The Palm Beach Poetry Festival Alzheimer’s Poetry Project: Holiday Poetry Reading and Sing Along. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival invites you to join us at this beautiful assisted living facility to read your favorite holiday poems and sing holiday songs to an enthusiastic audience of residents. All ages are welcome. Read more >
Participants, please bring 4 single page poems (they may be your own poems, or your favorite poets) to read around the circle as we pass the mic. Non-poets are welcome to join us, we love and audience! Read more >
This workshop explores how to write poetry rooted in activism that is persuasive rather than alienating. Effective political poetry requires more than an opinionated stance; thoughtfulness, accuracy, and compassion are also necessary to win over readers. To understand this balance, we will study overtly political work such as Audre Lorde and Danez Smith alongside more gentle poems of social change by Walt Whitman and Ross Gay in order to generate our own poems of justice. Bio: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize and … Read more >
This generation-based workshop will explore the emulative possibilities of elegies written by poets as diverse in voice and style as Jericho Brown, Eugenia Leigh, Larry Levis, and Muriel Rukeyser. We’ll also consider what the elegy borrows from the ode, its lyric cousin, in paying homage to a beloved person, place, or thing. BIO: Julie Marie Wade is the author of four collections of poetry and four collections of prose, most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX: Poems, selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Other volumes include Wishbone: A Memoir in … Read more >
Participants welcome, please bring four single-page poems (they may be your own poems, or your favorite poets) to read around the circle. Non-poets are welcome to join us, we love and audience! Read more >
Poetry and prose? Writers often reach new depths in their work when they immerse themselves in the nebulous poetry/non-fiction divide. In this workshop, poets will use lyric essay techniques to prompt and guide their work. We will read and learn from different types of lyric essays including braided, flash, collage and hermit crab. By opening themselves up to hybrid possibilities, participants will see their work to spill into new territory, either revisiting existing themes in new ways and/or plunging into previously unexplored spaces. Bio: Monica Isabel Restrepo has an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. Before becoming a lyric essayist, Monica did financial … Read more >
The Palm Beach Poetry Festival invites all Palm Beach County High School Students to send in one original poem. The winner will receive $200 and a pair of tickets to the Friday night Reading Event featuring Elizabeth Acevedo and Aja Monet The four runners up will each receive $100 and a pair of tickets to Friday night Reading Event All winners receive a one-year subscription to Poets and Writers Literary Journal All of the prize-winning poems will be posted on the festival website: palmbeachpoetryfestival.org and will be included in press releases Prize winners will be invited to participate in exclusive … Read more >
The public is invited to participate in what could be the largest poetry reading in history. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is hosting this annual open-mic event in partnership with 100 Thousand Poets for Change. This global happening will be taking place at the same time in over 1,000 venues in 118 countries. Poets will read and perform work to promote social, political, environmental sustainability, and change, simultaneously across the planet. Attendees are welcome to read their own work or favorite poems by other poets. Between poetry readings, special guest musicians will play songs for peace. Attendees are welcome to play … Read more >
We hope you will join us for our eleventh year of this much loved and well-attended quarterly event at Green Cay Wetlands. We will spend a lovely afternoon reading poetry round-robin style in the Green Cay Club House Community Room. Please bring up to four poems (favorites, or your own) to share with the group. Please be prompt as we will start to read at 12:30. Feel free to invite guests, we love an audience! The room can be very cool, please bring a wrap, sweater or jacket for your comfort. Read more >
You are crafting a perfect poem. You have designed it to your exacting specifications. It does precisely what you wanted it to do. And it couldn’t be more predictable. More than once during the 2017 PBPF workshop Carl Phillips asked, “What is at stake in this poem?” We will ask that question and look for the missed opportunities that the poem presents. Bring works in progress or write from examples and prompts. Michael Mackin O’Mara has lived and worked in West Palm Beach, Florida since the 1980s. Before that he studied under Hans and Ilse Juergensen at the University of South Florida. He is the managing … Read more >
