On Saturday, April 18, 2026, at 7:30 pm NOPF will stage a public second line in the form of a jazz funeral mourning the death of democracy. The second line will begin on the St. Claude Avenue neutral ground in front of the New Orleans Healing Center (2372 St. Claude Ave.) and proceed on the neutral ground toward Siberia (2227 St. Claude Ave.), where the festival’s Saturday Night Feature Event will take place at 8pm.
Small Press Fair (10:00 AM – 3:30 PM): Browse and buy from dozens of independent publishers, zines, and literary journals in the Grand Hall of the New Orleans Healing Center. Meet the makers, discover new poets, and support independent publishing culture.
Small Press Fair (10:00 AM – 5:00 PM): Browse and buy from dozens of independent publishers, zines, and literary journals in the Grand Hall of the New Orleans Healing Center. Meet the makers, discover new poets, and support independent publishing culture.
Small Press Fair (10:00 AM – 5:00 PM): Browse and buy from dozens of independent publishers, zines, and literary journals in the Grand Hall of the New Orleans Healing Center. Meet the makers, discover new poets, and support independent publishing culture.
New this year: the Small Press Fair Happy Hour (Friday, 4:00–5:00 PM) in the Grand Hall. Nothing else will be happening during that time, so everybody’s invited to hang out, sip a drink, snack, and mix it up with poets and publishers. ~~Buy a book. Drink for free.~~ ; )
Across a little over two years, 16(ish) poets have participated in one way or another in a collaborative composition process and a performance resulting from that process for the online series called "It's Copperhead Season." The collaborating pairs are sorta-randomly matched and given a few months to share ideas, swap poems, construct something new together, and ultimately perform some live document of their writerly connection(s).
Expressing the desire and need for a poetics that has a political horizon beyond that of the lyric as mere song of the individualized bourgeois subjectivity, Anne Waldman writes: "Documentary is our new hope. / We will fill the ranks." This roundtable will feature poets discussing the theoretical and practical aspects of working in archival and documentary modes. These four poets will offer artist-talks then hold space for an open discussion testifying to the potentials of documentary poetry as well as testing the limits of archival poetics.
Five poet-curators, Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn (Tender Buttons Press/Torn Page), Jennifer Firestone (Poetry on the Porch), Philip Good (Poetry State Forest), Evelyn Reilly (OtherWords) will discuss their visions and aesthetics on the curation of unique poetry readings in non-traditional spaces. They will address what makes for a compelling poetry reading experience that is accessible to different communities, and how such readings can in turn develop new forms of social connections around poetry, ranging from the intimate to the expansive.
Disruption exists everywhere. When first hearing the word, we may think of it as stopping something that is supposed to keep going. What if disruption could be a wake up call, an invitation, a poem, an interjection to violence whether physical or inside our minds, what if it is something that helps draw attention to something important, that breaks us out of our routine thinking or boredom?
This roundtable gathers five artists whose work enacts visionary practice not as transcendence but as deep listening—to language, to the past, to archaeological time, to presences human and otherwise that dominant culture has rendered inaudible.