Catherine Barnett's new book, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Greywolf Press, 2024) has arrived! It was such a pleasure to see her poem "Hyacinth" in The New Yorker. Come hear Catherine read on Sunday, April 21 from 4:00pm-5:00pm at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival this weekend and grab your copy!
Dates for the 2025 Poetry Festival will be announced in January 2025!
About the Poetry Festival
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 Tracy K. Smith, Anne Carson, Nicole Sealy, Jos Charles, Eduardo C. Corral, and many others. Our festival includes readings, panel discussions, generative sessions, craft talks, and more! We hope to see you there.
In 2024,the Poetry Festival ran from April 19 to April 21 and featured readings, craft talks, and generative sessions with Catherine Barnett, Haleh Liza Gafori, Marie Howe, Joanna Klink, Eugenia Leigh, Dennis Nurkse, Maya C. Popa, Afaa M. Weaver, Shelley Wong, among others.
Our capstone event was a celebration of the late poet Jean Valentine, who was a beloved faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for many years and was co-hosted by Alice James Books.
For more information, please email us at slcpoetryfest@gmail.com or follow our social media pages (@slcpoetryfest).
Connect with Us
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Please check our festival's book sales hours to get the latest published books from our poets!
Please note that on Saturday evening, after the Jean Valentine Celebration event, we will have a book sell of Light me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (April 2024), with Alice James Books.
Time to meet this year's poetry festival student contest winners-- our grad poetry student Anushka Paresh (pic.1) and undergrad poetry student Naomi Marx (pic.2)!
Anushka Nagarmath is a writer and poet from Mumbai, India. Their poems have previously appeared in The Margins, How To Share The World: A Feminist Anthology, Liminality: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry and Lucent Dreaming, amongst others. They love experimenting with form in their work and believe that poetry can be shaped like anything, be it a receipt or a math problem. They can be found @anumagicshop on Instagram.
Naomi Marx is an undergrad poetry student at Sarah Lawrence and a managing editor of Love & Squalor literary magazine. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in Rochester, New York, she has been writing about nearby bodies of water and faraway clusters of stars for most of her life. Naomi’s work can be found online at love-squalor.com
Naomi will be reading at 7 pm on Friday the 19th before Eugenia Leigh's reading, and Anushka will be reading at 6 pm on Sunday the 21st before Afaa Weaver's reading, please come to hear from our talented students!
Our Schedule is here! For more detailed info of poets and events, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio, and don't forget to RSVP~
On the evening of Saturday, April 20th, in honor of the publication of Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (April 2024), poets, writers, and friends of the late Jean Valentine will share their work in conversation with Valentine's poems, co-sponsored by Alice James Books and the 2024 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Readers include Catherine Barnett, Myra Goldberg, Marie Howe, D. Nurkse, and Victoria Redel, with introductions by Executive Director and publisher of Alice James Books Carey Salerno.
Books will be sold after the event through Womrath Bookstore. Please visit our Eventbrite paged linked in bio for more info.
From Alice James Books:
Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 13th book of poetry was Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. In 2014 she was given an award for exceptional accomplishment in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was awarded Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2017.
She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
Jean Valentine died on December 29, 2020, in New York, NY. She was 86.
It's our honor to introduce our final faculty reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Afaa Weaver--
Afaa M. Weaver: B.A. University of the State of New York (1986) M.A. Brown University (1987). In 2023, Afaa received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Previously known as Michael S. Weaver, he spent fifteen years (1970- 85) in his native Baltimore as a factory worker, and served in the military (1970-73) as an Army Reservist. His sixteenth collection of poetry is A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen Press 2023). He was first faculty at Cave Canem in 1996-98, and in 1998, named its first elder.
Please visit our Eventbrite page (linked in bio) for the detailed schedules and RSVP!
This year, D. Nurkse will also join our poetry festival as one of our faculty readers--
D. Nurkse is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS (Knopf, 2022), He's the recipient of the N.E.A., the Guggenheim, Tanne, and Whiting foundations, and the Literature Award from th4 American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other venues, and has been translated into a dozen languages. He has also taught at Rikers Island, written on human rights, and served a term on the board of directors of Amnesty Internation USA.
For more information and RSVP, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
It's our pleasure to present Marie Howe as one of our faculty readers of the 2024 Poetry Festival--
Marie Howe: BS, University of Windsor, Canada. MFA, Columbia University. Author of four books of poetry, the most recent Magdalene (WW Norton and Company). Howe was New York State Poet Laureate from 2012-2016. She is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. She has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, and other magazines. Her New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Norton in 2024. SLC, 1993–
Please visit our Eventbrite page (linked in bio) for more information and RSVP!
Please join us in sending our warm welcome to Haleh Liza Gafori, who will be reading and giving a craft talk at the 2024 Poetry Festival--
Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, performance artist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has deepened her connection to her ancestral culture through singing and translating the work of various Persian poets, most notably the poetry of the 13th-century sage and mystic Rumi.
For more information, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio~
It's our delight to introduce our next featured reader of the 2024 Poetry Festival, Shelley Wong--
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. She lives in San Francisco.
For more information, please visit our Eventbrite page linked in bio!