The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Many poets are drawn to write about place, including natural landscapes, distant homelands, and specific neighborhoods. What happens when a place is in flux, constantly changing? Or what if the poet’s relationship to place changes? Panelists Sonia Aggarwal, Mary Kovaleski Byrnes, Kiran Maharaj, and Heather Wright will discuss writing through evolving place. Our panelists will interrogate issues of how writing is shaped by and responds to place as it changes physically, through memory, or through found memory. They will consider the intricacies of how place is both destroyed and created through the physical world and the poet’s imagined world, what that means for the poet’s relationship to place, and how the poet locates themselves physically, imaginatively, and literally. Audience members will also be invited to contribute through discussion and questions. This panel will be moderated by Livia Meneghin.