Join us for a full day of readings, workshops, multi-genre performances, a small press fair, and more. Free and open to all! Register here for the festival!
Location: Room 518, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center
Are poems ever finished, or just abandoned? In this panel, five poets will explore the process of a single published poem, from initial inspiration and drafting, through the process of revision, and focus on the moment they decided their work was finished—if it ever was. Focusing on works that experienced deep and significant changes throughout their writing, this panel will explore the way revision can reveal hidden rooms within an initial draft, and examine the moments those revisions end.
Speakers: Megan Pinto, James Fujinami Moore, Diannely Antigua, Taneum Bambrick, Michael Dhyne
Join us for a poetry reading and conversation on the role of the localized poet laureate in service to the community. DIANNELY ANTIGUA (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) grapples with the body as a site of pain and trauma in Good Monster, chronicling her reckoning with shame, her fallout with faith, and the desire to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body. Love Prodigal by TRACI BRIMHALL (Kansas) lives in the dishevelment of starting over from a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family, and chronic illness, reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. CARIDAD MORO-GRONLIER (Miami-Dade County) plunges readers into Cuban American life on-the-hyphen in Tortillera, considering the role of language on gender, sexuality, diaspora, and shame. Moderated by NICOLE TALLMAN, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
DIANNELY ANTIGUA’s Good Monster presents a raw and innovative poetry collection that navigates themes of trauma, chronic pain, and mental illness. MERLE COLLINS’ Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings offers a poetic exploration of Little’s life, intertwining historical narrative with the power of imagination to illuminate a figure often overshadowed by her famous son. GEOFFREY PHILP’s graphic novel My Name is Marcus introduces readers to Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican icon who ignited a global movement for social justice. Together, these works offer profound insights into the history, heroes, and healing that define the Caribbean experience. Moderated by poet, blogger, and radio host SHARON CORINTHIAN.
Whiting Award–winning poet Diannely Antigua (Good Monster) and National Book Award finalist Danez Smith (Bluff) are joined by Oregon Public Broadcasting host and producer Jenn Chávez to reflect on the role despair and violence, hope and resilience play in their latest poetry collections.
With an equal dose of fatalism and dark wit, Antigua captures the body’s capacity to cage and cradle sadness.
Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster grapples with the body as a site of chronic pain and trauma. Poignant and guttural, the collection “voyage[s] the land between crisis and hope,” chronicling Antigua’s reckoning with shame and her fallout with faith. As poems cage and cradle devastating truths–a stepfather’s abusive touch, a mother’s “soft harm”–the speaker’s anxiety, depression, and boundless need become monstrous shadows. Here, poems dance on bars, speak in tongues, and cry in psych wards. When “God [becomes] a house [she] can’t leave,” language becomes the only currency left. We see the messiness of survival unfold through sestinas, a series of Sad Girl sonnets, and diary entries–an invented collage form using Antigua’s personal journals. At the crux of despair, Antigua locates a resilient desire to find a love that will remain, to feel pleasure in an inhospitable body and, above all, to keep on living.
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem–part map, part annotation, part visual argument–offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love–those given and made–are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.
Wednesday, October 9
6:00 PM A SHOWCASE OF BLACK POET LAUREATES
PORTLAND - SPACE Gallery
Five Black poets from all over the U.S. who have held or currently hold the title of Poet Laureate in their city will read their original work and engage in a panel discussion moderated by former poet laureate of Portland, Maine Maya Williams. Featuring A$iahMae (Charleston, South Carolina), Andrea Vocab Sanderson (San Antonio, Texas), Diannely Antigua (Portsmouth, New Hampshire), Junious "Jay" Ward (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Melissa Ferrer-Civil (Kansas City, Missouri).
1-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Poets of the Public: New England Poet Laureates
Poets will share about their role as Poet Laureate in their respective communities, sharing information about the programming we each developed, and will discuss what it means to be a “Civic Poet” with a broad set of responsibilities and audiences while also maintaining one’s own personal writing practice. Featuring Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.
Join us at UNH for a weekend full of poetry, readings, panels, celebrations and more!
Click here for the full schedule!
Click here to register!
Find Diannely Antigua at the following event:
7:00 - 8:30 PM | Headline Event - Dimond Library's Courtyard Reading Room
New Hampshire Teen Poetry Prize Winners: Leonardo Chung, Pearl Hoekstra-Toste, Pranavi Vedula
Headliners: Diannely Antigua, Mckendy Fils-Aime, Nathan McClain
