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!
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
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!!
🚨 CONTEST ALERT 🚨
Attention Sarah Lawrence college students!! Submit to SLC Poetry Festival’s Student Reader Contest and get the opportunity to read your work before one of our guest poets during the festival!
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
•This contest is open to all current undergrad/graduate students at Sarah Lawrence College.
•Send 1-3 original poems (or up to 5 pages of poetry) to slcpoetryfest@gmail.com. For graduate students, please use the subject line “Graduate Poetry Contest Submission.” For undergraduate students, please use the subject line “Undergraduate Poetry Contest Submission.”
•Submit your work in a single document and add your name, email, and title(s) of your poem(s) to the cover page of your submission. Do NOT include your name anywhere else in your submission.
•Poems should be submitted by midnight on Thursday, February 20th, 2025. Winners will be notified by April 15th.
Good luck to all our submitters and dm/email us if you have questions about the contest!
Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival is BACK! We missed you!
We’re so excited to share all we’ve been planning for this year’s festival. Keep an eye out this spring for announcements about guest readers, workshops, contests and MORE!
The festival will take place April 25th-27th, 2025 in Bronxville, NY. 🌾
To all those whose labor and imagination carried the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival forward another bright year, we're so grateful. Special thanks to MFA Director, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Assistant MFA Director, Maddie Mori, Festival Co-Directors, Brittany Deininger & Xiaoyang Cheng, Ellie Laabs and Joshua Leonard for your daily support, Shyla Smith and events staff, student poetry contest winners and introducers, our incredible guest and faculty poets, Alice James Books, Womrath Bookshop, and our donors who keep the festival free and open to the public. See you next year!
“But I was made for this: Listening: ‘Lightness wouldn’t last if it wasn’t used up on the lyre.’” – Jean Valentine
What an incredible culminating day to the 2024 Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival! Thank you to all our participating poets: Catherine Barnett, Haleh Liza Gafori, Marie Howe, Joanna Klink, Eugenia Leigh, D. Nurkse, Maya C. Popa, Victoria Redel, Carey Salerno, Afaa M. Weaver, and Shelley Wong. The 2024 festival is dedicated to Jean Valentine.
Thank you to all who came out this weekend! As a parting gift, please enjoy the fruits of your labor / the labor of all our poets & participants bold enough to “drop a line” & create this poem together over the past 3 days. ✍️💛✨
[gently edited/compiled by @elliegoldlaabs ]
thank you @mariehowe77 for such a wonderful reading yesterday. what an absolute treat.
Generative sessions were packed with inspired poets yesterday. Thank you to Dennis Nurkse and Maya C. Popa for your brilliant teaching and deep listening. This is why we do this festival!
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!