2025 Poetry Festival

Here we go again! Our last poet introduction for the festival is the incredible ARDA COLLINS. Arda will be joining us on Saturday for a poetry reading, you won’t wanna miss it!

Some big final announcements next week, including the official FESTIVAL SCHEDULE and announcing winners to our Student Reader Contest!! April is flying by and we can’t wait for you all to join us on campus.

Arda Collins is the author of It Is Daylight (2009), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and a recipient of the Sarton Award in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her collection of poems Star Lake was published in 2022 by The Song Cave. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She received an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she has also been a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry, and a doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Denver. She has also taught in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. Apart from her work as a writer and teacher, she has also been an associate producer on the PBS documentary series Frontline and American Experience. Collins’s courses include the Intermediate Poetry Workshop and Introduction to Creative Writing. She has previously taught the Advanced Poetry Workshop as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence.

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Announcing our headlining event of the festival!! Sophie Cabot Black, Victoria Redel, Dennis Nurkse, and Maya C. Popa are meeting to form the panel of our dreams discussing the pastoral in poetry. You won’t wanna miss this :)
We’re almost ready to share some final announcements and publish our FESTIVAL SCHEDULE! Keep an eye out this week for more!

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What an absolute treat for Caroline Bird to join us from all the way across the Atlantic!!! How lucky are we?! Caroline will give a poetry reading on Saturday, as well as a very special generative writing session with none other than @mayacpopa ! We’ve got so much more to share, including a very special surprise about some mail arriving to us this week 🧐 stay tuned!!

Caroline Bird is an English poet and playwright. Bird’s debut poetry collection LOOKING THROUGH LETTERBOXES was published in 2002 when she was just 15 years old. Her subsequent poetry collections are TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP (2006), WATERING CAN (2009), THE HAT-STAND UNION (2013), IN THESE DAYS OF PROHIBITION (2017), shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and THE AIR YEAR (2020) which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and was shortlisted for both the Costa Prize and the Polari Prize. Her Selected Poems, ROOKIE, was published by Carcanet in Spring 2022. Bird’s latest collection, AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE was published in June 2024. Her poems have been extensively anthologized in journals including Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, The North and Poetry London, and she was one of the official poets for the 2012 London Olympics, with her poem “The Fun Palace” permanently displayed at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Other poetry accolades include the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award (1999 and 2000,) an Eric Gregory Award (2002,) the Dylan Thomas Prize (shortlisted twice in 2008 and 2010) and the prestigious Cholmondeley Award in 2023 for ‘sustained excellence across a body of work.’ As a workshop-leader and mentor, Bird is deeply committed to fostering literary talent. She regularly leads poetry workshops and teaches at the Arvon Foundation.

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We’re so excited to add a THIRD generative session by our SLC faculty to the schedule! Victoria Redel will be leading a generative writing session on Saturday, and later will join a very special panel that we can’t wait to tell you about. ;) Time is winding down before the festival and we’ve still got loads more to share with you, so be on the lookout for posts and stories in the coming weeks!

Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise (2022) and the novel Before Everything. Victoria’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

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