The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Western Mass creatives inspire with a braided session of poetry, art making, and stories of activism. With a ceasefire cento woven from Palestinian poetry, lyric poems inspired by Jewish resistance, healing, and anti-Zionism, and the doves and cranes of PeaceBirds flying out of the Asian and Abrahamic traditions, we offer creative sustenance from and to those doing the messy, necessary work of change-making.

As they read poems of Palestinian poets and their own original work used in protest and advocacy, the poet/artist-activist facilitators will demonstrate how poetry CAN change hearts and minds. Throughout the session, participants will write lines of poetry that inspire them from the readings onto paper that they will learn how to fold into birds. All will leave inspired to take their own poetry into the public sphere and contribute to the work of peace, justice, and sustainability.