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.
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.
Free and open to the public, this year our festival will run from April 25 - 27th here on campus! For more information, please contact us at slcpoetryfest@gmail.com or follow our social media pages (@slcpoetryfest).
Instagram slcpoetryfest
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.
Woohoo, another poet announcement as we approach the first weekend of SPRING! 🌾 @allytitus will be joining us on Saturday April 26th for a poetry reading!!! We’re getting excited to roll out more announcements and updates so stay tuned!
Allison Titus has written three books of poems, a novel, and several chapbooks. Her newest book is called HIGH LONESOME.
Her honors include poetry fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, and the Donaldson Writer-in-Residence program at William & Mary, and her work has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, The Believer Magazine and Ninth Letter, among other places.
She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE:
Revisioning the Animal in 21st Century Poetry, a collection of writing slash manifesto that centers the nonhuman animal’s agency, consciousness and creaturehood.
She works as a freelance copy editor and teaches in the low-res MFA program at New England College.
What an absolute pleasure it is to welcome @hala.n.alyan to our 2025 lineup!! Hala will give a poetry reading on the evening of Sunday, April 27th.
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, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists’ City, and 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, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Stay tuned as we churn out more introductions and updates for the festival🐑
Another guest announcement as April quickly approaches! We’re thrilled to kick off the festival this year with a reading from @samsax1 🥳 They’ll also be our gracious host for the open mic on Friday evening! Can’t wait to see you all there….
Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They’re the author of Yr Dead, Long-listed for The National Book Award and PIG, named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They’re also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.
It’s time for another exciting announcement!! @mayacpopa will be returning to PoFest this year for a panel and poetry craft talk!! We’re so lucky to host such a masterful poet and teacher.
Dr. Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of
Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry and a finalist for the Levis Reading Prize. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She is previously the author of three chapbooks published in the US and the UK. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU.
Get ready for more announcements and updates soon as we get closer to April…🐑
SLC PoFest has some AMAZING generative sessions lined up this year by our talented MFA faculty!! Keep a lookout for more announcements next week, we’re so excited to see you next month :)
It’s finally time to start announcing our guests for PoFest’25!
We’re beyond thrilled to welcome back HALEH LIZA GAFORI for a generative session, as well as a reading from her newest collection of Rumi translations, WATER, coming to bookshelves just in time for the festival!!
HALEH LIZA GAFORI is a NY-born performance artist, translator, vocalist, poet, and musician of Iranian descent. Her acclaimed book of translations, GOLD, Poems by Rumi (2022), and her 2nd volume of translations WATER (2025) are both published by New York Review Books. A 2024 MacDowell fellow, and recipient of a 2023 NYSCA grant, Gafori has created a cross-media performance pieced based on the books weaving stories, translations and song sung in both Persian and English and has presented her work via performances, lectures, and workshops, at institutions such as Lincoln Center, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, the Academy of American Poets, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bradford Literary Fest. Haleh lives in Brooklyn and is currently working on her own book of poems and essays.
Meet our graduate judge for the PoFest Student Reader Contest!
Rio Cortez is a poet and the New York Times bestselling author of picture books The ABCs of Black History, The River Is My Ocean, and The ABCs of Women’s History. Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the Pen America Open Book Award.
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, she now lives, writes, and works in Harlem.
The deadline for the contest is at MIDNIGHT tonight, so get your submissions in today!
Meet our undergraduate judge for the PoFest Student Reader Contest!
Leah Umansky is the author of three collections, most recently, OF TYRANT, Word Works Books 2024. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work has been featured in, PBS The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, and American Poetry Review.
She is at work on her fourth book of poems, a collection on joy, love and wonder currently entitled Ordinary Splendor, a hybrid-memoir, Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, fertility, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic, and a YA memoir, Oceans Apart. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
The deadline for the contest is at MIDNIGHT tonight, so get your submissions in today!!