The Poetry Society of New York’s 9th Annual New York City Poetry Festival

Reading with the Hobart Festival of Women Writers on the Chumley’s Stage on Governors Island

For more details about the 2019 New York City Poetry Festival, visit newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com.

Every year on the last weekend in July, the New York City Poetry Festival unites the vast and diverse New York City poetry community on the idyllic summer paradise of Governors Island. The festival invites poetry organizations and collectives of all shapes and sizes to bring their unique formats, aesthetics, and personalities to the festival grounds, which are ringed with a collection of beautiful Victorian houses and tucked beneath the wide, green canopies of dozens of century old trees.

Fostering an approachable, engaging, diverse, progressive, lively, and culturally prominent literary community lies at the core of the festival’s mission. Poets bring to light issues of vital importance; they create avenues of intellect, introspection, political awareness, and artistic communication for anyone to enjoy. The purpose of the New York City Poetry Festival is to liberate New York’s poets and their work from the dark corners of bars, bookstores, and universities and to bring together as many poets as possible, in the bright light of day, to meet, read, teach, learn, listen, perform, and collaborate in the festival's very own poetry village.

By uniting the largest community of poets in the country and offering a unique setting for literary activity, the New York City Poetry Festival electrifies arts and literature and brings poetry to new light in the public eye.