May 22, 2022 – Palm Beach — It is with deep sadness that we report that Festival Founder & President, Miles Coon, passed away peacefully on Saturday, May 21, 2022 in Palm Beach. He leaves behind his loving family, including his wife Mimi, son Matthew, daughter Jennifer, and grandson Elias.
Miles was a brilliant student, lawyer, writer, and poet. His sense of humor and wit were always at the ready, especially in the puns he shared with delight. He graduated with highest honors from the University of Virginia in 1959 and Harvard law school in 1962. He practiced law for several years, and ran a manufacturing business for 30 years, which he sold, thereafter turning his attention to poetry.
Since that time, Miles became even more involved with poetry. He attended writing conferences and workshops as a self-described “poetry junkie” and entered the Sarah Lawrence MFA program where he worked with Thomas Lux who became a beloved teacher, mentor, and advisor. Miles’ poems appeared widely in many journals and magazines. He received his MFA in 2002.
In 2005 he founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and served as its President and Chairman of the Board. For 18 years, the festival has benefited greatly from his leadership, graciousness, and generosity. He has offered support to hundreds of aspiring poets who have attended the festival workshops, gifted partial and full scholarships and fellowships, and endeavored to honor the work and achievements of festival faculty and featured poets who presented workshops and readings each January.
Many articles and interviews have been published with Miles as primary spokesperson for the Festival. In 2014, when the festival hosted its first sitting U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, South Florida PBS interviewed Miles for the Art Loft program. He spoke passionately and flawlessly about the ethos, mission, importance, and delights of poetry and the festival. You can listen to Miles speak from the heart in this PBS Interview.
Miles never abandoned writing his own poems. And we’re profoundly sad that he won’t be here to celebrate the publication of his first full-length collection, The Quotient of My Self Divided by My Self, forthcoming from Press 53 in June. However, a beautiful Interview with Miles by long-time festival poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar was recorded at the end of last year. In this recording, he speaks about the festival, the importance of poetry in his life, and of writing poems. He also reads some of the beautiful poems from his book.
Miles always liked to say that the festival would not be a festival without the participants, auditors, faculty, featured poets, interns, staff and friends who attend and give support. He believed passionately in the power of poetry and did great work to share that belief widely. That you are receiving this message today is an affirmation of accomplishment of the mission he set for himself and for the festival.
Should you have memories you’d like to share of your past times with the festival, we ask you to post them on our website at this Festival Guestbook page, or on our Past Participants Facebook Group.
We will keep you informed about plans for a memorial to celebrate his life, and there will surely be a reading of the poems from his new book. We’ll send you the details as that comes clear.
Miles would want once again to thank you for your poems, your dreams, your interest, participation, and for the joy he found in gathering the poets together in South Florida. The boundless inspiration that we have found through this festival would not have been possible without Miles Coon.
CantoMundo nurtures and supports the numerous aesthetic and philosophical approaches of Latinx poetry in the USA, and builds on the aesthetically, culturally, and linguistically diverse work of Latinx poets, who have historically—and with limited economic resources—formed supportive literary spaces. CantoMundo’s first gathering convened in 2010.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival believes in nurturing the creativity of the community’s young writers. Listening to their voices could not come at a better time for all of us. Click on their poems to read their outstanding work.
The 17th Annual Virtual Palm Beach Poetry Festival invites all Palm Beach County High School Students to send in one original poem.
July 15, 2020, DELRAY BEACH, FLORIDA — Palm Beach Poetry Festival Director, Susan R. Williamson, today announced that the 2021 festival, which for 16 years has been a South Florida event in Delray Beach, will hold its 17th Annual Festival virtually. “Poetry brings us together, whether in the flesh or in cyberspace. The festival’s purpose is to provide nationally recognized learning opportunities for writers of poetry and a world-class, life-enriching series of cultural events for our audiences,” said Miles Coon, Founder & Director.
This year’s Sarah Lawrence Scholar, poet Faith Henley Padgett, was raised in Texas and earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a current MFA student at Sarah Lawrence. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose, Permafrost, Red Cedar Review, and Penn Appetite, among others. She previously served as a contributor with the Southwest Reviewand Spry, and as a letterpress assistant. A teacher for Poetry in America, she organizes for the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival and resides in Nyack, NY.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is pleased to announce that through the generosity of some very special donors, we are offering a Thomas Lux Scholarship, to provide one full workshop tuition scholarship for the upcoming 16th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival to a poet who has not previously attended a festival workshop.
The Festival congratulates Joy Harjo, our Special Guest Poet at the 16th annual festival, for her being named the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. We announced earlier that Harjo would be Special Guest Poet at the upcoming festival, where she will be interviewed by faculty poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and will deliver the annual Thomas Lux Memorial Reading following the festival gala.
Lake Worth, Florida—National Endowment for the Arts Acting Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $80 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2019. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $10,000 to Palm Beach Poetry Festival in support of the 16th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, January 20-25, 2020 at Old School Square in Delray Beach, FL. Art Works is the Arts Endowment’s principal grantmaking program. The agency received 1,592 Art Works applications for this round of grantmaking, and will award 977 grants in this category.
The festival’s goal is to provide nationally recognized learning opportunities for writers of poetry and a world-class, life-enriching series of cultural events for our audiences. As a Florida nonprofit corporation, part of our mission is to organize educational outreach programs that bring the pleasures of poetry to our community. The 16th Annual Festival will take place January 21-26, 2020, in Delray Beach. Six days and evenings of extraordinary poetry events. Workshop admission is by application. Readings, interviews, panel discussion and talks on craft are ticketed events and are open to the public.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival has awarded three 2019 Fellowships, the Langston Hughes Fellowship, the Kundiman Fellowship, and the CantoMundo Fellowship for the 15th Annual Festival workshops. “The fellowships cover full workshop tuition and lodging during the festival,” said Susan R. Williamson, Festival Director. These fellowships represent a substantial investment in education focused on the craft of writing poetry. We have been working toward opening the doors widely to the festival workshops and offer participants the opportunity to work together with these exceptionally talented fellows who were selected from the largest applicant pool in our 15 year history,” said Miles Coon, Founder and President. “We have been blessed with very talented Fellowship and Scholarship applicants.”
The 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Kundiman fellowship was awarded to Shelley Wong from the San Francisco Bay Area. Wong is the author of the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, and Sycamore Review. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize along with fellowships and support from Kundiman, the MacDowell Colony, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, I-Park Foundation, Fire Island National Seashore, and SPACE.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival invites you to submit an original poem inspired by the 
(Delray Beach, FL – December 19, 2017) Susan R. Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (PBPF), today announced the fellowship and scholarship awards for the 14th Annual Festival workshops.
Dr. Patron Hennekou from Togo, West Africa, received one of two Festival Fellowships for African-Americans, and will work with faculty poet Tim Seibles. Dr. Hennekou is on a nine-month Fulbright Scholarship with the University of Nebraska, and is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Lomo in Togo. He is the author of Dovlo: A Worthless Sweat (play) and Souffles d’outre Coeur (poetry in French), and is working on a project that deals with the development of curricula in creative writing to be implemented by his home university in Togo.
Tickets to public events during our 16th Annual Festival, January 20-25, 2020–all craft talks, poetry readings, Special Guest Poet interview, and Beloved Poems panel discussion are on sale now. Visit our 
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is pleased to announce that through the generosity of some very special donors, we are offering a Thomas Lux Scholarship, to provide one full workshop tuition scholarship for the upcoming 14th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival to a poet who has not previously attended a festival workshop.
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is pleased to support, in partnership with our friends, Palm Beach International Film Festival and O,Miami, the Florida premiere screenings of the feature documentary film, 
