…missing the pastures? here’s a look back at some magical candid moments, as seen through the lens of our fabulous festival photographer @swampgorgon 📸 🌾
The Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival takes place in April each year and is the largest, open, student-run Poetry Festival in New York. Since 2003, we have been dedicated to the celebration of contemporary poetry and the creation of community around the art form. Previously, we have welcomed poets such as Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Anne Carson, Kaveh Akbar, Tracy K. Smith, Donika Kelly, Claudia Rankine, Li-Young Lee, SLC’s very own Marie Howe, among many others. Our festival includes readings, panel discussions, generative sessions, craft talks, and more! We hope to see you there.
Free and open to the public, this year our festival will run from April 17 - 19th here on campus! For more information, please contact us at slcpoetryfest@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram (@slcpoetryfest).
Schedule of Events- coming soon!
Instagram slcpoetryfest
Some words from our festival kick-off last night in the Slonim living room! Our Saturday line-up is well underway. Come join us!
We are SO CLOSE to festival time! So I thought I’d share some guidelines for our upcoming poetry open mic on Friday evening!
The reading will begin at 7pm in the Slonim living room after BEN PURKERT’S reading and a brief reception.
A sign-up sheet will be available upon arrival and slots will be on a first come, first serve basis.
All poets are welcome and are given 3 minutes each to read.
*If you’re like us and can’t wait another day for the fun to begin, join us in Slonim TONIGHT for the Lumina Journal 21st issue launch party at 6:30! It’s a hybrid event, go to our story for details or find out more @lumina_journal ✨
(psst, many of the PoFest committee members are also staff at Lumina, so we’d all love to see you there 😉)
Announcing the WINNERS of our SLC PoFest Student Reader Contest!!! You’ll be able to hear their fantastic work before some of our guest poets during the festival. Congratulations to our talented winners, and thanks to everyone who submitted work!
Another special thank you to our judges, @leah.umansky and @ohreallyrio ! Catch them both next weekend doing a joint reading on Saturday!
Here it is: our PoFest 2025 event schedule!!! We’re so excited to welcome all these amazing poets, and all of YOU to our campus!
We’ve got more exciting announcements coming up as we count down the days to the festival, so keep your eyes PEELED 👀
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.
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!
Hope everyone had a fantastic weekend! It’s almost April, and we’re ushering in spring with another festival announcement! We’re so lucky to share that SOPHIE CABOT BLACK will be joining us for several events at this year’s festival! Sophie will give a craft talk and join a very special panel (more details to come!!) on Saturday, followed by a reading on Sunday, as well as a conversation with none other than MARIE HOWE!
We’re feeling so grateful lately for all the amazing work we get to share with you in just under a month! Stay tuned for more!
Sophie Cabot Black’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Tin House, among other journals. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, among them Best American Poetry, Fatherhood, Doggerel, and Poems About Horses, anthologies from the Everyman’s Library Series. Her three books from Graywolf Press are The Misunderstanding of Nature, which received the Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Descent, which earned the Connecticut Book Award and was nominated for the 2005 Colorado Book Award, and The Exchange. Her newest collection is titled Geometry of the Restless Herd (Copper Canyon). She has been awarded several fellowships, including at the MacDowell Colony, the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute, and appears at national literary festivals such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival and the Dodge Poetry Festival. Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and continues to teach at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She holds degrees from Marlboro College and Columbia University. She was born in New York City, the daughter of a Broadway producer and an opera producer, raised on a small farm in New England, and currently divides her time between New England, New York, and Colorado.
Marie Howe is the former poet laureate of New York. The recipient of fellowships from the Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
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.
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.