheaval without appropriating others' experiences? What is the role of privilege in having the distance and platform to speak about others who are silenced by history and/or oppression? How have aspects of 21st century media and political environments affected our conception of both ekphrasis and witness? Through short readings and discussion, Ariel Francisco, Brad Richard, Alina Stefanescu, and Andy Young will address these issues and others that may arise. Alina Stefanescu will moderate.
Given that the work of BIPOC writers is judged first as a political statement, then as an aesthetic object, this Form and (Dis)Content panel will explore the idea of exactly what makes for a political text. In light of the arch-conservative outcome of the recent national election, the diarists, essayists, and poets on this panel will discuss how their individual works often address, unpack, and disrupt our contemporary political climate in both overt and covert ways. What does it mean to write as an act of resistance precisely just now, and what does, should, and will such writing look like? Panelists include Rob Arnold, Geneve Chao, Tameca L Coleman, Kenning JP Garcia, and Roman Johnson, with introductory remarks by Rone Shavers.
This roundtable discussion brings together a group of five poets and translators whose work mines essential questions about time, memory, speculation, and practices of correspondence. Critical questions guiding our conversation will include: how can we, as poets, operate as cronistas–chroniclers and correspondents across languages and historiographies? How do we activate the ethics of deep time in our correspondence with the dead? How do memory and the imaginal operate in poetry to create a space of confluence between our psychic and material realities? How do we attune to the nonhuman, the parahuman, and other orders of beings typically excluded from human discourse, and what alternate modes of communication can enable us to transmit those encounters?
This panel will think about the work of translation as a source for poetry writing. Translation introduces a different kind of music into the writer’s ear – other melodies, other rhythms. Reading and writing translation loosens the conventional bindings of syntax. It reminds the poet how flexible language is and how it longs to be played with in unusual ways. We’re interested in misunderstanding as a method of writing, interested in mistranslation as a way of generating new images (Moses with horns on his head!). We’re interested in thinking about the way that translation exposes the myths of singularity or originality and instead presents the poem as arising out of communal complexity. In the 20th and 21st centuries, translation has had a particularly wild and salutary influence on American poetry, and it is more important than ever to discover, make room for, and listen to voices outside this country and its self-regarding concerns. New Orleans is an ideal place to think about translation because of the city’s long and untamed history of the mixing of languages, musics, habits of talk: a gorgeous example of how the best sounds and images come out of the collaborative linguistic étouffée. Each participant will speak briefly so we can have ample time for questions and conversation with panel-attendees.
mercury firs is an online journal of poetry, text, and whatevfir else— with a special interest in translation, hybrid texts, & 'ecologically-minded' work. Founded in 2022, published biannually, and chapbooks forthcoming, mercury firs aims to foreground innovative, novel, and exploratory work engaging dirt/flora/trash/fungus/non-human entanglements, porous boundaries of languages, dream/waking planes, & etc.,. to expand the thinkable… inside the outside…. This reading, hosted by mf editor and New Orleans-based poet, Ian U Lockaby, will bring together contributors from the first three years of the journal. Readers will include poets and translators— Alexis Almeida, Olivia Muenz, Matt Broaddus, Cecily Chen, Elijah Jackson, olga mikolaivna, Cleo Qian, Emily Bark Brown, Eric Tyler Benick, and Chloe Bliss Snyder.
