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Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival

A Message from the Poetry Festival's Student Organizers

Friends, poets, dear members of our festival community:

With heavy hearts, we announce the official cancellation of the 2020 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival.

We are devastated to lose this opportunity to celebrate poetry with all of you, but we recognize the necessity of responding to the unprecedented COVID-19 health crisis with unprecedented measures. As we all focus on our well-being, we send wishes for good health and hope to you all.

We are considering the possibility of rescheduling for the fall, and putting together some virtual community events, which we hope you'll join us for remotely during the festival weekend. Please stay tuned to our socialmedia in the coming weeks for more information.

In the meantime, we know you'll keep writing, reading, and supporting beloved poets everywhere as we weather this crisis together, and embrace the continuous work of putting it all into words.

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What a wild ride it has been. When KT and I were selected as directors for the 2020 Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival, we envisioned multi-disciplinary programming, delicious shared meals, energetic readings, and our Saturday night dinner with the visiting poets. Above all, we envisioned a space that was radically accessible and radically caring; an event where our people, our community, would grow together. It truly broke my heart when we had to cancel the event after our committee’s months of planning was beginning to come together. But we knew that caring for poetry means protecting the health of poets and readers. I am so grateful that we were able to compensate our fantastic performers, and that we were able to put on some virtual events this past weekend. While this was not the festival our readers, committee members, and larger community had hoped for, we still were able to come together around writing and share space. My greatest wish is that we were able to make Rosebud Ben-Oni, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Cynthia Cruz, Cornelius Eady, Shira Erlichman, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, John Murillo, Roger Reeves, Paul Tran, Afaa Weaver, and Rachel Zucker feel supported and respected: and that we made the past directors of this festival, our school administration, and our current MFA students as proud of us as I am proud and grateful to share a degree with them. It is easy to consider poetry a luxury in times like these, but I know that poetry has been integral to my survival of traumas large and small, and I know that all of the poets who read or were slated to read have and will continue to help us survive. It’s been a joy and honor to serve as the co-Director with KT Herr, who has made me a better and more conscientious artist and organizer. It has been a privilege to work with Paige, Amparo, and our graduate and undergraduate committee members: thank you for your trust and your time. I hope to continue creating space to celebrate the revolutionary acts of witness and vulnerability, and I hope to see all of you thrive in the world to come after this, which will be kinder for your being in it -Anna Binkovitz

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Beloved poets and kindred spirits, I suspect it may be some time before I'm able to adequately express the pleasure and excitement of planning for this festival, or the answering grief Anna and I have felt as we took the necessary steps to dismantle our carefully and joyously imagined weekend. Against a backdrop of global crisis, a poetry festival seems a small thing to lose. I'm grateful that I and most of my family and friends remain in good health. I have a safe place to live and resources to see to my basic needs. In that sense, I'm very lucky, and I offer silent thanks for my luck at least once a day. But at least once a day I also forget, and then remember all over again, that the weekend of community and celebration we worked so hard to plan will never come to pass, and I'm overcome with deep regret. In these moments, I'm struck by the thought that we will all need to be more attentive, in the months ahead, to fostering community in the face of separation, and to remembering celebration during a time of mourning and upheaval. The world will need our abilities, as poets and lovers of poetry, to bear witness and offer the balm of recognition and shared experience. I know that, in spite of the circumstances, we did our best to react to the needs of our community in the midst of a suddenly shifting reality. Both Anna and I will carry what we've learned from this experience forward to serve our future communities, wherever those may be. I echo Anna's gratitude for the dedication of our committee, our classmates, our program, and our featured poets, whose words continue to carry us from afar. And of course, I'm grateful to Anna, whose support and partnership made our planning feel effortless, and our work feel like play. I'm already looking forward to attending the next Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, as a guest. -KT Herr * full statement is available at The Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival Facebook page*

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What poems are you grateful for? Who’s work has sustained, invigorated, and opened you? Share these poems today with #SLC gratitude mic and tag us!!

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Next up is an amazing poet, musician & legend... • Poet/Playwright/Songwriter Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is the author of several poetry collections including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; and Brutal Imagination. He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, and is Professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton.

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We are so excited to introduce the next guest for PoFest! Pssst — head over to @fourwaybooks to snag a copy of her latest collection 💖 • Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, Ruin, and Dregs. Her sixth, Guidebooks for the Dead, is forthcoming in spring of 2020 by Four Way Books. Steady Diet of Nothing, her first novella, is also forthcoming from Four Way Books. Disquieting:Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays, was published by Book*hug in spring of 2019 and her second collection of critical essays, The Melancholia of Class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University.

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Hi everyone! We're sure you've been keeping a close eye on updates from #AWP20, as have we. Here's the scoop: we, this year's co-directors, have made the difficult decision to sit out this year's AWP conference, for a host of reasons. However! A few intrepid and beloved representatives from Sarah Lawrence College will still be attending the conference this year, so if you're at the book fair and you'd like to snag some swag, we'll have coasters, pencils, and beautiful broadside postcards featuring poems from this year's poets available at booth #1131! (We hear there might be some awesome candy, too...) This has been an exhausting few days, and our hearts go out to everyone who has had to make difficult decisions, and especially to those already struggling directly with this pandemic. We're sending wishes for good health, comfort, and joy to all our friends near and far, at AWP and elsewhere. Be well, travel safe, and we can't wait to celebrate with you in April! If you haven't already, please check out #AWPvirtualbooksale on Twitter, where you can find a plethora of information and online sales for this season's most delicious new books, including a few by our featured poets! Much gratitude, - KT & Anna

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Next up on our spotlight 🌟 Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice. He writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. He is the author of three collections of poetry; Felon (W.W. Norton), Bastards of the Reagan Era (Stahlecker Selections, 2015) and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010). His memoir, A Question of Freedom, was published in 2009. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife and their two sons. Photo: Mamadi Doumbouya.

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It’s March!!! 🌺 Welcome to day 1 of our features on the amazing poets that will be reading at PoFest 🌸 we’ll be posting a feature every couple of days, so stay tuned! • Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from NYFA and CantoMundo. Her poem “Poet Wresting with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online.

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Introducing our second judge of the student reader contest! 😻 Leah Umansky is the author of two full length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), and Domestic Uncertainties (2013), among others. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Guernica, Bennington Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Poetry International, The New York Times, Rhino, Pleiades.

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REMINDER: The student reader contest is still open for submissions! We are delighted to introduce one of our judges for the contest, Traci Brimhall. Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Believer, Kenyon Review, and The New Republic. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the 2012 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, and the 2008-2009 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD). She works as an Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

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HOLY WOW LOOK AT THIS LINEUP! Join these fantastic poets and musicians April 24-26 for our poetry festival.

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Submissions open FEB 1 for our student reader contest! Submit for a chance to share the stage with one of our featured readers (psst, the lineup will be announced SO SOON)!

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