New Orleans Poetry Festival

New Orleans Poetry Festival The New Orleans Poetry Festival offers several days celebrating poetry, music, writing, performance, small press, bookmaking, and community in New Orleans.

🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽➡️🤩🥳🤯😤Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola creates experimental poetry that fuses language with performance, sound, film, draw...
01/16/2026

🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽➡️🤩🥳🤯😤

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola creates experimental poetry that fuses language with performance, sound, film, drawing, and installation. Her recent work includes The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons, 2023), Templos en erupción (2025), and her debut album REZO (Insect Poem)—an ode to the stridulation of insects. Co-editor of diSONARE, an experimental editorial platform from Mexico City, Hinojosa Gaxiola has performed and exhibited at venues from Fonoteca Nacional to The Poetry Project.

Hugo García Manríquez, poet, translator, and scholar with a PhD from UC Berkeley, explores language and political economy in works like A-H. A Reading of NAFTA and Lo Común. As a translator, he has brought essential works by William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Jack Spicer, and Sean Bonney into Spanish. García Manríquez will be translated by Cameron Lovejoy, New Orleans-based poet, editor, and book artist who operates the micro-press Tilted House.

Karen Villeda, award-winning author of seven poetry collections, three essay collections, and three children’s books, brings her genre-defying work that explores the intersections of literature and multimedia through her project POETronicA. Her most recent collection, Teoría de cuerdas (String Theory), has garnered international acclaim, and her work appears in the Library of Congress Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape—a rare honor for Mexican poets. Villeda will be translated by Whitney DeVos, founding member of NAFTA (the North American Free Translation Agreement) and scholar of Indigenous languages, whose translations have appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, and Best Literary Translations 2026.

Román Luján, poet, scholar, and translator based in the Bay Area, explores a poetics of anti-assimilation in works like Sánafabich, examining the history of violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Winner of three national poetry prizes in Mexico, his work has been translated into English, German, and Finnish. His first full English-language collection, Imagenigma, is forthcoming from Cardboard House Press.

🎉 🎆 🤯 🎇 🍾 drum machines please… Your NOPF headliner night awaits…  only 18 Saturdays away!!! 1️⃣8️⃣❎🗓️ Mark your calenda...
12/19/2025

🎉 🎆 🤯 🎇 🍾 drum machines please… Your NOPF headliner night awaits… only 18 Saturdays away!!! 1️⃣8️⃣❎🗓️ Mark your calendars for an evening guaranteed to be remarkable… smudge ya later alligators 🐊 ✌️

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice.
 
JJJJJerome has the great privilege of being married to poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. They live in a monastery on a creek in traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. JJJJJerome dreams of building a sonic bath house!
 
Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, silence, and devotion. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. The artist’s body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents. 
 
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lives and works as a nanny in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023, winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025) and The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (blush lit, 2025). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. 

📸 JE: Annie Forrest
📸 CB: Payton Barronian

We’re thrilled to have the above small presses and poetry organizations join us at NOPF 2026‼️What a beautiful set of ma...
12/16/2025

We’re thrilled to have the above small presses and poetry organizations join us at NOPF 2026‼️

What a beautiful set of makers, doers, alley-oopers of poetry. Trapeze artists of putting books in the right hands, words in the right ear. Thank you to each one who supported the book fair early this year—we sold out super fast.

This year will also feature a brand new “Small Press Fair Happy Hour” on Friday April 17th from 4:00-5:15 pm. No other events to take place at this time: just books, books, books. And if you purchase a book, you get your choice of drink on us. Fair is fair! 🎡 🤹🏽‍♀️ 🥳

OKAY the “ish” is doing a lot of work here… we’re actually only 22 days away from that live wire known as a dead line… b...
11/10/2025

OKAY the “ish” is doing a lot of work here… we’re actually only 22 days away from that live wire known as a dead line… but all this to say don’t let the chilly weather in your proximity freeze ya up… our magic poetry portal is all agog for your current thinkings… 🪄 🔮 🤯

The caption is simple, the task bigly easy: get all your poetry friends together for what you know to be or at this poin...
09/15/2025

The caption is simple, the task bigly easy: get all your poetry friends together for what you know to be or at this point have heard is literally the best poetry festival in the country. Yes, we’re obsessed with ourselves, but what that really means is we’re obsessed with you: the poets both national and international who don’t quite fit in under the fluorescent aisles of major conference centers, the experimenters who aren’t afraid to fail, the translators who put in the cherished work of breaking borders both physical and immaterial to expand poetry’s audience, the performers who lay it out in real time and remind us that poetry is actually an agent of change in the world.

Call your friends, tell them you love them, talk about the thing you most love about poetry, and then send us that. NOPF is literally crying just thinking about it. We’ve been waiting for you.

Oh, and also, Mexico is the mood. More on that soon. Let the chatter begin…

ICYMI. In case you want to relive it. In case you want inspo to make yr case via a proposal for next year… We here at NO...
05/03/2025

ICYMI. In case you want to relive it. In case you want inspo to make yr case via a proposal for next year… We here at NOPF thoroughly enjoy making an effort to document a selection of panels and readings since our inception 10 years ago. Kick back, click forward, and resuscitate that one-of-a-kind vibe on our Youtube channel 🤙 🏝️ ✏️

The New Orleans poetry mole hill is about to go mountain af. 🥾⛰️ Check out the schedule, the skedge, the doula of grand ...
04/04/2025

The New Orleans poetry mole hill is about to go mountain af. 🥾⛰️ Check out the schedule, the skedge, the doula of grand poetry times to be shared by all who pour their hearts and spirits and drinks and languages into one of the greatest places on planet earth. 🤲🌎 As if the core lineup of nearly 300 officially scheduled poets isn’t enough, this year our off-site presence is more poppin than ever before—may our scenic tendrils continue to grow poetics into a neighborhood near you ! 🏡 🐙 😊 One special quality to NOPF that we cherish is its interwoven into the fabric of the city itself… this ain’t Conferenceville, USA y’all… this is New Orleans. This is poetry magic. WE CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR YOU SAY THE MAGIC WORD IN LESS THAN A WEEK!!! 🪄🗣️🗣️🗣️🔮

NB: All events originally scheduled at St. Roch Tavern have been smoothly moved to Siberia, just a 6-minute walk from the New Orleans Healing Center. Vibes are equally great!! 😌

Yet MORE good news, poetry ppl! Two more wonderful events have been added utilizing two of our lovely French poets trave...
04/04/2025

Yet MORE good news, poetry ppl! Two more wonderful events have been added utilizing two of our lovely French poets traveling all this way to share their work, knowledge, and experience for the French teacher, learner, or appreciator. Thanks to and all our other tagged sponsors for so generously putting on these extra lagniappe of poetry and pedagogy!! You can find a signup link by heading to our website, finding these events on the schedule, and going to their respective event pages. A link is there waiting for you to register! Hurry and register now as spots are limited. Please especially share with the French teachers in your life and community! 💙🤍♥️

Good morning, everyone. We just want to take a moment to recognize the historical significance of an extremely special e...
04/01/2025

Good morning, everyone. We just want to take a moment to recognize the historical significance of an extremely special event this year: Poetry Behind the Walls: A Special Performance at Angola…

As part of Louisiana State Poet Laureate, Alison Pelegrin’s Lifelines Poetry Project and in partnership with the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Louisiana State Penitentiary—commonly known as Angola—opens its gates to poetry in an unprecedented event of artistic expression and solidarity. This landmark performance brings together renowned poets to transform a space long defined by confinement into one of creativity and shared humanity. This represents a bold step forward in recognizing the role of art in healing, rehabilitation, and social change. By bringing poetry into Angola, the event challenges boundaries—both literal and figurative—offering a glimpse of freedom through language and imagination. This program is made possible by the generous support of the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation.

Time: Thursday, April 10th 1PM
Place: Louisiana State Penitentiary, 17544 Tunica Trace, Angola, LA 70712
.wade

A great piece just came out today on  by NOPF collaborator and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin () with a realist...
03/08/2025

A great piece just came out today on by NOPF collaborator and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin () with a realist’s take on the beauty of teaching poetry at Angola and other prisons in the state. The cento-like excerpts from her workshop participants are especially moving—be sure to read the whole thing at the and check out more on the Lifelines Project at nolapoetry.com!

🚗 🛣️✏️The NOPF Road Show returns this year with stops across Louisiana at Lafayette, Thibodaux, and Uptown New Orleans  ...
02/28/2025

🚗 🛣️✏️The NOPF Road Show returns this year with stops across Louisiana at Lafayette, Thibodaux, and Uptown New Orleans . This year we will be showcasing our French international features and friends David Middleton musical accompaniment by .mienniel —a little of this, a little of that, a little je ne sais quoi for the soul.

📯 Your friendly neighborhood poetry festival has some things to say… 👋🏵️ HEADLINERS ANNOUNCED! 💐 INTERNATIONAL FEATURES!...
01/31/2025

📯 Your friendly neighborhood poetry festival has some things to say… 👋

🏵️ HEADLINERS ANNOUNCED!
💐 INTERNATIONAL FEATURES!
🌸 LOCAL POETS GALA COMIN’!

Everyone put your digital hands together for .mienniel

🧼🧹 To state the obvious: we are not messing around this year. We got mops in our hands and windex in our holsters. On Thursday we hit you w the local flavor. Friday night we’ll have a bilingual reading plus a lil jazz improv on top—French in one ear, English poppin’ in the other. Saturday night avant stalwarts Ariana Reines and Tongo Eisen-Martin will blow up your minds, possibly tenderly (possibly not). And of course Saturday and Sunday we’ll have hundreds and hundreds of poets from all over the world spreading their sonic knowledge in the form of readings, roundtables, and workshops, plus the art of slanging books at the book fair with over 40 presses and counting. The hottest of damns, y’all. ☀️

❤️ Lots of love to grants galore: Funding for these events has been provided by the State of Louisiana and administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities . NOPF is also in partnership with the New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund and the International Night with the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane and the Division of the Arts. Thank you!!!

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New Orleans, LA
70119

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