The Poetry Project

The Poetry Project The Poetry Project is based at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, a vibrant artistic and community space which includes the St.

Through its live programming, workshops, publications, website and special events, The Poetry Project promotes, fosters and inspires the reading and writing of contemporary poetry by presenting contemporary poetry to diverse audiences. Through its live programming, workshops, publications, website and special events, The Poetry Project promotes, fosters and inspires the reading and writing of cont

emporary poetry by (a) presenting contemporary poetry to diverse audiences, (b) increasing public recognition, awareness and appreciation of poetry and other arts, (c) providing a community setting in which poets and artists can exchange ideas and information, and (d) encouraging the participation and development of new poets from a broad range of styles. Since 1966, The Poetry Project has expanded access to literature, education, and opportunities for sharing one's creative work in a counter-hierarchical, radically open space and community. Premised on the vision that cultural action at the local level can inspire broader shifts in public consciousness, The Project is committed to developing and collaborating on replicable program models that challenge persistent social narratives, especially through the verbal reframing made possible in poetry. We do this work through a combination of live readings, performances, lectures, events, and workshops, in addition to literary and critical publications and an emerging writers program. Mark's Church congregation, Danspace Project, and New York Theatre Ballet.

Car Lara and Carlos "CJ" Chavarria are artists and comrades whose practices meet at the convergence of disciplines, conj...
04/21/2025

Car Lara and Carlos "CJ" Chavarria are artists and comrades whose practices meet at the convergence of disciplines, conjuring images via words, sounds, and visual compositions. Together they challenge the autonomy of individual art forms, inviting us instead to engage in acts of extended listening.

Monday 5/5 @ 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

We write to probe and traverse the unknown—the poem a soft, pliable device that Mónica de la Torre and Tonya M. Foster e...
04/17/2025

We write to probe and traverse the unknown—the poem a soft, pliable device that Mónica de la Torre and Tonya M. Foster explore through swirling semantic permutations, linguistic turns and leaps positioning the apparatus in closer proximity to the heart. The Poetry Project is thrilled to celebrate the release of their new publications, Pause the Document and Thingifications::Mathematics of Chaos.

Wednesday 4/30, 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

To mother is to inhabit a form of acute sociality, one of deep dependence and need, attachment and love—a vulnerability ...
04/16/2025

To mother is to inhabit a form of acute sociality, one of deep dependence and need, attachment and love—a vulnerability to all the ways the system continues to fail us. Kendra Sullivan and Alexandra Egan are two poets writing through affective and social bonds that are as cannibalizing as they are life-giving, and without which practices of communal care would remain unimaginable.

Monday 4/28, 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

Two choreographers who work in and through language join one comedian who works in and through song for a night explorin...
04/11/2025

Two choreographers who work in and through language join one comedian who works in and through song for a night exploring the relationship between humor, text, and movement. Tess Dworman is a choreographer and audio describer who rides the line between sense and nonsense through a commitment to improvisation and the inhabitation of multiple personas. Isa Spector is a choreographer and performer who experiments with how dance can propel and distort narrative and how humor and seriousness twist through each other. Francesca D’Uva is a comedian who draws inspiration from teen melodramas and bad musical theater, playing with the uncanny pleasures that open up when parodies miss their mark.

Friday 4/25, at 8pm in the Parish Hall

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

Please join us for a special evening celebrating the revered poet Essex Hemphill (1957–1995), and the publication of a n...
04/02/2025

Please join us for a special evening celebrating the revered poet Essex Hemphill (1957–1995), and the publication of a new landmark selection of his incendiary, sensual verse Love Is a Dangerous Word. The legacy of the late, great Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works. They are as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill’s poems unflinchingly explore the complex, overlapping identities of sexuality, gender, and race; the American political landscape; and his own experiences as a black gay man during the AIDS crisis. This event will be a tribute to Hemphill and his lifetime of achievements as a poet, performer, editor, and activist. The selection, co-edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, serves as both an introduction to Hemphill’s poetic prowess and a treasure trove for those who have long awaited his return to the literary spotlight.

The evening will include readings and performances by: John Keene, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Pamela Sneed, Samiya Bashir, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, and more special guests.

We hope you can join us at 7:30pm for a pre-event reception to raise a glass to Essex Hemphill.

Co-presented by New Directions.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org

The Poetry Project is pleased to announce The 2025 Lisa Brannan Prize, judged by Laura Henriksen.The Lisa Brannan Prize ...
03/28/2025

The Poetry Project is pleased to announce The 2025 Lisa Brannan Prize, judged by Laura Henriksen.

The Lisa Brannan Prize is a $1,000 prize for emerging poets in honor of Lisa Brannan, a former Poetry Project intern and poet. In addition to the financial prize, the winning poet will have one poem published in the Poetry Project Newsletter. The generosity and dedication of our interns and volunteers — often emerging poets themselves — is invaluable to The Poetry Project, and we are so honored to offer this prize in the memory of our former intern.

Lisa Brannan was a Poetry Project intern in New York City during the mid-1990’s. She was born in Utah, grew up in South Carolina, and moved to New York to study engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. While a student, Lisa began to develop an interest in the local literary and cultural scene of Lower Manhattan. She joined The Poetry Project as an intern in 1995 and helped the Project with event promotion and archiving. Lisa's time with the Project was one of the most joyous times in her life. She developed her writing by immersing herself in the world of the subjects and themes that interested her. Lisa passed away in 1997, at the age of 22 in Atlanta, Georgia.

There is no fee for poets interested in submitting to the prize. Applications open Friday, March 28 and will close at 11:59PM ET on Wednesday, April 30. For more information, including full submission guidelines, and to read past winners' work, head to poetryproject.org/publications/the-brannan-prize

This evening invites two leading psychoanalytic writers and thinkers to stage an encounter between psychoanalysis and po...
03/24/2025

This evening invites two leading psychoanalytic writers and thinkers to stage an encounter between psychoanalysis and poetry. What is psychoanalysis as a mode of linguistic experimentation? What is poetry as an engagement with the unconscious, desire, madness, and treatment? Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and author of On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (2025), and Hannah Zeavin, historian and founding editor of the psychoanalytic magazine Parapraxis, will each read new work that addresses the importance of psychoanalysis for poetry and the importance of poetry for psychoanalysis.

poetryproject.org/events

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

Please join us on Friday, April 11, at 8pm in the Parish Hall for Hannah Zeavin & Jamieson Webster: Psychoanalysis and P...
03/21/2025

Please join us on Friday, April 11, at 8pm in the Parish Hall for Hannah Zeavin & Jamieson Webster: Psychoanalysis and Poetry.

This evening invites two leading psychoanalytic writers and thinkers to stage an encounter between psychoanalysis and poetry. What is psychoanalysis as a mode of linguistic experimentation? What is poetry as an engagement with the unconscious, desire, madness, and treatment? Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and author of On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (2025), and Hannah Zeavin, historian and founding editor of the psychoanalytic magazine Parapraxis, will each read new work that addresses the importance of psychoanalysis for poetry and the importance of poetry for psychoanalysis.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

The Poetry Project is pleased to share a second module of Spring 2025 Learning.In this group of workshops, facilitated b...
03/21/2025

The Poetry Project is pleased to share a second module of Spring 2025 Learning.

In this group of workshops, facilitated by Sol Cabrini, Haytham el-Wardany, Janice A. Lowe, and Maru Pabón and Yasmine Seale, students will think through vision and revision; the potentiality of the literary device metonymy; collaging the personal and collective archive; and translation and the relationship between linguistic surface and political gesture.

The Poetry Project offers a limited number of scholarships for our Learning programming. To be considered for a scholarship, please apply by April 10.

poetryproject.org/learning

Alex Cuff and Morgan Võ’s imaginaries share an attachment to the surreal, a commitment to the suspended time of narrativ...
03/19/2025

Alex Cuff and Morgan Võ’s imaginaries share an attachment to the surreal, a commitment to the suspended time of narrative–a world within a world where family, love, and loss are best expressed in dreams and stories that know that unlearning what we know is the only way to make sense of it.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

Wednesday 4/9 at 8pm, in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church

poetryproject.org/events

Dina Abdulhadi & Farah Barqawi are two poets writing through the breath and abundance of contemporary Palestinian poetry...
03/17/2025

Dina Abdulhadi & Farah Barqawi are two poets writing through the breath and abundance of contemporary Palestinian poetry; their poems explore loss, family relations, and the shifting geographic and affective distances that give grief its many shades.

Monday 4/7 at 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church

poetryproject.org/events

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

Please join us on Wednesday April 2 for Writing Against Rent with Tracy Rosenthal.“When our roof swells with water, we p...
03/12/2025

Please join us on Wednesday April 2 for Writing Against Rent with Tracy Rosenthal.

“When our roof swells with water, we pay for the privilege of having a roof. When the wet morass swells with mold, we pay for the privilege of being poisoned.”

If writing is a way of life, then it is also inseparable from the ways we have to live. To live, we have to have a home. But to have a home, we have to pay rent. In Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis’s incisive book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis, the authors lay bare the injustice of rent while showing how the tools we have as tenants—our rent checks, our bodies, and our relationships to each other—can be put to work to set it right. This April, the Poetry Project gathers writers and organizers whose laments, screeds, investigations, and tributes will speak to the degradations large and small that come from living under the thumb of landlords and developers, and to our shared struggle for a home in a rented world.

With readings from Tracy Rosenthal, Nora Treatbaby, Sidik Fofana, Sarah Schulman, Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim, Canal Street Research Association, Lena Pervez Afridi, Kaleem Hawa, Maya Martinez, and the Crown Heights Tenant Union.

4/2 at 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

Dylan Robinson, author of Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, and Chloe Alexandra Thompson, ...
03/11/2025

Dylan Robinson, author of Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, and Chloe Alexandra Thompson, sound artist and sound designer, come together for an evening of new textual and sonic works. Thompson will offer an in-progress excerpt from a new sound piece that reverberates architecture in order to explore listening as a connective tissue of relation and care. Robinson will read from two emerging projects, one investigating translation and transposition across the senses, exploring the gaps between reading, listening, and seeing; and the other experimenting with modes of address that move toward (de)formations of settler subjectivity and Indigenous resurgence.

Monday 3/31 at 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

Emily XYZ and Myers Bartlett perform works from the vinyl LP OMSHIVA MICHIGAN — Poems for 2 Voices by Emily XYZ, commiss...
03/11/2025

Emily XYZ and Myers Bartlett perform works from the vinyl LP OMSHIVA MICHIGAN — Poems for 2 Voices by Emily XYZ, commissioned by the Poetry Project with funding from the Axe-Houghton Foundation. Please join us on Friday 3/28 in celebrating the release of their new LP! 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

poetryproject.org/events

What distance enables us to diagnose the ills of the world without disavowing what makes us part of it? Daisy Atterbury ...
03/07/2025

What distance enables us to diagnose the ills of the world without disavowing what makes us part of it? Daisy Atterbury and Betsy Fagin write with planetary perspective: a lucid rendition of skies and land owned and sold toward boundless colonial expansion (the last frontier). Their poems reinvest sites of disaster with the desire of the poet, brightening the lower atmosphere with the glow of small fires.

This event will also be livestreamed for free on the Project's YouTube channel.

Wednesday 3/26, 8pm in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church.

poetryproject.org/events

In this issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter, Alex Auder, , and reflect on Gary Indiana’s life and writing. Read the...
03/06/2025

In this issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter, Alex Auder, , and reflect on Gary Indiana’s life and writing. Read the issue online or pick up a free print copy at our events.

Poetry Project Newsletter #279 is here: mournful, thoughtful, furious. In his remembrance for Gary Indiana, Tobi Haslet...
03/06/2025

Poetry Project Newsletter #279 is here: mournful, thoughtful, furious. In his remembrance for Gary Indiana, Tobi Haslett quotes Jean Guéhenno: “I dream of a deeper order so that life may no longer be this mold on the side of a huge rock." “This line isn’t by him, but it makes me miss him,” Haslett writes, “because it’s very, very Gary.”

Morgan Võ riffs on Haslett in his farewell note as part of the Newsletter’s editorial collective: “Power wants people to be less and less complicated, more and more manageable. Power develops a strategy for death, where it goes and doesn’t, when it matters and doesn’t. But we are incalculable, and death, like life, never ends. May life no longer be a mold, may we know death as more than just life’s stain. May our writing, our thinking, our loving, deepen our commitment to each other, in past, present, and future.”

Read the issue in the link in our bio, or pick up a free copy at any of our events.

Editor’s note by
Remembrances for Gary Indiana by Alex Auder, .hasl, , and
mónica teresa ortiz in conversation with alma valdez-garcia
Poems by , Car Lara, and incoming Newsletter editor
Essays by Farnoosh Fathi and
Response: sadé powell to Judith Kiros’s O, trans.
Reviews: on , on Joyce Mansour trans. C. Francis Fisher, .a.c.o.b.kahn on .earth.stone, Noa Mendoza on Sergio Chefjec trans. Rebekah Smith and Silvina López Medin, Jason Moris on Sarah Menefee, on N.H. Pritchard

Debt is elusive, but it proliferates in our lives. It is a detrimental structure for colonial-capitalist society and for...
03/05/2025

Debt is elusive, but it proliferates in our lives. It is a detrimental structure for colonial-capitalist society and for the formation of a psyche necessary to preserve this society. Debt is not a state we go in and out of but a condition we are born with. It is how we start and end. In its cumulative essence, it binds us, making us both indebted and owed. This workshop, led by writer and curator Adam HajYahia, will examine debt as it manifests in histories of colonization and capitalist accumulation, and how it unfolds in literature and writing. We will be engaging in collective reading and reflection on poetry, prison literature, and material analysis, and conclude with a writing exercise. Pre-registration will be required to attend (workshop will be capped at 50 participants) and all participants will be asked to read a selection of texts prior to attending the workshop.

Friday, 3/21 at 7:00 pm, in the Parish Hall at St Mark's Church

poetryproject.org/events

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