The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Explore the allure of the witch archetype and its resonance with personal agency and outsider perspectives. Leaders in the magical writing community unveil their journey, showcasing how practices like automatic writing, tarot, animism, and shadow work fuel creative expression and experimentation. From spell books to astrology columns, from page to stage, they traverse literary realms, infusing their work with their own personal magic. This panel includes performance, interaction, and discussion of craft (witchy and literary!). Come revel in the magic and find new keys to unlock your most potent writing.

The everyday objects we hold close and use intimately carry a poetic imprint of emotional experience.

Our Hands Upon is a roving visual poetry event exploring this idea. Think of your favorite scarf, one you’ve wrapped, draped, cried into, sweated on, and tied around, and think of the poems you’ve left in its threads. Picture the emotional stains left on the aprons and skirts of the women involved in the Salem witch-hunt.

Alexis Fedorjaczenko will be showing and sharing handkerchief poems and a poem-apron made with text from the original documents of the Salem witch-hunt. Handkerchief poem samples will be given out while they last.

Join Alexis in St. Peter's Church on Saturday morning, and throughout the festival weekend wherever you might find her, for conversations about poetic textiles, historical poetry, reuse of textual materials, hand printing, and the project’s connections to contemporary experience.

This panel will explore the life and work of the landmark Massachusetts poet Sylvia Plath through radical new critical approaches, including trans masculinity, intimate partner violence, motherhood, burnt and missing texts, and the metaphysics of place and location.

What cues can poets take from the remarkable underground pathways ignited by trees, fungi, and other species? The poets, editors, and organizers on this panel will discuss how, working outside of established power structures in precarious times and spaces, we can connect with allies and advocates—and how these relationships affect the work itself. Literature has a Wood Wide Web, and we can tap it.

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.

Each writer/artist on this panel reaches back into the worlds and stories of myth and folklore to interrogate these narratives' silences, harms, and omissions. We work with these materials, knowing full well that they have historically been used to reinforce oppressive systems of empire, patriarchy, whiteness, and misogyny. Rather than hold these stories up as unimpeachable or as a means of gatekeeping or control, we aim to create novel points of access into these stories as we claim agency as narrators & reinvent myths in our own ways.

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.

Four poets will share their approaches to poems with fresh and humorous takes on pop culture and modern life. Jess Yuan (Slow Render, Airlie 2024), Yena Purmasir (Viraha, Game Over Books 2022), Otto Vock, and Alejandro Lucero (Sapello Son, Bull City Press 2024) will read from their collections and share new work. These poets reflect a range of approaches in using poetic craft to illuminate the joys and messiness of living in the world today. In this reading, poets will explore how the art of lyric can be closely aligned with the art of humor. How can crafting a poem be like crafting a joke? How can a visceral poem hit hard like a punchline? What’s the best way to introduce Lady Gaga in a sonnet? This reading explores how our idea of poetics can be expanded by weaving together and borrowing language from the internet, movies, music, sports, advertising, and beyond. Join us for a reading with fresh perspectives, witty insights, and delightfully relatable poems!

In this revelatory conversation, two poets, and their poet interlocutor, explore the layered realities of slavery’s archives and what they tell us about the enslaved as well as a collective American history. From an inherited oral slave narrative and plantation ledgers to a compelling Reconstruction-era diary, this panel will address the tough historical realities of narrative control, archival silences, inherited trauma, and the present-day residue of institutional American slavery. Poets Artress Bethany White and Lauren Russell will share poems from their respective collections on the topic, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) and Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), while poet Nicole Terez Dutton author of If One of Us Should Fall (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), curates the conversational flow.

Writing about grief can be a literary exorcism. The completed poem, or book, becomes a vessel, an alchemical object. Betrayal, illness, violence, loss, and the deaths of those both known and unknown to us don’t disappear. Instead, the grief lives outside the body in the poem, the shellac or dry ice that preserves what’s passed. Grief can be a trigger for re-examining our lived experiences, and writing about grief becomes a portal to self-discovery, a way to navigate after loss. This will be a conversation among poets familiar with the way poetry mitigates and transforms grief into something we can revisit, a monument, a cemetery, an ever-burning flame.

"...a dictated thought with the absence of any control exercised by reason” André Breton (1896–1966) first manifesto of the Surrealist movement

While André Breton (1896–1966) initiated the Surrealist movement with his first Manifesto of Surrealism, surreal elements in poetry and writing techniques associated with this art movement have always been integral to poetry. Breton, as a writer, was influenced by Freud, with whom he worked briefly, and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. The movement ignited within the context of the aftermath of World War I, in response to the unprecedented scale of killing achieved through mechanized violence. The Surrealist plan and hope were radical: in a society that glorified reason, surrealist art would defamiliarize the status quo and thereby prompt people to question their values and incite social change. How does a poet break from the status quo they’ve inherited through their poetic tradition, let loose from self-censorship, and still write meaningfully from the cusp between wakefulness and sleep?

In our present moment of global climate change and violence, the poets on this panel share the Surrealists’ goals to contribute to a more in touch and sustainable humanity. Surrealist techniques include automatic writing, writing from constraints, trance poetics, synesthesia, collage, dream writing, and free association, and each of the panelists forefronts one or more these elements in their poetry. This event will consist of three components: a poetry reading by the panelists, an interactive discussion with the audience about Surrealist writing techniques, and a mini-workshop in which audience members will have the opportunity to experiment with surreal writing via prompts offered by the panelists.

How does darkness influence our art, our prayer, our perspective? Given the explosion of artificial light over the past 150 years, how do we navigate the loss of darkness and what—exactly—are we losing? In this panel, we’ll explore ways to enrich our creative practices through mindful engagement with darkness, literal and metaphorical. We’ll also explore the profound effects artificial light has on the natural world. We hope to converse across theology, ecology, poetry and non-fiction, touching on such topics as winter solstice, via negativa, midnight prayer (‘the night office’), and the importance of the night sky.

Join editors of contemporary literary organizations as we engage in frank discussions about common questions, concerns, and myths of the submission game. The process of submitting creative work is a stressful and lengthy maze which is only made more stressful by gatekeeping practices that exasperate both emergent and seasoned writers. Together, we seek to offer tools for finding the right home for your work. We also aim to dispel popular assumptions about publishing and curating while identifying toxic practices often normalized and espoused by top tier journals and magazines. As multiply-marginalized queer people, we promote equity and inclusion and aspire to dismantle gatekeeping practices that limit the caliber and variety of written work that makes it to publication.

The act of caregiving has received new attention in recent years, as needs surged during the pandemic. On this panel, three women poets who participate in caregiving in multiple, overlapping ways, explore the poetics of providing care for people and communities in need, attesting to the act of writing as restorative and anchoring for those who offer care. Extending beyond the individual to the communal and historical, they consider poetry’s potential to offer a window into intimate care acts, provide connection beyond the isolating space of the sickroom, and record histories of suffering, such as the pandemic, for which there have been few rituals of remembrance.

Further, panelists will discuss the potential and need for poetry to represent and interrogate what it means to provide care and record histories of individual and communal suffering, in a grieving and overwhelmed world. Each panelist has expressed the experience of caregiving, often performed in crisis, and/or found relief from its burdens, through her work as a poet, opening avenues for creative expression, empathy, identification, and remembrance.

Panelists will each discuss how caregiving informs and shapes their work and share exemplary poems, followed by panel discuss and an audience Q&A.

“Ultimately the poem is about the moment at which mere sequence turns consequential; where moments suddenly cohere into the momentous.” —Heather McHugh

Brenda Hillman once said, “Each piece [of a sequence of poems] should be an isolated gem”— A gem that is shaped by the pressure placed on it by the rest of the poems in a sequence. Through repetitions of structure, image and theme, the elongated form of the sequence poem can both suggest and disrupt narrative and create a space where one can explore a topic from multiple directions, styles and voices. What is the urgency of the sequence? What are the cumulative meanings, iterative meanings, and afterlives of a poem read within a sequence? In what ways does a sequence of poems allow us to become emotional historians of the present?

Sara Deniz Akant, Anna V.Q. Ross, Diannely Antigua, Ashna Ali, and Adrienne Raphel all work in this poetic form. In this panel, each poet will share work from recent projects and share the ways in which writing in sequence enlarges and informs their poetic practice. We will end with a Q&A discussion.

Shame is often an experience without language as it is shrouded in silence and taboo. Poetry is an art form capable of holding shame as it uniquely captures what cannot be named. How do poets approach shame in their work? The panelists will discuss what forms, language, and perspectives they use in their work to bring shame into the light. This event will be composed of three components: a reading, an interactive Q&A, and mini-workshop. Audience members will be invited to experiment with writing a poem from/out of their own experiences with shame via writing prompts offered by the panelists.

Publishers of four distinguished Massachusetts small presses will share their perspectives on what they are looking for in poetry, ideas on how to present poems for publication, and to offer thoughts on where they see the future of poetry publishing in the state.

As fabulist Italo Calvino said, “The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.” In this panel discussion, three translators share their love of, and work with, translated poetry. Their discussion will include how best to engage with translated texts, how to work in co-translation teams, and the benefits of engaging in translation as a poet. Q&A to follow panel discussion.

The word 'weird' has different but intertwined lives as an adjective and a noun. As a noun it can mean individual fate or destiny; as an adjective it takes on the more familiar contemporary sense of odd, slant, strange, uncanny. In this panel, five poets will discuss the "weirds" and obsessive specializations of their own writing – the peculiar personal topics that compel them as writers. Can finding ways to communicate our odd enthusiasms bring us out to meet the world and others? As Philip Metres recently said, "Our obsessions have a way…of returning us to ourselves, [and] to the self that is bigger than ourselves."
Delving into poems about coral reef formation, bivalves, witchcraft, etymologies, fatness, folklore, physics, desire, and pirates, we will discuss how we have used our weird interests to explore the material that shaped (and shapes) our lives. We will also touch on the work of expressing 'weirdness' in prosody, drawing examples not only from our own writing, but from favorite poets including Lucille Clifton, Lucie Brock-Broido, Alfred Tennyson, James Merrill, Tracy K. Smith, and C.D. Wright.

This panel will share ideas for re-inventing the writing of the contemporary love poem, focusing on strategies that push back against cultural expectations meant to govern queer love on and off the page. By allowing a more embodied sexual existence into our poems, we can create more space for explorations of humor, grief, play, and even our deepest rage. This panel brings together a diverse group of queer poets to confront the stereotypes and taboos that often restrain such poems. Instead, we aim to create a space of safety, understanding, and shared respect as we discuss the tenderness it takes to really go there in our writing.