🔎 Free and open to the public, you can register for each event you’d like to attend via the Eventbrite links in our bio.
The 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival
Free and open to the public, this year our festival will happen on April 21st - 23rd, here on campus! We are proud to feature readings, a panel, craft talks, and generative sessions with Hala Alyan, Nickole Brown, Claudia Cortese, Richie Hofmann, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Donika Kelly, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Cecily Parks, R.A. Villanueva and more. For more information please email us at slcpoetryfest@gmail.com or follow our social media pages, and RSVP through our eventbrite.
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✏️ PSA: deadline extension!
You now have until March 15th to submit your works for consideration. Find the link in our bio. Happy writing!

We’re excited to reveal our final faculty reader for the 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival!
Sally Wen Mao is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, 2023), and the debut fiction collection Ninetails (Penguin Books). She is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
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🔎 Don’t forget to RSVP via Eventbrite! Find the link in our bio.

We are proud to present our next faculty reader for the 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival!
R. A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
It’s time to reveal our first SLC faculty reader!
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel “Salt Houses,” winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, “The Arsonists’ City,” was published in March 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently “The Twenty-Ninth Year.” Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times Book Review and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
There’s still time to submit your works for consideration at the link in our bio 📨
And finally, we have the honor of presenting our last 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival reader!
Claudia Cortese is a queer poet, essayist, and educator. Her first full-length book, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), won Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, and The Offing, among others, and her poems have won awards from Baltimore Review, Mississippi Review, and RHINO Poetry. In 2022, Cortese published a peer-reviewed article that examines the visual activism of book covers by fat-identifying poets, and in 2018, she received an OUTstanding Faculty Ally of the Year certificate from the LGBTQ+ Center at Montclair State University. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio’s Rust Belt and lives in New Jersey.
It’s time to announce our next esteemed reader for the 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival!
Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. Her poems have, among other places, appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, Poetry International, Gulf Coast, and The Best American Poetry 2017. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. Currently, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she periodically volunteers at three different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. Her work speaks in a queer, Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative.
We are pleased to welcome our next talented reader for the 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival!
Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is A Hundred Lovers, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. The recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships, he teaches at Stanford University.
Please join us in giving a warm welcome to our next reader for the 2023 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival!
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of the debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. She is also the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019), which received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Colorado Book Award. Nguyen's next poetry collection, Root Fractures, is forthcoming from Scribner in early 2024. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, & PEN America.